Читать книгу Social Media Marketing For Dummies - Shiv Singh - Страница 34

After you understand what your customers do online, you can begin to define them more clearly. To do this, you can create what are known as personas. Personas are customer profiles that represent your actual buyers. Alan Cooper first wrote about personas in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (Sams Publishing). He wrote, “We don’t so much make up our personas as discover them as a byproduct of the investigation process.” That is exactly what you need to do.

Some marketers swear by personas; others find it difficult to wrap their heads around the concept. We recommend the creation of personas because they help you stay focused on the buying strategies that matter. For example, suppose you identify your customer as a 45-year-old male who has an annual income of more than $90,000, a family with two children less than 12 years old, and deep interests in chess, gardening, and wine.

When you’re developing your SMM campaign, you can stop your team from developing copy for a young woman of college age. This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to get off track when the ideas are flying fast and furious. When a fun notion pops into someone’s head, it can be helpful to look at your persona and think it through. You can remain focused and course-correct when you find you are getting away from the heart of the profile.

So what information goes into creating a good customer persona? Consider the following:

 Demographics: Obviously, you want to know whether your customer is male or female, where she lives, what her estimated income is, and so on.

 Photo and name: If you give your persona a name and choose a stock photo (or real customer photo), you bring life to it. When someone asks, “What would Alice want?” it makes a greater impact than visualizing a faceless and nameless customer.

 Online places where your customer hangs out: This is important for your SMM efforts. Does he spend time on Facebook or a niche sports site?

 Online places where he looks for product information: You need to know where he reads product reviews and what online bloggers influence him.

 Job level: Is your customer a supervisor with staff to whom she can delegate? It’s helpful to know the amount of responsibility she has at work.

 Children and pets: Clearly, childcare responsibility, family pets, and other home care chores play a factor in his product choices.

 Hobbies and interests: Learning about hobbies and special interests helps you speak to the customer’s desire for specific products.

Make sure that your team understands the value of personas. Start with one or two until your team gets used to using them. Also, task someone with keeping them updated. If something changes, you want your customer profiles to be current.

You may not have all the information you want to include when you start out, but you can fill in the blanks as you go along. Don’t wait until you have every detail to create a persona. The value comes from the ongoing “investigation process,” as Alan Cooper once wrote.