What is social media?
Well! It’s a platform where people interact with each other.
Now what is marketing?It’s a practice meant to attract people to your company or business.
But hey! People don’t talk to companies or businesses. People like talking to other people. That’s where Inbound Marketing jumps in.
It’s a no hidden fact that almost all the companies use social media as part of their inbound marketing strategy. All those followers count on Twitter or the number of likes on Facebook won’t help much. Integrating Inbound Marketing with social media marketing is what drives leads and revenue for your business.
Your social media strategy becomes more customer centric when integrated with Inbound Marketing. The importance of social media in today's society is immense. After all social media is a one to one conversation platform and when you give people something of value, something they want, you gain their trust. But how do we do it ?Here is a step-wise guide to prepare your Inbound Marketing Strategy for social media.
#1 Build a list of Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Build a list of buyer personas for your organisation based on your research and past customer data. This will give you a focused view about whom to target in your social media campaigns and what kind of content would such buyer persona like to consume.
Here are few basic questions that can help you in sketching your buyer persona:
- How would your persona describe itself?
- What do they value most in life? What are they trying to accomplish, achieve, or are working towards?
- What does a day in their life look like?
- Where do they go for information?
- How do they learn about new things about your job, hobbies, and interests?
Let’s take an example : Suppose you sell online garments for children upto 5 years of age. Then one of your buyer persona would be a person who is a parent, male or female, varying from age group 23 to 55 years and likes to shop online.
#2 Identify Buyer’s Journey
If you know Inbound Marketing, buyer’s journey is not a new concept. It essentially talks about the stage of buying. So there are three stages of buying aka buyer’s journey.
- Awareness - The buyer realises they have a problem.
- Consideration - The buyer defines problem and searches for options to solve it.
- Decision - The buyer chooses a solution.
Think of it this way - If a person’s phone fell into water, he gets aware of his problem. Now if he goes on Google and searches how to repair the phone that falls into water, then he is in the consideration stage. Now, if he finds a solution and is ready to buy it, he is on the decision stage.
You must have understood clearly what a buying journey is. So, basically after deciding your buyer persona you have to research and find which stage your buyer persona is at.
If the question ‘Why so?’ comes to your mind, then here's the next step to follow.
#3 Type of Content
Based on your buyer’s journey, you can decide the type of content you can offer to your personas that will add value to them. The content can be of two types:
- Gated - When you ask the buyer to fill the form for him to access the offer or information.
- Un-gated - When you straight away give the offer or information to the buyer without exchange of personal details.
Ready - Social - Set - Go!
Now you have identified your buyer persona, the buying journey and the content you want to deliver.
Engage the audience with provocative conversations, offering them both gated and un-gated content pieces that you have prepared strategically according to your persona. When people like your content they visit your website or fill the forms and become leads. Nurture them further and they become your customers.
People are using LinkedIn to strike business conversation, Facebook for personal conversation, Twitter for micro-conversation. There is a huge sea of potential buyers out there. Your content and tone of conversation can be moulded according to the platform you are sharing your content on.Just hit the right content at the right place in a beautified manner and boom! You hit the buyer’s sweet spot. Keep tracking the metrics like number of visitors, leads and customers that you acquire from social media so that you can test different strategies that drive results for your business.
Do let us know if it helped.
