Recap: Brands and the Buyer Persona

This week, group 5 members explored the use of buyer personas in social media marketing by looking at brands that have mastered the art of marketing to a specific buyer persona via various social media.

Dove stood at the top of the list as a brand that effectively uses an emotional connection to engage with “real” women on social media. Through the brand’s real beauty campaign across various channels, it evokes an emotional, relatable response that sets the brand in the buyer’s eyes as more than simply beauty products, but as a source of true beauty empowerment. “‘The buyer persona profile gives you a chance to truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers’ eyes, the circumstances that drive their decision process’” (Scott, 2013, p. 167).

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TacoBell is another buyer persona success story highlighted this week for the brand’s ability to relate to its young, millennial target audience. Active on appropriate networks like Instagram and Snapchat, Taco Bell sparks passion and engagement for its products by speaking the language of its target audience. Campaigning for the addition of a taco emoji, Taco Bell’s Change.orgpetition has gained over 28,000 signatures. This sort of audience engagement goes deeper than the company’s bottom line; it builds a real, relatable relationship with the brand and its social media savvy fans.

ESPN has championed communication with the young, male sports lover buyer persona. The large company connects with specific consumers on a more niche basis through the use of tailored outlets to meet the needs of different areas of its primary buyer persona. For example, ESPN program SportsNation connects with a younger audience through the use of sports memes, interactive polls, and other shareable media. The polling that SportsNation uses to engage with its audience is more than a viewership draw. The network can use this information as free, engaging market research to continually develop its buyer persona and keep fresh records of the buyer persona’s needs. Scott (2013) says, “the best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people” (p. 166), and this type of multipurpose audience interview sets the network at the top of the ranks in buyer persona communication.

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The final company profiled for its successful use of buyer personas on social media, just in time for Valentine’s Day, is Hallmark. Hallmark pulls at the heartstrings through sentimental video campaigns like #PutYourHeartToPaper to connect with its most engaged social media buyer persona, mothers and grandmothers. Of course women aren’t the only Hallmark customers, but as those most likely to engage with such a brand on social media, targeting the social media buyer persona is an important part of the integrated marketing communications mix.

While each of these companies target different audiences via social media, they all have one thing in common: utilizing market research to develop specific buyer personas to strengthen targeted marketing efforts. While defining buyer personas may seem like an optional way to optimize standard marketing efforts, it is in fact a crucial first step in any marketing plan.

Source:

Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing & PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, & viral marketing to reach buyers directly (4th ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.