Leveraging Social Listening and Buyer Personas for Marketing Strategies

I'm going to show you a few things, personas, as well as some of the things that I was referencing on the previous slide, because these are the tools that you can use to build your audience. And the first such tool is social listening, social media monitoring, right? So what's a great way to understand what customers are saying or think about your brand or about your competing brands is just to go on to social media around, you know, when the subject around a particular brand or particular customer category, when someone's posting around that and see what people are responding, what people are saying, what questions they may have. So you can do that just by manually looking through social media accounts, your account, your competitors, obviously, but your competitors as well.

But there are also third-party tools such as Social Sprout, Brand24, and BrandWatch. There are a number of them. You just Google social media, social media monitoring tools, or social listening tools, and you will find that there are many of them.

There's a moderate fee, generally, you know, to be able to access it. But what do these tools do? They can track social mentions across every social media platform as well as on blogs and other websites. What I mean by that is, if you are in the athletic shoe business and you want to track what people are saying about Nike's new release of a sneaker, what people are saying about Adidas, or New Balance, or any of them, you can enter those brands into the social media and social listening tool and then track all the mentions.

It'll give you the total number of times that Nike was mentioned in any given time period, what platforms they were mentioned on, how many likes, how much share of that content, how people are engaging with that content, as well as a sentiment analysis. Are people positive or negative about that new shoe release? It uses algorithms and AI to determine that, not just how much people are talking about that brand, but what they feel about that brand, even to the intensity of their feeling. Are they feeling very strongly or more neutral about a brand? And it will track this and provide reporting for you.

Then there are buyer personas. These are third-party tools, and I'm going to show you two of them. There are many different options there, but two very solid ones are from HubSpot, a digital marketing brand.

Their primary service is a CRM system, and SEMrush focuses on providing information for search engine marketing and SEO campaigns, a very invaluable tool for those tactics, but they also have personas and tools. HubSpot is really geared more towards B2B customers, whereas the SEMrush customer profile template is geared more towards B2C, brands to consumers. You can try these tools out.

They're free. When you're asked a series of questions, you'll pick an avatar, giving you an option of different ways to visually represent your audience. For some categories, it may not matter.

For some audiences, it may not matter the gender, but if you are targeting an audience that's more male or more female or exclusively male or exclusively female, then you want an avatar to reflect that gender and age. You begin to build this profile and have this data come to life. For this particular fictional persona, I'm creating for a let's just say I'm a business-to-business brand that markets software for business professionals, and one of the targeted audiences that I'm focusing on is project managers, because I have software that helps project managers more effectively and officially manage their projects.

I give them a name. It's generally the practice to use alliteration, just make it easier to remember. Pete, the project manager.

If I were targeting marketing professionals with a software for them, maybe I would say Mary, the marketer. The job title is project manager. The age is 25 to 34.

There might be project managers who are older than that, but my research is that you only build these personas after you've done the research that we have been discussing. I happen to know that the majority of my project managers are within this age, let's just say, hypothetically. The education.

In this case, I'm saying that they have a bachelor's degree. Generally, the preferred method of communication is phone or email. I have other options, texting, in-person, but I chose these two.

These tools will give you these options. You just pick which one. You get to pick the age range, the highest education, which could have been high school, an associate's, or a master's.

I could only be looking for doctors. You would set all that as you build a persona with the HubSpot Persona 2. I list the job responsibilities, project management, budget management, team leadership, project planning, who they report to, the vice president of operations, what tools they need to do their job, word processing programs, project management tools, email, and invoicing software. Again, hypothetically.

This job is measured by team productivity and budget efficiency. What are their goals and objectives? I didn't add a goal, but I will put one here. They are looking to come in on time and under budget.

So very easy to add. I can do additional ones if I want. So what is the purpose of this? What is the point of this? I can now take this information and share it with my marketing team.

Those who have developed a communication strategy, those who are developing a product strategy, whatever way they touch the marketing efforts for this particular brand. And we all now know several things. We know, I think I'm leaving a couple of things out.

All right. Biggest challenge. Yes.

Let me go a little bit further. Social networks. They're on Facebook.

They're on Instagram. Actually, now I'm looking at that wrong. It's the darker circle, the ones that they're on.

So the choices were these five, but they're on LinkedIn, they're on Instagram, and they're on X; they're not on Pinterest, they're not on Facebook. The industry they're in is manufacturing. The organization's size is 51 to 200.

I can also gain information. Another one I did not fill out. So instead, they do it by blogs, they do it by online education, as you are doing today, and they do it by company training.

Now, I have a complete profile. So what is the point? Well, I know visually, roughly what this person will look like. I know in this case, more project managers are male, and more project managers are between 25 and 34.

Let's just say hypothetically, and that's why I picked those options. I also know how they want to be communicated with, by phone or by email. So if I want to do a follow-up, those are the options that I would use.

I know what their responsibilities are. So I'm getting to understand what a day in the life of this person might be, what is important to them, what they have to do, and who to report to. Now, why is that potentially significant? Well, in some cases, in B2B purchases, there's a concept, or even consumer purchases, but in B2B purposes, in some cases, it's not just understanding who the actual purchaser is, but who influences it.

So this person, Pete, may ultimately make this decision, but he also has to defend it to his vice president and say, hey, I want to purchase this software for these reasons. So understanding that might help us arm Pete with information that will sell it to his vice president. This is one way.

And there are influences in consumer purchases as well. Think about toys. So toy manufacturers or toy brands want to appeal to children, show them a commercial or some marketing communication, so they could then beg their parents, hey, I want this, I want this, I want this.

So it's the children who are influencers, but the parents are the actual purchasers. They're the ones who are going to use the credit card and buy it for them. So there are different scenarios where you might have not just the purchaser, but influencers.

They gain information from blogs, online education, and company training. Well, how might that be helpful? Or maybe we could write a blog to educate them about our product. Maybe we can advertise on blogs that are addressed to project managers.

The tools they need to do their job. Well, this is really important information for the product development people. So project managers need all these things.

So maybe we can create or add features to a core project management tool that include some additional options. Their job is measured by team productivity and budget efficiency. Their goals or objective is to come in on time and under budget.

And their biggest challenges are communication, project management, disorganization, and resources, let's say, lack of resources. Why is all this important? Because now we're getting into some of the psychographic aspects of Pete, right? These are the things that drive Pete. When he wakes up in the morning and comes to work, he wants to make sure that his team is as productive as possible.

He wants to always ensure that he's not overspending and that he's getting the most out of the money that's budgeted to him. These are his goals and objectives, right? And these are the challenges. So what does that mean? We know what his aspiration is: to be productive, to be efficient.

We know what his goal specifically is: to come on time and under budget. And then we know the challenges. These are the pain points.

These are the things that are preventing him from doing that. The communication with the team may be hindered by the fact that he's communicating across time zones, project management, and disorganization. There are some issues that make it hard to keep organized.

So when we speak to Pete and try to convince him to do the action that we want him to do, maybe it's downloading a demo of our software, or maybe it's scheduling an online call with our salespeople to walk him through what our features and benefits are. We know how we should position the brand. What problems is this particular product going to solve? What problems is this software going to solve? It's going to help you communicate.

These features will help eliminate disorganization. It will enable you to do more with fewer resources. Now I'm speaking to him.

Now I'm relevant to him with my messaging. So that is why personas are important. It pulls all this information together into one document, so to speak, that everyone can gain insight from and see, in many cases, how it will affect or impact the decisions made by everyone on the marketing team.