Consumer Research: Building Better Personas

Campaigns without a clearly defined persona are easy to spot. 

They’re either generic, speaking to a stereotypical made-up consumer (think ads aimed at ‘young women’ where everything’s pink and the protagonists spend all day taking selfies in their bedrooms). 

Or they focus on the product rather than the solution or benefit it offers customers (think stock images that look like stills from ‘The Matrix’ promoting big data solutions). 

Building meaningful personas is hard. It takes a lot of time and resources to run focus groups or interviews with customers. 

This guide explains how social data can help you quickly and easily study personas that are defined by more than just broad demographics. It can also help you track live trends within your target audience to inform a more sophisticated marketing strategy. 

The millennial problem 

There are all sorts of myths and generalizations made about millennials, from their attitudes to work, to their ability to “cancel” brands on social, to them essentially “killing” particular industries by moving away from the purchasing behavior of previous generations. 

But there’s a real problem trying to target this generation, whether the stories are broadly true or not. 

It comes down to the fact that millennials were born between 1981 and 1996 – a demographic that ranges these days between 27 and 43. In other words, millennials are a massive group of people with a huge variety of lived experiences, financial situations, and life stages. 

Targeting them is going to be expensive and futile if your product isn’t suited to everyone in the demographic. 

Ultimately, we have to look at new ways of building an audience to target. Every organization is unique, so why not create custom audiences that capture their nuances and perspectives, driving better results for marketers?  

With this approach we can better understand our customers and stop relying on tired generalizations that can only be applied in specific situations.

Beyond demographics 

With that in mind, it’s time to go beyond demographics and think more about the factors that define your target audience. 

Your audience needs to be carefully considered and guided by your aims and objectives. This is the only way to group people in ways that really represent them, giving you the ability to reach out to them more effectively. 

When creating personas based around interests and behaviors rather than broad demographic categories, social data becomes invaluable.  

Social media and online forums are where people go to share their passions and hobbies, express who they are, and get involved in what’s happening. What’s particularly useful about social data is it’s, for the most part, unsolicited. This means you can find out what people really care about or their opinions ‘in the wild’ and identify the social tribes that gather around common interests.  

Brandwatch Consumer Research can identify and analyze specific topics of conversation across the web, offering you a deeper understanding of the people talking about your brand or a specific topic. 

Here’s an example: Let’s take a look at how different audiences, such as Tesla owners, advocates, detractors, or interest groups, such as automotive and tech journalists, talk about different aspects of Tesla. 

As you can see, this gives a whole new depth of insight compared to just what the general conversation looks like. By looking at different audience segments that go beyond broad demographics, you can learn about the nuances of the conversation – the preferences and opinions of subgroups that are super relevant to your brand. 

You can delve much deeper, too. For example, you could look at the most popular topics that people who own a Tesla talk about online. We found that this audience is engaging in conversations about politics, world events, technology, and artificial intelligence.  

Understanding your audience 

These insights can tell us a lot about the groups we want to target when they’re engaged with our brand or key topics. But how do we build a bigger picture of who they are the rest of the time? 

This was a question our customers were asking us that led to the creation of Brandwatch Social Panels. 

Social Panels draws from an enormous online database (including sources like X, Reddit, online forums, and blogs) to allow users to build audiences (or panels) based on author attributes, interests, demographics, or conversations. Users also have the option to select or combine with pre-built panels created by Brandwatch experts. 

These panels give users insights on what and who their chosen audience talks about online. 

For example, with Brandwatch’s pre-built Social Panels, we can analyze vegans as an interest group to identify topics they discuss more frequently than the general population. We can learn, unsurprisingly, that they talk more about the environment, food, and fitness. But we can also learn that there are clusters of audiences within the community that have shared interest in music and marketing.  

With Social Panels, we can also drill into any topic to see the actual posts and reposts by the audience that are driving those conversations. This gives a great insight into the mix of content that resonates with this particular audience, allowing you to better cater to their needs. 

For example, in our vegan panel the authors like sharing stories that combine their personal experiences and professional interests in social issues, like animal rights, and environmental activism. Vegans are also creative in the kitchen and often share delicious recipes that can be achieved with few ingredients. 

This analysis can be done over a month to get a general idea or even over the last 24 hours to detect current trending topics and content within an audience that can aid your engagement strategy. Target personas can now remain up to date as you can check in on them each morning to see what’s new in their world.