One of the best descriptions of a marketing persona is a composite sketch of a critical section of your customers. You want to use educated guesses and raw data to represent various sections of your customers. The purpose of these sketches is to try and solve your customers’ needs better by acting as the basis of creating your marketing content. With the huge digital competition in Singapore, it is important that you get to interact with your audience better and solve their problems. Creating personas to represent your fundamental addressees will enhance how you solve your customer’s online social networks problems which will have a significant impact on your business sales and marketing. It is hence essential for you to become conversant with the course of building personas. This article exclusively goes through how to create marketing personas online in Singapore.
The Basic Template of Marketing Persona
Which is the ideal number of these personas do you require to come up with? The ideal number of personas recommended is approximately five. These will be enough to characterise the audience correctly. It is small enough for specificity and still large enough to serve all your customers. There is an endless list of businesses which have developed personas for marketing and are as well as using them successfully in their marketing. More so, there exist lots of templates galore to help you make your personas. Most of the prototypes share similar necessary info. You need to understand the person, the thing that is most significant to them and the appropriate way to communicate to them. Below is an overview of the essential information that should be contained in your template of marketing personas.
Persona name
Demographics
- Gender
- Age
- Education
- Family
- Location: e.g. CBD, CBD outskirts, heartland
- Salary
Job title
- Company information (type, size)
- Their role in the company
Values
- Main values
- Common complaints during the sales process
Objectives and problems
- Main objectives
- Secondary objectives
- Ways you reach the objectives
- Main encounters
- Minor problems
- Ways to elucidate the problems
Elevator pitch (marketing message)
Additional Customer Specific Persona Info
Businesses are different from each other with varying characteristics. This means that other than the basic persona information, your particular business will want definite info. This is the reason why personas differ from one business to another and company to another. A medical company will entail various consumer details as from those of an internet company. Furthermore, a persona created for a blog will look different from one created for a purchasing funnel. Some of the specific details that you may consider to add to your template include:
- Computer literacy
- Hobbies
- Blogs that they read
- Real interview quotes with customers
- The source of their news
How to Make Marketing Personas Online
For a persona to take shape, you need a wide range of information from your audience. There is a lot of information sources about your potential customers including real-life conversations with customers and the details contained within your statistics data on your site. Ensure that you look for information widely from all sources to come up with the perfect persona. Below are the common places to look for information:
-
Social Media Research
Social media listening is a good strategy when looking for information on social platforms. Conduct social media research to look for questions being asked or problems being aired by your potential customers which are relevant to your products and services. Some of these social platforms that are essential include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat.
-
Look at Analytics On Your Website
Your site analytics will give insights on the platforms your audience emanated from, the keywords utilised and the time they spent on your site. This information will help you know what your audience is interested in the point of visiting your site and tools owned for pulling on those actions which are vital information when creating personas.
-
Ask Questions to Your Customers
Customers are the one who know about themselves and what they want better. It is hence critical for you to hold interviews and surveys when creating personas. For best results, you should base your personas on the interviews information gathered from customers, customer service interaction and salespeople. During interviews with your customers, you have the opportunity to know their aims, principles, and problems more in-depth and what will reverberate best with your customers.
-
Involve All Your Team Members in Creating Profiles
All your business team including customer service, marketing and development team should be involved in the process of creating marketing personas. You want to take into consideration the perspectives of each business member who gets involved with customers or customer data. Here you will get some vital information that would otherwise be rare to find.
A Guide to Creating a Template Marketing Persona
At this stage, you are aware of the direction we are going towards regarding having a persona in our marketing strategies. Here, we now want to create out the profile of the persona by filling out a persona template. This will improve finding and connecting with our customers.
-
Give A Name to The Persona
You can choose any name for the persona. You need to give an actual name for the persona to feel like an actual person. Moreover, the persona ought to have psychological details to get you into his or her view convincingly. This makes you start seeing your goods and facilities from the persona viewpoint.
-
Come Up with Persona’s Role, Job and Company
Customer surveys provide you with the most excellent resource when identifying the jobs of your persona. When conducting these assessments, you may take account of the company size, job title, and business type. You can use the answers from the majority to come up with single or few personas that fit nicely to the descriptions.
-
Find Demographic Information
Some of the best sources of demographic information include Google Analytics, survey information, and educated guesses. Google Analytics can show you the location, affinity, gender, age, and technology of your site visitors. This information is found in the audience section of google analytics. Surveys are useful in complimenting information elements that are unavailable on Google Analytics. There are survey tools such as Survey Monkey that gives suggestions on the way of inputting your demographic questions for increased accuracy on the responses.
-
Goals and Problems, Principles and Worries
In an aim to get information about objectives, problems, principles, and worries, customer interviews are best fitted for this. You need to ask them questions related to marketing interactions, their goals, and problems. What is most valuable to them? What leads to changes? Who do they consult for advice? How do carry out transformation? What are their wants to embrace the change? Such questions will give you insights on their goals and challenges. Apart from generating such information, you also need to establish methods of helping your customers to meet the objectives and overcome encounters. Imagine yourself as a customer and find solutions with responsiveness. Try and figure out the problems they come across in the process of purchasing, that what may prevent them from closing in a purchase and come up with suitable solutions.
-
Elevator Pitch and Marketing Message
This step is all on you to come up with the best tactics of meeting the desires of individual kind of your customers. Here, you need to use all the information and knowledge you have acquired from the entire process. How you describe your products and services to your specific customers is what is referred to “message.” An elevator pitch is used to reinforce message consistency to your customers.
You may be wondering whether all this information is useful. However, as fluffy as it seems, all these details have essential roles in creating marketing personas. One of the functions of these details is to enforce the creators to get into the character. To facilitate this, such specific details gives boosted understanding of the behaviour, feelings, and thoughts of the customers. Last but not least, it gives you insights on marketing opportunities for your line of business that are yet to be discovered. Generally, getting deep when creating personas helps to convert a sketch into an authentic portrait.
Examples of Marketing Personas
According to the earlier statement, marketing personas are different from business to business. Though there exist similar themes running all over marketing personas, each persona is unique. You get to start noticing the differences as you go deeper into specific details. There exist many persona examples from various marketing companies. They have variations regarding their roles and specifications. Some of them include operations manager, director, and marketing manager.
Social media platforms are powerful marketing platforms that you should be leveraging to catapult your Singapore business to the next level of success. According to a recent report by Clock Asia, there are more than 4.6 million active social media users in Singapore. A majority of the users use mobile devices to access the platforms, which explains why 56.8% of website traffic is from this select audience group.
When creating marketing personas for other digital marketing campaigns, such as email marketing, you cannot afford to skip creating personas for social media marketing.
As mentioned earlier, a marketing persona or a buying persona is a clear description of your ideal customer. The persona will help you develop robust campaigns that are cost-effective and effective in generating leads.
One of the main reasons why most social media campaigns record the lowest conversion rate is that the marketer or brand does not clearly understand its followers. It’s easy to post content that you assume the audience is interested in… but the reality is that they don’t fancy such content. Creating a precise social media person will help you to solve this problem amicably and get more results.
Like the conventional marketing persona, a social media persona is a fictional but data-based profile of your ideal client. A business can have more than two social media personas depending on the available data and the niche.
Here is an example of a good social media persona.
- Age: 35
- Gender: Male
- Location: Clementi
- Living Situation: Lives in a mansion
- Hobbies: Hiking, camping, fashion, traveling
- Job Title: Architecture
- Main Influencers they follow: Diana Bakar, Jessica Loh, Ryan Tan
- Common hashtags they use/engage with: #greenarchitecture, #interiordesign, #greentechnology
- Most active social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram
- Preferred types of content: YouTube Videos, Infographics, Instagram Reels, Documentaries
- Buying Triggers: Seeing architectural designs that don’t match his collections
- Pain Points: He cannot create unique designs because he does not have enough capital to purchase the software required.
Suppose you have been actively engaged in social media marketing. You have an idea of the kind of people who engage with your content on different social media channels.
Time is one of the most limited resources you have as a digital marketer. While having different social media personas for every platform may seem like a good idea, it will just make managing the channel and creating content cumbersome. Your goal should be to know what your ideal customer looks like and wants, then create a campaign that matches their interests to find and engage with them.
Here are three strategies that you can use to make your buyer personas more effective in spurring engagement and sales.
- Posting the most preferred forms of content on each social media platform, for example, Memes on Facebook
- Prioritizing some of the buyer personas in a social media channel, for example, car enthusiast on Instagram
- Using diverse social media content formats to meet the expectations of the followers in a specific channel
By now, you already know what a social media persona is and maybe have an idea of how to come up with one, but do you need to invest time and other resources in creating one? YES
One of the main reasons the most successful online businesses in Singapore continue to thrive despite the harsh economic environment is that they clearly understand their social media followers. Here are three primary reasons why you should create social media personas.
- Achieve High Return on Investment from Social Ads
The best social ads solve low conversion rates because they are laser-targeted towards a specific audience. Below is an example of a Facebook ad by ClassPass based on the primary pain point of the target clients, which is not finding a fitness membership plan with classes that match their fitness goals.
Photo Credit: Audiense
Carrying out social media persona research will help you identify the target customer’s problems or pain points. With this information at hand, you will be able to position your service or product as the most effective solution to the pain points.
Facebook, Instagram, and other popular social media platforms in Singapore have features that allow marketers to segment their audiences based on factors such as location, interest, gender, occupation, and age.
- Increase Engagement Levels
If your ads or the available content you share on social media don’t resonate with the target audience, you will not get many results. Your business will not get to the high cruising altitude you have been yearning for since day one.
The social media persons will give your content and ad creation processes direction. Keep in mind that 72% of customers will only engage and take the desired action if the content speaks directly to them.
If your target customers are into outdoor activities or fitness, make sure that the posts you make on Facebook and other platforms are related to the interests. Hiring influencers to push the message further will give you a higher cutting edge in the market.
- Identifying Social Content that you Can Repost or Curate
The first thing to note that you don’t have to spend hours creating or designing every post from scratch. 55% of brands have a small team whose main role is to create social media content and do research.
There is no harm in curating content to save time and resources; the trick is making sure that the new design resonates with the audience and is memorable. Here is a post by Carrie Rose from a previous PR campaign that she tweaked to engage with her audience.
Photo Credit: Audiense
That said, it’s not possible to curate content if you don’t have a clear understanding of your audience. The personas will help you know which influencers to track and hire, hashtags to use and monitor for fresh content ideas, and profiles to regularly repost content.
The processes of creating social media buyer persons should be handled tactically to get the results. Here are six important steps that you should follow to get a clear picture of your customers.
Step 1: Evaluate the Available Social Media Data
Nowadays, virtually all social media platforms have an analytics page that you can check out to learn more about your followers. Here are links to the insights page of the four major social media platforms in Singapore.
- Facebook Insights
- Instagram Insights
- Twitter Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
Look at each platform’s analytics page to identify themes and trends. Write down each audience’s qualities and consult widely to be sure that you are deciphering the report correctly. As you review the data, remember that the audience varies from one platform to another. The same prospect who retweets your post on Twitter is different from your die-hard fan on Instagram.
So, be on the lookout for common factors that cut across the board and leverage them to create succinct content.
Step 2: Invest in New Generation Audience Segmentation Tools
Sure, the social media analytics tools will help you get more information about your followers, but they are not always effective in helping marketers creating fleshed-out personas. Luckily, there are professional insight tools that are affordable and can get the job done.
One such tool is Audiense Insights which collects data from multiple social media platforms and analyses it to generate a holistic report. Some of the additional information pieces that you will get by using such software include;
- Celebrity interests
- Brand interests
- TV shows they are fond of
- Relationship
- Personality
- Demographics
- Factors that influence their purchases
Every factor is broken down to give you a deeper understanding of each follower.
The data points are then cumulated to create segments, also referred to as mini personas, that you can use to refine your social media marketing campaigns.
Step 3: Start Using Google Analytics
At this stage, you already know the interests of your followers in the various social media platforms. After creating the personas, the next thing you need to do is identify the real customers who keep tabs on your brand on social media and visit the website to buy products.
One way of identifying these customers is by using Google Analytics. Click on the Traffic Sources section to know the amount of traffic your website gets from Facebook and other social media platforms. Create a segment for each of the platforms.
Photo Credit: Google Analytics
Here are four questions to help you understand the audience better.
- Which referral channel records the highest conversion rate?
- What channel drives more potential customers to the website?
- Which pages do the followers check out?
- Which day do you get the most traffic from the platform?
All this information will help you to come up with effective campaigns. For example, if most traffic comes from Twitter, you should invest me in Twitter paid ads. If Facebook records the highest conversion rate, focus on creating laser-accurate personas to generate sales.
More importantly, if most of the followers visit your website on Wednesday, creating a posting calendar to engage with them on this particular day. For example, you can commit to posting a new infographic or video every Wednesday.
Step 4: Customer Surveys
Customer surveys will help you get more information about what the customers want or expect from your brand. Remember, the main goal is to create social media personas of highly likely people going to visit your website and convert.
Make the survey questions simple but relevant to your brand. You can ask them which type of content they prefer to see on your Facebook or Twitter account, factors that discourage them from following brands, and what ticks for them when engaging with a brand.
The qualitative feedback will help you to come up with content that elicits positive reactions or emotions.
Step 5: Engage the Support and Sales Team
You will stretch yourself too thin if you try to do everything alone. Engage with the support and sales team to get a clearer perspective of your social media followers. The two teams probably interact with the customers more often than you, and so their input will point you in the right direction.
They may give you insights that you couldn’t find using the social analytics tools earlier on in this article. Knowing the type of customers that the sales executives consider qualified leads will help your social media team to increase SQL and MQL conversion rate from the low 13% benchmark.
Step 6: Check Out Historical Revenue Data
The main reason why you are actively involved in digital marketing is to generate more revenue. Even as you work smart to create social media personals, you cannot afford to ignore historical revenue data. The data will help you answer several crucial questions such as;
- Which platform does a majority of the customers use to find your brand?
- What is the average order value for every lead from social media platform?
- Which referral social media channel records the highest customer lifetime value?
The answers to these questions will help you decide which social media platforms you should prioritise with both paid and organic content. Focus more on the platforms that generate more sales and continuously work on the low-performing platforms.
Final Conclusion
The success of your marketing campaigns in Singapore is hugely dependent on how you conduct social media marketing. Follow the above six steps to create accurate buyer personas for your brand. Over time, the personas will change, and so should your business and approach when interacting with the customers. More importantly, delegate some of the tasks to a professional digital marketing agency in Singapore to free up your schedule and get more tasks done within the limited time you have per day.
