August 7, 2018

5.0 : Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience

5.0 : Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

We’ve already introduced the concept of buyer persona and, with the concept of our platform, a digital platform, we’re really talking about the range of social media that we may already be familiar with, and those that may come along in future, and those ones that we may be less familiar with. All serve the same purpose for different buyer personas.

What we’re dealing with is different technologies, different purposes for these platforms and, in those platforms, different actions that are performed and are an opportunity to present to the buyer persona.

Digital platforms offer a number of engagement options for a buyer persona

Understanding these platforms will help you to identify the best ways to engage with your buyer persona

Obviously, you have heard of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat perhaps, and a range of others, all of which may have experience with in some way. All of these provide an opportunity to reach out to that audience, to reach out to individual buyer personas, and to actually contact them in a way that’s meaningful to them, and meaningful for your brand, and meaningful for the product. We’re going to look at some of these in detail and look at what can be done to actually maximize the benefit of focusing the right buyer persona to the right platform.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

So we go about researching the right digital profiles for the right digital audiences by firstly having an understanding of the different sites, and the different areas, the different platforms that exist for us, and what they can offer. LinkedIn, for example, is very different to Facebook, very different to Twitter, in terms of what it can offer, in terms of the right type of candidate for our business.

Each platform is evaluated by The Candidate Ltd in terms of the options that it offers to engage with their buyer persona

We would speak to the websites themselves, look at the different offerings that they’re able to give to us so that we can have an understanding of the type of candidate that would exist in those different areas.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

You think that Facebook is better, I don’t know, for 25-40, you think that search is better for ages 35+, but you only think. In digital, you can measure. So smetimes you can see conversions coming from nowhere really. So you have to see, and test and revise.

In digital channels experimenting with platforms is the best way to ascertain whether they are useful

Kristina Chokoeva, Marketing Director, DINO, Bulgaria

The digital communication channels that we use with our customers are Facebook because it’s the primary social media in Bulgaria, Twitter but very few people use it, Instagram and Pinterest because our target group is mainly women, and YouTube because we’re trying to get a younger set of customers.

Dino share examples of using each channel for a specific purpose for engaging with their buyer persona

We also have email marketing in which we send out weekly newsletters to our registered clients, and Google+ and Google Maps which give our clients more information on how to easily find us.

Matching the buyer persona with a social media platform

We have already explored the idea of a buyer persona. Let’s now see in detail how you can learn about your buyer persona on a particular social network.

Here is a guide to some of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Additional materials

Background material

Learn how in some countries Social Media is changing the world:

We have been using the #passion4digital hashtag for this course mostly on Twitter – but do you know that some of our learners have also used it on other networks? Here is some more background on Hashtags

References

How to integrate social media into marketing campaigns

 http://www.smartinsights.com/traff…

Digital business strategy

 https://en-recanati.tau.ac.il/site…

Grow your business through social media (summary)

 http://dentalwealthbuilder.com/dwb…

For chapter 5 related sections, follow:

5.1 Facebook
5.2 YouTube
5.3 Twitter
5.4 LinkedIn
5.5 PPC optimisation
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?