How do you validate social media personas and buyer journeys?

1 What are social media personas and buyer journeys?

Social media personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on their demographics, psychographics, behavior, goals, and pain points. Buyer journeys are the stages that your customers go through from awareness to purchase and beyond. By creating personas and journeys, you can tailor your social media content, tone, and channels to match your audience's needs and expectations.

2 Why do you need to validate your personas and journeys?

Creating personas and journeys is not a one-time task; rather, you should validate them regularly to ensure they accurately reflect the current reality of your market, industry, and customers. Doing so can help you avoid assumptions and biases that can lead to ineffective or irrelevant content, as well as identify gaps and opportunities in your social media strategy and tactics. Furthermore, validating your personas and journeys can improve your engagement, conversion, and retention rates, as well as help you adapt to changing customer behavior, preferences, and feedback.

3 How to validate your personas using data

To validate your personas, begin by gathering data from your social media analytics, CRM, and other sources. This data should include demographic information such as age, gender, location, education, and income, as well as psychographics like interests, values, attitudes, and motivations. Additionally, consider behavior like social media usage and content consumption, goals that they want to achieve or solve with your product or service, and pain points that your product or service can address. You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, or social media listening platforms to collect and analyze this data. Moreover, you can segment the data by persona to compare and contrast their behavior and preferences.

4 How to validate your journeys using feedback

The second step to validate your customer journeys is to use feedback from existing or potential customers to confirm or adjust the journey stages and touchpoints. You can collect this feedback through surveys, interviews, reviews, and social media listening. Tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Zoom, Google Reviews, and Hootsuite can be used for collecting and analyzing this feedback. Additionally, you can map the feedback to your journey stages and touchpoints to see how they align or differ. This feedback can help you understand customer satisfaction, expectations, challenges, thoughts, feelings, and actions at different stages of the journey. It can also provide valuable insights into what customers like or dislike about your product or service.

5 How to validate your personas and journeys using testing

The third step to validate your personas and journeys is to use testing to experiment and measure the impact of your social media content and campaigns on your persona segments and journey stages. A/B testing can compare two versions of your content or campaign, while multivariate testing can compare multiple variations. Additionally, user testing can observe and record how persona segments or journey stages interact with your content or campaign, while social media analytics can track and measure the key metrics and KPIs. Tools like Facebook Ads Manager, Google Optimize, UserTesting, or Sprout Social can be used to conduct and analyze these tests. Ultimately, the results of these tests can be used to optimize or refine your social media content and campaigns.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?