Buyer personas are key to delivering personalized experiences to your audience, but traditional methods for developing these personas are often time-consuming and labor-intensive. They require collecting customer questionnaires, conducting exhaustive consumer research, analyzing purchase behavior, and assessing overall brand engagement. The process can take weeks or even months, yet the end result typically lacks critical information around how to effectively engage these individuals, from the media channels they engage with to the influencers they follow.

Buyer personas are a necessary part of any good marketing strategy, but if they don’t include actionable insights, they’re useless. And if you’re currently experiencing a similar situation or have, you’re not alone. It’s far more common than you think.

In this blog we’ll dive deeper into:

Why an audience intelligence tool is crucial for creating actionable buyer personas
How to easily build your buyer personas using StatSocial’s audience intelligence platform
Everything you’ll instantly uncover about your buyer personas
The ways you can take action on your buyer personas

Why an audience intelligence tool is crucial for creating actionable buyer personas

Methods most marketers employ when creating buy personas typically include gathering and analyzing existing datasets on their target audience and current customers, conducting surveys, 1:1 interviews or focus groups. And while these methods provide a great deal of information, they often lack necessary insights that help inform more targeted and actionable marketing strategies, not to mention the time and resources spent creating them.

But audience intelligence tools are changing that, providing greater understanding of an existing customer group or target audience, like their interests, media preferences, brand affinities, influencer relationships and political leanings in a matter of minutes.

StatSocial’s audience intelligence platform provides marketers with the most comprehensive understanding of their audience and audience segments (persona clusters) based on what they self-declare and engage with across major social platforms. This provides an accurate view into their interests, preferences and affinities and as a result, marketers gain valuable insights into who their audience is, and what drives their purchase decisions, enabling highly actionable and personalized marketing touch points.

How to easily build your buyer personas using StatSocial’s audience intelligence platform

Uncovering your unique audience will not only make your campaign reach and resonance stronger, but may even reveal an entirely new audience segment you were overlooking. StatSocial’s dynamic Persona Clusters change as new trends, influencers, and media channels emerge overtime.

Most buyer personas, once created, remain static and become quickly outdated, whereas StatSocial dynamic persona clusters stay relevant and actionable.

Let’s see what this looks like by exploring the buyer personas (or readership groups) of The New York Times.

To do this, The New York Times marketing team has a a few options:

• Upload their first party subscriber data
• Access their social audience (as pictured below) across major social platforms
• A combination of both -> Create any consumer audience relevant to an upcoming campaign or launch

The New York Times could even build The Wall Street Journal’s social audience to see how their personas compare to their competitors’.

Everything you’ll instantly uncover about your buyer personas

Once an audience is built, you gain access to an incredible amount of insights including the audience’s:

• Dynamic persona clusters
• Media preferences (from traditional to niche podcasts)
• Trusted influencers (from nano to celebrity)
• Brand affinities
• Political preferences & leanings
• Interests & passions
• Personality traits
• Career profiles
• Demographics

Within the Dynamic Persona Cluster section of an audience report, you can explore how each persona differs within each of the categories listed above. Looking at The New York Times, their US audience makes up 3 different personas:

• Info Seekers
• Pop Culture Junkies
• Politically Thrilled

At first glance you gain a preview into each persona’s demographics, preferences and affinities, but you can easily dive in further, generating an in-depth report for each.

The ways you can take action on your buyer personas

Now that you know the various buyer segments of your audience, it’s time to reach them. With StatSocial, this couldn’t be easier. Let’s take a closer look at the Pop Culture Junkies persona:

Interestingly they consist of more women in their mid-20’s to 30’s compared to Info Seekers that are men over the age of 54. Pop Culture Junkies have high affinities and engagement around the restaurant industry and food media, with specific brand affinities for restaurant chains like Panera, Steak ’n Shake and Red Lobster, and media outlets like Food and Wine Magazine and recipe site, Chowhound.com.

To further reach this audience and increase their subscriber base amongst this persona, here are just a few examples of how The New York Times could take action based on the insights revealed within the StatSocial platform:

• Create more content specific to the food industry, restaurant reviews, etc.
• Craft specific marketing messaging around existing and future food related content.
• More heavily promote their online subscription of NYT Cooking to this persona across the digital ecosystem (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, paid channels, CTV, etc.) to fuel highly targeted paid media campaigns.
• Identify trusted foodie influencers and restaurateurs among this persona to be content contributors and/or paid partners promoting subscriptions.

Get started building your buyer personas to uncover thousands of insights with StatSocial

Personalization is thrown around a lot in marketing. But how many marketers actually pull it off? Adobe reported that “quickly growing companies generate 40% more revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.” When you understand the various segments of your audience, you CAN be personalized in your approach and how you reach them.

Buyer personas are a necessary part of any good marketing strategy, but relying on traditional data sources alone doesn’t cut it anymore. Having an audience intelligence tool like StatSocial that can provide actionable insights is key to delivering the personalized experiences our consumers expect.

Ready to start understanding your audience and build actionable buyer personas? Schedule your demo with a member of our team.

Discover additional ways marketers are leveraging StatSocial:

> Digital Media Planning Needs More Than Intuition, Demographics and Engagement Data

> How to Measure Brand Perception: Identify & Survey Exposed Social Audiences

> Why The Best Influencer Marketing Strategies Include Social Audience Insights