Have you ever wondered how to turn your social media connections into loyal, lifelong customers? Digital marketing strategist Sabrina Killgo is here to share what she’s learned in working with major entities like Kelsey-Seybold and Houston Methodist and as an independent consultant. Speaking with Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse at a recent Social Media Breakfast of Houston, she shares actionable strategies for mapping out the customer journey and crafting unforgettable brand experiences.
Understanding the Customer Journey
“The traditional customer journey has three phases,” says Sabrina, “so awareness, consideration, and then the decision-making process.” All three should be customized for different businesses and products.
If awareness about a service or product already exists, that’s wonderful, she notes, but customers “may not even know that they need this product or they need this service, so it's more about you making the consumer aware of who you are and what you offer.”
Meanwhile, “consideration is [when] they're ready to make a purchasing decision,” she explains, “but they need that push, they need a differentiator [such] as, ‘why I should go with your product or service…?’” Finally, “the decision making period is when they're actually ready to make a conversion.”
Creating Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are essential in helping businesses understand their customers' needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes. This allows for more targeted and effective marketing efforts. By aligning your company’s messaging and offerings with what truly matters to your ideal customers, you can attract higher-quality leads, boost engagement, and ultimately drive more sales.
“A persona is basically a character and it's your customer, but you're creating a narrative about the customer,” Sabrina says. “So, what's their background demographic, details [like] maybe income level,… what’s their job role? So you're really creating this character that you're putting through your journey map.”
Unless you are targeting an identical group of people, the specifics of how you market to them need to be customized to their unique background and demographics. In other words, you will likely need multiple personas.
Some fear that this is a herculean task. However, Sabrina argues that it doesn’t have to be.
“I think there's a misconception that the exercise of developing a persona is going to take a long time, especially if you're a lean marketing team or you're a small business,” she says. But ”the value in that is, one, you're able to, again, visualize, and you're able to think in that persona's mindset when you're doing your marketing and when you're doing your social media content.”
In the end, “the benefit of having multiple [personas] is that you can really begin to personalize your content because you're thinking of it from the perspective of Persona A… versus Persona B.”
She recommends using AI to assist in this process. “Just give the different large language models just a bit of data about your customer and ask it to build out a narrative, a Persona A story, based on the data that you give it, and you can really generate four five six in a very efficient amount of time.”
If you’re a new business and don’t have a lot of existing customer data, she explains that “you have to go off of your business model, what you think it may be. But if you have ten customers that have bought from you, you can send out a customer survey. There’s things that you can do. Ten is not statistically significant but it's a place to start.”
“If you’re a small business, one or two [personas] is sufficient,” she explains. “If you're a much more robust enterprise like a health care system, obviously you're going to have dozens.” For smaller businesses, “it’s definitely achievable to create one or two unique landing pages for your persona, like that's an attainable goal.”
Consider the Best Channels On Which to Reach Your Customers
When identifying what channels to focus on to reach your customers, Sabrina suggests doing “your own personal research, like putting yourself in the mind of your customer. If they're looking for your product, how would they access it ? Is your product bricks-and-mortar?” Also think about whether the product is “something where they would put it into Google.”
Additionally, she suggests “kind of role playing, and walking through the process yourself as that persona.” In other words, “a really good touch point if you have just no idea is to go through the process as if you're a new customer looking for the service.”
Lead People to Where You Want Them To Go
For businesses, their website is where they want to lead customers. As Sabrina points out, “I think [for] most businesses, the website is the most valuable, because that is where you have the ability to capture information from them and then continue to nurture them as a lead or a customer.”
But there are other approaches too. “On social media we see that a lot of people don't like to leave platform, they want to stay in platform,” she notes. “So even if you're just providing information…they'll have that frequency where they're seeing your ad or your content continually, you know, it'll resonate.”
The other thing to keep in mind is frequency. “I think the statistic is it takes like seven touches for someone to really remember [the company or brand].” While “getting them to the website is really a great goal, [it] doesn't always happen, especially on social media, so being mindful of that and how you project your content.”
Sabrina also finds Pay-Per-Impression (PPM) a valuable indicator of success. “It’s really a great indicator of, how much did it cost for us to reach this amount of people? And social media [is] always significantly lower than traditional [advertising].”
The Number of Social Media Followers You Have Isn’t Determinative
Followers don’t necessarily translate to viewers or customers, so follower count isn’t quite as important as some people claim it is. “A follower is not going to necessarily be the person [to] always see your content,” she says. ”That's really kind of a mindset shift from maybe the last five or six years of social media. In the past it was all about, ‘I want to have a huge follower count, follower count,’ and now it's more about what is your reach? Are you gaining algorithm well enough to where you're being put on different people's pages?”
Social media can simply be a way for people to be introduced to your company or brand. “Social media can be a discovery tool for a lot of people,” she notes.
Create Valuable Social Media Content That Guides People Towards Your Goal
In terms of social media content itself, Sabrina suggests it should be “something that’s always valuable.” She warns that “if you are constantly promoting, selling, that's not valuable, and social media users are sophisticated, they know when they're seeing an ad or when they're seeing an organic post that is trying to perform as an ad, and they just scroll past it.”
When it does come to converting your viewers to actual customers, she argues that it starts with “optimizing your content to where there's always a very clear call to action and making it very easy for your customer to ultimately make that decision.”
Email can play a big role in this process. “If you're able to take it off social media by capturing emails…, it's a great way to get them into that email nurture strategy, that email journey, to kind of automate that process and set it up to where certain messaging is being sent after two or three days, those sort of things.”
Sabrina likes email because “it's really low cost and it's very effective, so as a small business or a lean marketing team, it's a great tool to kind of capture those lower people who are ready to make that purchasing decision and kind of push them to that.”
Optimizing content also means figuring out a system that keeps people on the platform they are presently on. “I try to put it into my brain and how I do things,” she says. “If I'm scrolling and I see something, I don't necessarily want to take off to sign up or to learn more. So if you are thinking about how you're optimizing your content, just keeping it in platform is pretty much always ideal.”
Best practices for doing that include “provid[ing] all the information very clearly in your content,” she explains. “If you have video, always [offer] captions because sometimes people are watching videos without sound.” Links are also very helpful. “People use the Instagram bio a lot to use Linktree or those different sites that'll kind of put all your different business links in one centralized place.” Finally, she notes that companies should also remember to “have some sort of CTA for your business.”
For those looking to delve deeper into Sabrina’s insights, be sure to watch the full livestream.