"Know Me Better" Using Paid Social Media Insights to Boost Relevance

If you’re a sales person, nothing must annoy you more than time wasters, disinterested consumers - and worst of all, numbers that don’t connect. You’re spending money on data lists (boo!) or paid social media advertising (yay!) and you’re not even speaking to relevant leads. Why? The answer may well be that your advertising and sales pitch isn’t relevant to the people you’re speaking with.

So how do you solve your issues, become hyper relevant and make loads of profit? The answer is research, creativity and emotional intelligence. But we know that modern society has destroyed all of these, so instead we’re going to look at how Facebook’s insight tool can help.

Brands that perfect their inbound lead generation strategy see falling marketing costs, better quality leads, greater client engagement and other benefits that outbound methods simply can’t provide. If you want to know more about inbound lead generation read our guide “Everything you need to know about Inbound lead generation”

Persona building for dummies

Before we get to the fancy stuff, we need to look at who your consumer is and how you can relate to them. We talk about personas a lot, but that’s because they work and give a really simple framework for building success.

You can use the exercise below to build a very basic persona. Just fill in the blanks:

My consumer has [pain] and this causes them to [problem] which makes them feel [emotion]. My consumer has tried [alternatives] to fix their issue, but if they had my product they would [solution] making them feel [emotion].

This may seem silly, but these 2 (slightly longwinded) sentences have established the rough foundations of your persona and started to explore their pain points. You now need to look for common demographics that apply to your audience. Are they mainly male or female, luxury or value product buyers, high or low level earners? Once you have this data, note it all down for part 2.

Building your relevance on paid social media

Now you have your audience mapped out, go into your Facebook business account and take a look at the audience insights tool. This allows you to see all the demographical information in Facebook’s API and build out connections. It also shows you the relevance that topics, interests and other segments generate based on your original criteria.

First, take your persona observations and input them into the left hand column. Then open the likes section, and you will see a long list of things your chosen demographic relates to, with the relevance score adjacent.

If you expand this list, you can see many selections. You should now build out a list of 10 interests, with a relevance of over five times the norm. Once you have this, add it to your original persona and start to build out a highly specific analysis of what your persona is actually into.

This will throw up a lot of different aspects that you may not expect. However, the more specific and relevant you can make your personas, the better received your message will be, simplifying the sales process.

How do I use this?

So now you have a highly relevant persona and some great insights into your campaign. So how do you use them? The simple answer is, at every available opportunity. When you’re building audiences for paid social media, adding in websites or topics as required interests can add new levels of relevance. This allows you to pinpoint those who are really interested in your product, and simultaneously reveals what else they are likely to be interested in.

Building keyword lists for paid social media or SEO? Use the highest relevance-scored topics to base your keywords on, and you’ll find some long tail gems. Writing a sales pitch or looking for a great icebreaker for a call? Use the high-relevance sites to build out some great sales copy which you know will correlate with typical consumer values.

Knowledge is power, and you have the tools at your disposal to discover in-depth knowledge about your consumers, so use it.

A word of warning on paid social media insights

As I mentioned previously, these tools allow you access to a serious amount of information. However, you need to apply some emotional intelligence to properly utilise the data. For example, don’t ring a consumer and say:

“Hi, so I see that you’re really into Japanese people pillows” …. [Dial Tone]…

Now, the consumer may have some interests they sure as hell don’t want you to know about! Don’t use specifics. Instead, use the information to create informed campaigns and creative content that guides the consumer through the sales process and you’ll be onto a winner. Anything else, and you may risk becoming a bit creepy.

Brands that perfect their inbound lead generation strategy see falling marketing costs, better quality leads, greater client engagement and other benefits that outbound methods simply can’t provide. If you want to know more about inbound lead generation read our guide “Everything you need to know about Inbound lead generation”