Improve social media engagement for your business: Build some bears

This is a guest post from Jon Tromans, a digital marketing trainer from the UK. Jon has spent over two decades helping enterprises take their digital marketing game to the next level, by providing both training and consultation services. A true expert, he provides guidance in a variety of topics, right from SEO to social media, and email marketing to blogging. Check out his website for more information!

We all do it subconsciously, we don’t even know we’re doing it. We echo the people we meet and the attitudes of the places we go to.

You may have left the town you were born in, but whenever you go back, do you find yourself falling back into old habits? Your accent may change slightly, you’ll use colloquialisms, and you’ll start to behave more like the people around you.

A lot of us tend to dress in a similar way to our friends or our social group, buy the same tech, and go to similar places on holiday.

We echo our surroundings.

We need to try and do this on social media.

You Are Not Your Customer

I speak about this quite a bit during my training sessions. Chances are that you don’t buy anything from the company you run social media for. If you’re an agency, you’ll be managing social media for many different brands.

Don’t for one minute think that what you find attractive, pretty, funny or cool is what the client at the other end likes.

You are not your customer or your clients’ customer.

Voice And Tone

Having a similar attitude to your perfect customer is essential. You make a better connection. They instantly warm up to you and will engage with you more readily.

Decide on what voice you’re going to use for your audience and stick to it. It’s fine to add some individual personality but keep the general tone the same.

I’m old, almost 50, and I’ve been doing this marketing lark for a long time. Whenever I see posts that starts “OMG! I’m so super-excited…” I grimace, swear under my breath, and switch off. If I was the target market, you’d have lost me instantly. It’s the wrong voice and tone for me.

Write down a short description on how your customer expects you to sound. Do you use mild swearing? Are you edgy or conservative? What style of images do you need to collate?

If you’re an agency do this for all of your clients’ audiences.

Build Some Personas

A lot of companies will have more than one type of customer, and usually never more than three or four. A great way to identify how to sound for each of your audiences is to build a fake person or persona for them.

Choose a name, age, and gender. How much do they earn? What movies and music do they like?

The most important question to ask is this: What makes them buy or complete the goal of your campaign?

Build your persona and give that fake person what they want to hear.

Build Some Bears

If you’re a busy agency then you’re going to be switching and changing personas all the time, and it can become exhausting work.

I was working with an agency last year who managed the social media for a wedding dress retailer, an anti-virus software company, a chain of accountants, and a fishing tackle shop!

Imagine getting the wedding dress persona mixed up with the fishing tackle!

One tactic we used was to buy some bears and dress them up as a persona and put a little name tag on them. When the marketing exec needed to write for a client they picked up the bear and wrote for that person.

It helped focus the mind, brought in better results, and was fun.

Have a word with the boss and get some bear budget!

Conclusion

Being able to appeal to your clients and giving them what they want will improve engagement and generate more sales and leads.

Another bonus is improving your authority, which is essential online. We need to demonstrate that we know what we’re talking about in the language your customer understands. Social media is a great way to get this message over creatively.

If you want to chat more about this article then I’m always happy to connect on LinkedIn or Twitter. Oh, and let me see your bear photos