How to Design a Targeted Buyer Persona for Social Media Marketing
As a social media marketer, one of your key objectives is to implement scheduled social media content and use social media personas to effectively reach out and engage with your target audience. But in order to do so, you first need to know who they are. This is where buyer personas come in.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on real data and research. When done right, a buyer persona can help you better understand your target audience, what their needs and pain points are, and how best to reach them on social media. Depending on the platform you’re using, your buyer persona can also be referred to as your social media persona.
In this article, we’ll show you how to design a targeted buyer persona for social media marketing and come up with some audience personas and social media persona examples.
If you’re looking for a social media agency in the Philippines that can help you get started on a social media campaign, send us a message today!
Why Do You Need a Social Media Persona for Social Media Marketing?
Before we dive into the how-to of designing a social media buyer persona, it’s important to understand why you need one in the first place.
As we mentioned, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. In other words, it’s a detailed profile of the type of person you’re trying to reach with your social media marketing.
Creating a buyer persona can help you in two ways:
It can help you better understand your target audience. It can help you create more targeted and effective social media campaigns.
For example, let’s say you’re selling a new line of skincare products. You may think that your target audience is all women aged 18-35. But when you create a buyer persona for social media marketing, you may realize that your target audience is actually women aged 25-34 who are concerned about environmental toxins and are looking for natural and organic skincare products.
This new insight can then help you create more targeted social media campaigns that speak directly to the needs of your target audience. As a result, you’ll see better results from your social media marketing efforts.
So now that you know the importance of creating a social media buyer persona, let’s take a look at how to do it.
Designing Social Media Personas for Your Target Buyer
Reaching customers today remains a challenge because of the pandemic. But one thing we know: more of them are on the Internet than ever before.
According to WeAreSocial’s Digital Report for 2021, Filipinos spend 4 hours and 15 minutes on social media every day. The 18-34 age bracket – which consists of older Gen Z and younger Gen Y consumers – is highly receptive to social media advertising.
Reaching audiences in social media has never been easier – your customers are online. To reach these customers, you can begin by profiling the social media version of your brand’s target personas.
Here’s how to design a target buyer persona for social media marketing:
- Know your audience.
The first step is to know who you’re trying to reach with your social media marketing. This means taking a close look at your current customer base and understanding who they are, what their needs and pain points are, and what they’re looking for from a brand like yours.
You can use data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system, surveys, and website analytics to get a better understanding of your current customers. You can also use social listening tools to track mentions of your brand and see what people are saying about you on social media.
- Identify your buyer persona’s needs and pain points.
Once you have a good understanding of your current customer base, you can start to identify the needs and pain points of your target buyer persona. What are they struggling with? What are their goals? What are their biggest concerns?
Again, social listening can be a valuable tool here. You can use it to track mentions of relevant keywords and see what people are saying about their needs and pain points.
- Create a buyer persona profile.
Once you have a good understanding of your target buyer persona’s needs and pain points, you can start to create a profile for them. This profile should include basic information like their age, gender, location, and job title.
But it should also include more detailed information like their interests, needs, pain points, and goals. The more complete and accurate your buyer persona profile is, the better you’ll be able to target your social media marketing campaigns.
- Develop targeted social media campaigns.
Once you have a complete buyer persona profile, you can start to develop targeted social media campaigns that speak directly to their needs and pain points. You can use this profile to create targeted ads, posts, and offers that will resonate with your target audience.
- Measure and adjust your campaigns.
Finally, it’s important to measure the results of your social media campaigns and adjust them as needed. Are your campaigns reaching your target audience? Are they engaging with your content? Are they taking the desired action? Are your social media personas reflected in the buyer persona profiles your campaigns are using?
Monitoring your campaign results will help you fine-tune your approach and ensure that you’re getting the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
Reaching Digital Customers Through Social Media Personas
As we learned in a recent session of the Truelogic DX Webinar series, applying serious effort toward segmenting your audiences is a powerful way to reach many digital audiences.
Through research and testing, it is possible to segment brand personas into further segments in order to increase audience reach, according to Laszlo Lim, Managing Partner of Invictus, who was guest speaker at the webinar.
A milk brand may target mothers who are concerned about their health or the health of their children, for instance. A male hygiene product may target men who are athletic, office workers, or are simply based at home.
These audiences are reachable through major social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and other emerging platforms, such as Tiktok.
Platforms such as Facebook can be tapped for “traditional” advertising that creates mass awareness, he adds.
Here are three methods that you can use to build an audience on Facebook:
Interest-based targeting: This is based on interests that people declare in their profiles, as well as the Pages they Like. For example, a user who likes the Page of a certain basketball team is likely interested in basketball.
Behavior-based targeting: This is based on the activities people do on and off Facebook. For example, a user who frequently visits sports websites is likely interested in sports.
Lookalike audiences: This is a method of finding people who are similar to your current customers or fans. For example, if you have a list of people who have purchased your product, you can create a lookalike audience of people who have similar interests and behaviors.
Once you’ve built your audience, you can then create targeted ad campaigns that speak directly to the needs of your target buyer.
Lim is also a believer in Facebook’s custom audience features. Facebook’s advertising tools can lead users toward particular actions and “be used to drive people down the funnel”, he says.
Let’s take a closer look at how audience building and audience targeting in Facebook can drive these results.
Confirm Your Social Media Personas with Facebook Audience Insights
Launched initially in 2014, Facebook Audiences is an audience targeting platform that can strengthen your messages with fresh audiences or customers who may have already interacted with your brand.
These audiences can be built using Facebook Ads Manager on a Facebook business account, which is connected to a page you have created separately from your personal account. Audiences can be selected based on whether they are connected to this page or not, as well as on the custom audience profiles you have created.
Use your social media personas in your audience lists for Facebook Ads to confirm if you’ve been targeting the right segment the entire time.
There Are Many Benefits To Building Social Audiences On Facebook
- Once you have built up your audience matrix and know who your audiences are, creating multiple custom audiences in Facebook can be done in a matter of minutes.
- Facebook Audiences allows you to do A/B testing, so you can test your messaging, creative collaterals, and the overall performance of your campaign against your selected audiences.
- You need to give yourself time and a firm budget to test these audiences to evaluate your campaign, but Audiences gives you the agility to finetune any of your given variables to help you improve your campaign.
- You can quickly pivot your campaign if you don’t see the results you want – and do so, as Lim remarked, without necessarily breaking the bank.
Use Facebook Retargeting And Remarketing with Audience Personas
Facebook remarketing and retargeting are methods by which companies can bring back lost customers, or those who have interacted with their brand before.
The process of remarketing and retargeting on Facebook begins with building an audience. You will upload your customer list to Facebook Ads Manager, and then create a “lookalike” audience from that starting point.
As we’ve established, you can use your social media personas in your audience lists for Facebook Ads to confirm if you’ve been targeting the right segment the entire time.
From there, you will create a series of ads and carousels that target this lookalike audience with content related to what they’ve shown an interest in before.
This is a powerful way to recapture lost customers and bring them back into your sales funnel.
The easiest way to build these audiences on Facebook is through customer lists. These lists may be segmented lists coming from your CRM or newsletter database, or a list of your mobile app users, if you have one.
If you are targeting visitors coming from your website, you can use a Facebook Pixel to track specific actions that were taken on your website and drive specific messages or actions when they come to Facebook. You can encourage these users to revisit your website, remind them of a product they looked at, or upsell them a certain product based on a recent purchase.
Because these customers are already familiar with your brand in some way, Facebook Audiences is an ideal retargeting/remarketing tool to re-engage them. All these retargeting/remarketing techniques are highly effective in reinforcing your brand’s visibility in ways that can drive actual conversions.
Build New Audiences: Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences
Would you like to extend your reach with brand new audiences who are a potential fit? Then Facebook’s custom Lookalike Audience feature is for you.
Constructing new audiences is easy with the audience-building tool. You can create custom audience profiles based on five main characteristics: location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. The key in this strategy is aligning these lookalike audiences with your existing audience segments.
Lookalike audience strategy is a great tactic for increasing potential market size, discovering new prospects, and converting them into leads. You will have to tweak your messaging to speak to these new audiences, so again, testing your campaign is important to evaluate your efforts.
When it comes to time and money, PPC specialists like Lim recommend at least two weeks to give your campaign a chance to saturate with audiences.
Social Media Persona Example
Given these pointers in crafting a social media persona for your social media marketing campaign, how can your business leverage the opportunity? Here are three examples of how your company’s persona might look.
Scenario 1: Your business is a small vape juice and vintage clothing shop in Laguna, just outside Metro Manila.
User 1:
| Name: | Juanita Roane Santos |
| Age: | 33 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Laguna, Philippines |
| Interests: | Vaping, fashion, makeup, hip-hop music |
| Motivations: | Wants to be seen as unique and stylish; wants to try new things |
User 2:
| Name: | Pedro Dalupang |
| Age: | 28 |
| Gender: | Male |
| Location: | Laguna, Philippines |
| Interests: | Vaping, basketball, cars, EDM music |
| Motivations: | Wants to be seen as cool and rebellious; wants to relax and have fun |
User 3:
| Name: | Maria Frances Ingrid Gomez |
| Age: | 22 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Laguna, Philippines |
| Interests: | Vaping, fashion, makeup, K-Pop music |
| Motivations: | Wants to be seen as fashionable and trendy; wants to try new things |
As you can see from these examples, your social media persona will be based on actual characteristics and interests of real people in your target market.
When you have a good grasp of who these people are, you can start planning your strategies for both SEO vs social media marketing accordingly. You can create content that appeals to their motivations, design ads that feature products they’re interested in, and boost posts that speak to their values.
You can also use this persona to inform your social media platform choice. In the case of our vape shop example, Instagram would be a good platform because of its focus on visuals and style. Facebook and the use of its “Marketplace” would also be a good option because of its large user base and targeting options.
Scenario 2: You’re a luxury candle-maker, home baker, and women’s rights advocate based in Manila.
User 1:
| Name: | Loisa Alvarez De Macapuno |
| Age: | 35 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Manila, Philippines |
| Interests: | Luxury products, home décor, gourmet food, travel |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel indulgent and luxurious; wants to be seen as sophisticated and cosmopolitan |
User 2:
| Name: | Ana Reyes |
| Age: | 28 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Manila, Philippines |
| Interests: | Home baking, DIY, Supporting women-owned businesses, social causes |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel empowered and supportive; wants to be seen as kind and compassionate |
User 3:
| Name: | Sofia Lopez |
| Age: | 32 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Manila, Philippines |
| Interests: | Bath bombs, essential oils, Escolta market, eco bags, Cubao Expo |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel the universe listening; wants to be seen as matured and healed |
In looking at the case of our luxury candle-maker example, both Instagram and Facebook would be the most effective platform because of its reach and capability to showcase the style of our dear candle biz. Using the “Reels” and other forms of video content can help captivate the brand’s target social media persona.
Scenario 3: Your enterprise manufactures and sells herbal haircare and skincare products in the Philippines.
User 1:
| Name: | Lila Patel |
| Age: | 25 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Philippines |
| Interests: | Herbal health and beauty, natural skincare, yoga, vegetarianism/veganism |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel healthy and beautiful; wants to be seen as natural and earthy |
User 2:
| Name: | Nadine Jamonte |
| Age: | 32 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Philippines |
| Interests: | Herbal health and beauty, aromatherapy, nature walks, feng shui |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel relaxed and balanced; wants to be seen as calm and serene |
User 3:
| Name: | Lara Tan |
| Age: | 28 |
| Gender: | Female |
| Location: | Philippines |
| Interests: | Herbal health and beauty, home-made skincare, gardening, cooking |
| Motivations: | Wants to feel nourished and beautiful; wants to be seen as natural and earthy |
What about Scenario 3? Given these social media persona examples, which social media platform will best fit our herbal hair care and skin care brand? Would social media marketing be the best option as a strategy? Or should the business also consider doing SEO?
There are plenty of considerations in targeting a buyer persona in social media marketing, such as fully understanding the brand and the business, knowing the nature of every type of buyer, and a familiarity with the sales and marketing funnel.
Upcoming Changes
Certain platforms are undergoing changes in 2021 to address user privacy concerns. In Facebook, this will be affecting the Audience Insights panel starting July 1, 2021. After that, audience insights will become available in Facebook Business Suite and other business tools inside Facebook.
Nonetheless, marketers still have a very powerful digital tool to reach audiences on the largest, most active social platform in the world, and tap into its product ecosystem, which includes Instagram and WhatsApp.
So, is your brand ready to make a lasting impression? Social media is where your audience is, so that’s where you should be.
