You probably heard that many times – ‘preparation is a half of success’. Very same applying to getting started in social media – you have to prepare before you start spending your money.

Before you start doing anything – like posting on social media, or creating an ad on social network, long time before you do that you need to define your customer. There are many tools and words flying around that concept – like ‘customer profile’, ‘buying persona’ etc. Generally speaking they’re all about same – some framework to define your customers.

What I prefer to use in my business of managing social media is the concept called ’empathy map’. Let me explain what it is, and trust me, by the end of explanation you will clearly see why you need that to start.

The major idea of the empathy map is to imagine (define the image of) your customer not in general terms like ‘they’re 25-40 males from NY’, but in much more detailed sections I will come to in a second.

It starts with some social/demographic intro like ‘who is this person’ and spoken in ‘human language’. Something like, his name is Bill, he is 35, he is a marketing manager for the small company selling DIY products. He has a wife, and two kids, 3 and 10 years old….’ – start painting this picture. However, this section is not so essential, it is like a warm-up, something to get your mind off these things, the real ‘meat’ is starting then.

Findings sections

Then you’re going to delve into 4 important sections. Try to imagine what this person…

• Does
• Says
• Sees/hears
• Thinks

… and now I’m going to switch to caps because it’s very important … – IN RELATION TO YOUR PRODUCT OR PROBLEM YOU SOLVE.

For example: ok, if I started with this guy, Bill – he probably does all lots of things everyday. But we’re not interested in full journal of his daily activities. We only need those that relate to what we do, and our business is (in our case – social comment alert service). So, I will write to the section ‘he does’ something like ‘he regularly checks the  social media to find out if there are any new comments in there.

May be he loves his wife, I hope he does. But it doesn’t add up anything in relation to our product or the problem we solve – we’re not in the family counselling business. But if he loves his wife he most likely wants to spend more time with her. This is what we can use. So into the section ‘he thinks’ I’d add ‘he wants to spend better time with the family and be less stressful as he often is too heated up by his work.’ I may be stretching here things a bit, but just for demonstration purpose, but I truly believe our social comment alert service reduces stress of social media managers.

Where to get the ideas for this?

There are two good starting points:

• Customer interviews – well, whatever you’re going to do or even doing as a business, you really need to do customer interviews to ‘hear what they say’. I would totally not recommend going into new business without asking your potential customers what they feel about what you’re going to offer.
• Your sales team and your customer support team – if you’re in the existing business, these teammates know hell of a lot about your customers, as they’re on the front line of talking to them. Ask themselves for ideas.

Hint: asking ‘So what?’ question

When you do this empathy map, you might often state/declare things about your customer which do not relate to your product or problem you solve. Then ask yourself the ‘So what?’ question, even repeatedly, until you either ‘maneuver’ to something something about your product like I did above, or drop that point entirely. Like ‘he loves his wife’ – ‘so what?’ – ‘he wants to spend better time with her’ – ‘ok, so what?’ – ‘he wants to be less stressful’ – ‘so what?’ – ‘our product helps him with this by doing x,y,z’

Hint: remember about emotions

It’s very easy to fall into very rational and logical thinking like ‘Bill doesn’t want to do routine job of checking comments…’ While that’s a valid point, but when you avdertise your product it is important to try emotional approach as well, so try finding this. We’re not robots, and while we’re often logical (or trying to be) there is a whole lot of power in what we love/hate etc.

Try thinking about this emotions of your customers (again, in relation to your product) –

• Positive: love, happiness, proudness, hope, satisfaction, compassion
• Negative: hate, sadness, shame, sorrow, fear, guilt, anger

Like in my example we can say that – ‘Bill hates that he has to open his social media like every 15 minutes to see if there is new comment there’ or ‘he feels guilty when he couldn’t answer potential customer in comments quickly’.

Conclusion sections

After working out these 4 previous sections of ‘does’, ‘says’, ‘sees/hears’, ‘thinks’ you need to come down to two conclusive sections – what this person

• Wants
• Is scared by

This is like a conclusion section from the previous 4. We normally separate this two because this will make two most important motives to use in your advertising and posts – either how to get what you want or how to avoid something that scares you.

Empathy map example

I will throw in now our working example of empathy map for you that we’re actually using at work.

Let me warn you –

Working on empathy map is not an easy exercise. You WILL NOT create it in like 5 minutes and go with it. It requires a lot of thinking, interviewing and thinking again.

His name is Bill, he is 35, he is a marketing manager for the small company selling DIY products. He has a wife, and two kids, 3 and 10 years old. He runs all the marketing efforts for his company solely. Recently the company started using social media, which is also Bill’s responsibility, but it goes with moderate success. Bill is still struggling to turn social media into solid, good selling channel.

What he does: he tries to check social media of his company as often as he could. This is very tedious task as it is like opening a page, nothing there, closing page, and like 6 times that for each social media. Normally there are about 10 comments daily appearing there with questions from potential customers. He also runs some advertising campaigns in social media and he also wants to receive comments from these ads. He also orders some ‘influencer’s posts’ and he would want to get comments form such posts, but ignoring other comments from these communities. He also runs a Twitter search about every hour to learn if someone mentioned his company brand.

What he says: ‘wish there were some easy way to check comments/mentions’, ‘I need some single channel for getting all new comments from all my company’s different social media’, ‘damn, I need to answer comments quickly – these are practically lost money, if I don’t’, ‘I have so many other stuff to do, and social media require a lot of attention and time’, ‘I probably could talk my boss to get our customer support to answer these comments, but it just can’t work in the way it works now – they would need some ‘single place’ to check for comments, asking them to check 6 different social media themselves is just beyond expected’.

What he sees/hears: seems like everyone from customer to competitors is using social media these days. ‘Switching it off’ is simply not an option. His boss repeatedly tells him, that answering questions in social media is a priority. His colleagues often complain that ‘all that he does is playing with Facebook’. Despite he does a lot of other stuff including offline, all that the colleagues notice is that he is always on social media sites. Hiring another person to just manage social media is not yet justified by the results the company is getting from it.

What he thinks: ‘checking for comments is pain in the …’ ‘there should be some instrument for doing this’, ‘I feel so stressful from doing social media’.

And conclusions….

What he wants: some easy ‘one-stop-shop’ for reporting new comments in social media – quickly and automatically, and with the ability to send it to someone else also, like to support or sales team.

What he is scared by: that he might miss important question from customer or some bad mention, that his boss would become unhappy with his work, that he might be replaced someday by some younger person more ‘advanced’ in social media, that he might be missing some easily accessible tool which he simply doesn’t know about, that he generally may be missing some important knowledge about social media as it is not his ‘native’ environment.

And.. so what?

Do you already feel why this is so important to do when getting started in social media?

Now when there is an empathy map (see above) – do you see how it is now easy to prepare content or create ads for this person? You can literally write the blog posts for his ‘want’ and ‘scares’. You can address his specific motives in advertising CTAs and texts. If you do empathy map in good details, it becomes relatively clear how to attract these people.

‘What if I sell to different segments/different customers’?

I guess, you know the answer, right? You obviously need another empathy map for another type of customer. For example, we also offer our service to freelancers who do social media management for their clients. We tell them different stories and show different messages in our ads.

So, before you start doing anything else – go talk to your team about who your customers are in the format of the above. Interview some of your customers or leads yourself, prepare the empathy map (or maps). And feel relived about how it is relatively clear it becomes on how to attract them.

 

Also, if you’re just preparing, have a look at this article which also might be helpful when getting started in social media.