Using Facebook Audience Insights

to build buyer/customer personas

your creative team can actually use

First, you have to ask why you’re going to spend time

developing personas in the first place.

Most of the time the answer to this question is:

To better understand our customers (or our ideal target

customer) so we can focus our creative and marketing

efforts on reaching that person.

So you think about who they are, what they look like, what a

day in this person’s life might be like.

You might even talk to some customers.

And then you write your persona. Maybe you give them a

nice picture, too.

Do your personas look like this?

Pamela is 35-years old and has worked in procurement

and logistics for 15 years, 8 of those as a director in a

small manufacturing company.

She always feels rushed and works hard to balance the

needs of her job with the demands of her online Master’s

degree course and her family.

She has been married to Mark for 13 years and has 2 boys

aged 9 and 7 who are always have some after-school

activity going on. In the small amount of spare time she

has, she watches YouTube videos about cooking.

For vacations, she tries to get away to the beach with her

family in the summer, and takes a food-centric long

weekend to a big city with fancy restaurants with her

friends from college in the spring.

Procurement Pamela

The bad news is that’s a really awful persona, but you’re not

alone in making them that way.

The good news is you can make personas that are better,

more meaningful, more useful and more effective.

But it’s gonna take more time. A lot more time.

Facebook Audience Insights

I know you’ve heard of Facebook.

But have you heard about Facebook Audience Insights?

It allows you to create custom audiences based on data you provide.

Primarily this tool is used for ad targeting, but we can use its functions to really

understand who your audience is and learn how to connect with them.

The first thing we need to do is create a custom audience.

Custom audiences can be created using data from:

• A spreadsheet file containing specific fields

• Customer activities on your web site

• Actions customers take in your app

• Engagement with your Facebook page

Since we’re uploading customer information from a

CRM export, choose Customer File…

…and then Choose a file or copy and paste data

Upload (or drag and drop)

your customer data file,

name it, agree to the

Facebook Custom

Audiences Terms and click

Next.

Next, make sure each field is mapped

to the correct data type, and choose

whether you want to include it in

Facebook’s matching algorithm.

This determines which fields

Facebook will try to match in its

userbase, anonymize and return the

results to you.

In this case we’re using 7 of the 15

possible fields.

Actual customer

data here.

Actual customer

data here.

Actual customer

data here.

Actual customer

data here.

Actual customer

data here.

And now we wait…

…and wait and wait and wait. Seriously it can take a few hours for all that lovely data to

get matched. But it’s worth it.

When the file is ready, you’ll see how many records were matched.

Now the fun part!

You can get insights for any audience – from :

• everyone on Facebook

• people connected to your page

• the custom audience you just created

Since we’re building a persona from your

customer data in a Custom Audience,

select that option.

In the Custom Audience box, select

the audience you just created.

If you’re only interested in female

millennial customers in Ohio, you

can filter your insights to help you

create personas based only on

the gender, age and location

demographics that reflect those

characteristics.

It may be necessary to create multiple personas for your

audience. You may want to segment by gender, age,

location, job type or other demographics.

But better yet, segment by the problem you solve for them.

How many personas should you develop?

As many as you need, but as few as you can afford based

on your goals.

But first!

Let’s take a minute to see what

kinds of data Facebook Insights

can show us.

Now you can see the age and

gender demographics of your

audience, along with how Facebook

characterizes their lifestyle.

The dark blue bar is your audience, the light blue/gray is all Facebook users.

Want to know what kinds of

jobs they hold, if they’re

married and how educated

they are?

Remember, you can compare

your audience to Facebook

as a whole.

These reports tell you which Facebook pages your audience likes…

…and this one tells you the cities and countries your audience calls

home, and the languages they speak.

If you want to see how your audience uses Facebook, and the devices they use,

this is where you’ll find it.

You can also see how affluent your audience is, and whether they rent or own their

home – and for homeowners you can find their home value.

As you can see here,

Facebook matched 92% of

the audience to find

household income data, but

the household size section

is empty.

If Facebook can’t match

enough individual data

points in a category to

anonymize the data, it won’t

be able to provide insights

for that category.

View how your audience spends its money…

…along with how their spending habits compare to the rest of Facebook.

Notice that this is based on a small matched sample of the audience, which reduces

how confident you can be that it’s a representative sample of your group as a whole.

These are the kinds of products your audience purchases.

And these are the kinds of cars they like.

Now you know what’s in Facebook Insights,

how do you turn your audience data into

personas you can write to or work with?

We have to take a quick diversion through…

The psychology of what and why we like

Physiological

Safety

Love/Belonging

Esteem

Self-actualization

Self-transcendence

In 1943, Abraham Maslow hypothesized that until fundamental needs are met, higher

needs cannot be met. For example, if your physiological needs for food and shelter

aren’t met, you probably don’t feel very safe.

Maslow stacked these needs into a hierarchy of five categories, and added a sixth,

self-transcendence, later.

Humans are motivated to move up through the stages of this hierarchy.

When you’re thinking about your personas, consider what it is about

each brand, trait and value, that contributes to these basic needs for

physiological health, safety of self, love and belonging to a family, a

person or a tribe, and recognition from peers and people your persona

looks up to.

Facebook users like brand pages because they identify with the brand in

some way.

Brand pages provide an important sense of belonging to a larger group,

and an implied approval of who we are. Individually, a single liked brand

may not tell us very much, but if we look for common qualities among

the pages a person likes, we can gain valuable insights from where the

data clusters emerge.

People like things they see as positive, that they want to feel they belong

to and with, so even if we see a brand as very negative, we need to look

for the positive qualities our audience sees.

How do you think people on the left and right of the political spectrum

might view Donald Trump?

• Bigot

• Misogynist

• Buffoon

• Anti-intellectual

• Narcissist

• Incompetent

• Patriot

• Businessman

• Straight-talker

• Successful

• Populist

• Decisive

It’s unlikely that someone would follow the president’s Facebook page

because they think he’s a bigot. It’s much more likely that they see the

president as straight-talker.

It’s all a matter of perspective, and if you’re going to get your personas

right, you need to see things through the eyes of your audience.

Which description is correct?

It doesn’t matter. You’re not looking for the truth, you’re looking for

perspective. Specifically, the perspective of your target audience.

• How do people who like this

page see themselves?

• How does this brand

positively contribute to this

consumer’s sense of self?

• Do multiple brands support

the same kinds of traits?

• What do those traits and

values tell us about the

consumer?

It all starts with Page Likes.

I value [brand] because [value statement]:

• It makes me feel _________

• It reminds me of _________

• They are ________

• It is ________

• It helps me ________

• Makes me think about __________

The adjectives you might use to answer

these questions could be:

• Cool

• Funny

• Intellectual

• Sporty

• Family

• …more on the next page.

Start with some simple traits that complete this statement:

For example: I like Entourage because it reminds me of my friends

the characters are cool

it is funny

Remember, this isn’t supposed to be what you think, it’s just the positive feelings a person

who likes this show might associate with it.

Courageous

Courteous

Creative

Cultured

Curious

Determined

Dynamic

Educated

Elegant

Emotional

Free-thinking

Friendly

Frugal

Fun-loving

Generous

Gentle

Genuine

Glamorous

Gracious

Hardworking

Healthy

Helpful

High-minded

High-spirited

Honest

Humble

Humorous

Idealistic

Imaginative

Independent

Individualistic

Innovative

Intelligent

Intuitive

Kind

Legacy

Leader

Logical

Loyal

Masculine

Maternal

Mellow

Modern

Mystical

Old-fashioned

Optimistic

Orderly

Organized

Outspoken

Passionate

Paternalistic

Patriotic

Peaceful

Perceptive

Playful

Practical

Purposeful

Questioning

Relaxed

Romantic

Rustic Sensitive

Sentimental

Serious

Sexy

Simple

Skeptical

Skillful

Sophisticated

Sporting

Strong

Stylish

Sweet

Tasteful

Tough

Vivacious

Well-read

Witty

There are a lot of words you could use. Here are 78 more.

Page/Brand Cool Intellectual Informed Capable Funny Aspirations Friends

Barack Obama Y Y Y Y

New York Times Y Y

Tasty Y Y Y

Adweek Y Y Y

Entourage Y Y Y Y

Mashable Y Y Y

Advertising Age Y Y Y Y

Total Brand 4 4 5 2 2 3 3

From this list we can say that this particular consumer likes

brands that evoke a sense of “cool,” that make him/her feel

“informed” and “intellectual.”

This exercise will help you identify where your audience has trait affinity and brand

affinity. Use as many brands as you feel are relevant to build picture of the feelings this

consumer likes to have stirred in him/her. Facebook will show you up to 100 pages your

audience likes, so it can be a time consuming process. But it’s worth doing.

Trait affinity: These are the values your audience identifies

with, seeks out and wants others to see in them. In the

table on the previous page “informed,” “intellectual” and

“cool” had the greatest trait affinity.

Brand affinity: These are the brands your audience

admires, enjoys, or aspires to. In the table, “Barack

Obama,” “Entourage” and “Advertising Age” had the most

brand affinity.

When you map the feelings and traits that resonate with

your audience, you can identify the characteristics they

most admire and identify with.

You can also identify the brands and people that inspire the

most affinity.

And now we need to ask: why does this person like this

page? What benefit does this brand bring to their life? Are

there groups or patterns to what this person likes, and has

an affinity for.

So who is this person?

He likes (has strong brand affinity for):

• Entourage – HBO

• ESPN

• Mad Men - AMC

• The Points Guy – Travel points website

• Sports Center – ESPN

• Game of Thrones – HBO

And a few other things that, if we’re being honest, are aimed at a male audience and are

male-centric, if not outright misogynistic.

Data for this persona was filtered to show only male audience members.

So we can safely say this persona is male.

HBO and ESPN are premium cable channels, so he likely earns

enough money to pay for those higher-end cable packages. Based

on the content of the HBO shows he likes, he’s just fine with TV that

pushes boundaries.

He likes sports, and that probably speaks to a competitive streak –

because just like sports, Entourage, Mad Men and Game of

Thrones are about being the alpha male.

He travels enough to think about travel points, so he probably

travels a lot for leisure or, more likely, work.

We’re already starting to get an idea of who he is. In fact, you might

be able to make some other inferences just from this data.

Based on his other page likes, he looks up to…

…stylish, risk-taking alpha males who aren’t afraid to break

the rules to get results.

…and identifies with brands like these…

How do we bring all this data together in a narrative so

marketing and creative departments can use them?

Your first persona – The Scoundrel.The Scoundrel likes his products and brands to be assertive, masculine and

unpretentious. He looks up to alpha-male type protagonists, especially those who take

risks and beat the odds.

He enjoys beer as an opportunity to re-connect with friends, and probably prefers

domestic out of the house, where drinking with their buddies is about how much they can

drink; and premium imports and craft brews at home, where exclusivity and good taste are

the qualities he wants to project. As the Scoundrel gets older and his earning potential

increases, his tastes get more expensive. Budweiser is replaced by bourbons; Men’s

Wearhouse makes way for tailored suits and shirts.

While family is important to the him, don’t expect emotional heart-to-hearts with friends. At

the gym, physical exercise is as much about cutting an imposing figure and being

competitive as it is about being healthy.

He sees his vices as acceptable when they’re shared with role models. Day drinking is

okay when Don Draper does it, being imposing is okay because James Bond and Jack

Bauer do it, and risks are acceptable because it’s better to die a heroic death like Leonidis

in 300. Rules are for other people; he feels more like Han Solo than Luke Skywalker, and

is always looking for an opportunity to get an edge over the competition.

How can we reach the Scoundrel?

Use messaging that appeals to their competitive nature,

adventure and risk-taking, his role models, friends, alcohol

and sports.

Assertive Winning CompetitivePowerful Influential Successful

Strong Hero ImpressiveActive Tough Commanding

Beat the odds Composed Ambitious

Affinity/trigger words to use:

As you proceed to make connections between traits and

brands, you’ll discover:

• How does this person consume information?

• What information does he consume?

• What values are important to him?

• What kind of image does he want to project?

• What are his motivations?

• What discourages him?

By building your personas in this way you’ll have a picture

of who your audience really is that’s broader, deeper and

more accurate than brainstorming in a conference room.