Finding the right social media platform should not be based on a CEO’s opinion -- or any opinion for that matter. Finding the right medium entails researching to determine where your buyers are or whomever you are trying to attract. It’s about figuring out where potential clients, channel partners, students, donors, or whomever the stakeholders you are trying to attract are.
When you put your target audience on a pedestal and realize it is all about them and not about you, it becomes easier to talk about things most interesting to them, address their challenges, and provide them with helpful advice.
Buyer Personas
The best way to connect with ideal buyers is to develop something called a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal clients based on research and some educated speculation. Buyer personas search for information regarding your buyers’
- Goals
- Plans
- Challenges
- Motivations
- What keeps them up at two o’clock in the morning
- What can get them a promotion if they do it right
- What can get them fired if they get it wrong
- Job responsibilities
- Demographics
- Company size
Once you have consensus, summarize it, figure out the commonalities, and develop a buyer persona.
In the course of doing buyer persona research, you will look for answers to questions like:
- What are their favorite watering holes?
- What conferences do they like to go to?
- What meetups do they attend?
- What associations do they belong to?
- What channel or dealer programs do they attend?
- Where do they hang out (online and offline)?
The consensus with the above information is what will dictate what the most effective channels are for your business.
Track Your Efforts
A huge part of inbound marketing is to measure everything you do. There is a famous advertising quote that says something along the lines of “Half of the money I invest in advertising is wasted. The problem is I don’t know which half.”
Living in the 21st century, every last bit of advertising, marketing, and demand generation can be measured— all the way down to the click. There is no excuse for investing without being able to measure what is working.
The Bottom Line
Defining the best mediums for your business requires gathering a consensus on your buyer personas to develop a shortlist. Buyer personas will help your business attract not just any clients, but new clients you want, profitable, ideal clients.
Once buyer personas are developed, it is a lot easier to prioritize your efforts for the kinds of channels you should be doubling, tripling, or quadrupling in on. Next, you want to measure and track everything like crazy. You want to track not just clicks or generating leads, leads leading to marketing-qualified, or sales-qualified opportunities, but also which clicks and channels are leading to new clients.
Look at the channels you have previously invested a lot of time and money in but received very little back in return. Over time, your campaigns will become smarter. Iterate this process. Accelerate the stuff that is going well. Optimize, test, search, and look to beat your control. For the stuff that is not working well, simply stop doing it.
The process is similar to the definition of an entrepreneur because you are constantly looking to move resources from lower-yield activities to higher-yield activities; this is the most important thing when it comes to finding the best channels to reach a particular kind of client, partner, or stakeholder.
What channels do you use to connect with your prospects and stakeholders? Let us know in the comments below.
To learn more about the best ways to connect with your potential clients, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.
Submit a comment