Creating a Persona for Your Social Media Campaign

One of the best ways to be successful when using social media marketing is to create a persona. A persona is a description of the person you are marketing to. However, it is much more than the standard description of a demographic or audience. Instead of marketing to, for instance, boys under 18, you flesh out the persona of a single boy under 18. Using this example, let’s go through the steps of creating a persona that will attract the audience for your product or service.

1. Determine Your Best Customer

Start by going through your sales history to determine who is your best customer. You may find that you have customer segments that are very different from each other. If so, then create a persona and campaign for each segment because each group will respond to different social signals.

2. Brainstorm Your Best Customer Persona

Ask your entire team to brainstorm ideas for your persona. Since different people have varying experiences, using ideas from a group of people is helpful. You can also survey your existing customers to get input for your persona.

3. Narrow Down Persona Qualities

Earlier we said we would demonstrate with a persona for an 18-year-old boy. Let’s work with that basic description. Questions you can ask are:

• What does he look like?
• Where does he live?
• What does he like to read, watch or participate in?
• Who are his parents, grandparents?
• Where was he born?
• What does he like to wear?
• Is he in a relationship?

You can see how detailed the answers would be to these questions. So let’s develop the current persona.

For this demonstration, our boy is named Juan. He was born in Ohio to parents from Mexico. His parents are naturalized citizens who own in a bakery they started 40 years ago. He is an only child who loves sports, and plays in a neighborhood soccer team. He loves to watch soccer on television, and follows the World Cup. He also collects t-shirts from World Cup champion teams.

Juan is 17, and short for his age. But his father told him that he was short at 17 too, and shot up after his 17th birthday. Since his father is 6 foot 2 inches, Juan believes him. In the meantime, Juan keeps playing soccer and running to stay strong. Since his parents own a bakery, they expect Juan to help out. Juan likes to help his family, but would rather play soccer with his friends. To encourage him, Juan’s parents pay him to work, and Juan uses the money to buy his favorite soccer t-shirts.

As you can see, this persona draws a picture of an actual person. This persona represents the audience that you are marketing to.

4. Review Your Persona

Go over the persona to ensure that it has the qualities of the audience you are marketing to.