How to Create Buyer Personas for International Social Media Campaigns

1. Five questions that will help you kick-off your buyer personas
2. A fictitious campaign for a better understanding of buyer personas: Gunsmoke
3. How you analyze your campaign markets and derive strategies from them
4. How you create your "digital mannequins"
5. How to apply the Gunsmoke example to your own company
6. 6 Tips for creating buyer personas
7. How Social Media Management Tools such as Facelift Cloud can simplify the management of international campaigns 

As with all marketing measures, defining a target audience requires carefully crafted buyer personas and the archetyping of characters. This is just as important for social media campaigns at an international level as it is for national campaigns. With each new region to which one wants to expand one's social media marketing, new character types may have to be created to reflect the demographics and societies of international target markets. Brian Powers from Facelift explains in his guest article using a fictional example, what you should pay attention to.

Five questions that will help you kick-off your buyer personas

Now back to the start: The first questions that you as a team must ask are identical regardless of the type of campaign and quite simple.

• Who are these people anyway?
• What problem(s) does the product or service solve for the customers?
• When is the best time to reach them?
• Where in the world are the customers or social media followers?
• Why would fictional customers decide to purchase?
• How different are your new international followers from your existing audience?

Depending on the social media platform, these questions can be answered in different ways.

Further aspects to consider when defining a persona are based on solid, individual market research. This includes aspects from culture, psychology and economics. Other elements include language and political climate.

That's the basics up front. To dive a little deeper, we have developed a fictional campaign to introduce you to the creation of buyer personas. Let us introduce: The fictional, revolutionary company Gunsmoke.

A fictitious campaign for a better understanding of buyer personas: Gunsmoke

A start-up named Gunsmoke AG based in Bonn produces cosmetics and body care products for men. The company has already achieved great success in the DACH region and other regions in Northern Europe in recent years. The success of the company can in part be attributed to a new attitude towards self-care and grooming routines among men. This progressive cultural phenomenon is driven not least by influencers on social media and a paradigm shift in online behavior of society.

Due to its growth, the company plans to set foot in some foreign markets, initially relying on an awareness campaign. This campaign is intended to test the social climate in these markets on a psychological and cultural basis and does not represent a direct sales promotion measure. On successful awareness campaigns, an offer of products for which there is a corresponding demand is then to follow. The company's aim is to sensitize men more to the topic of self-care and to convey a message that aims to defuse the so-called "toxic masculinity", without itself resorting to an aggressive brand presence to a certain extent.

The markets selected for these campaigns are North America, India and South Korea. The company is also aware that it must maintain or even significantly intensify its strong presence in Central and Northern Europe.

How you analyze your campaign markets and derive strategies from them

For the creation of the buyer personas, we first look at the different regions. We have decided to divide the markets into DACH, South Asia, East Asia and North America.

The DACH region

The DACH team of Gunsmoke is responsible for maintaining the company's already successful and growing social media pages. For this, German-language content is created and products for direct lead generation continue to be advertised.

This team has already achieved solid market penetration and its primary task is to maintain and maximize the company's success in Europe in the face of the uncertainties of global expansion.

As the original social media team, this group is also responsible for the management and monitoring of all campaigns and the progress of the international teams. They provide guidance if needed and ensure the maintenance of communication throughout the entire project.

South Asia

The primary target audience for this team is the predominantly English-speaking Sikh population in Punjab, North India. The PR agency recommends focusing on tradition and, to a more moderate extent, a conservative millennial target group with a very specific need shaped by culture.

The team pursues a marketing strategy that respects cultural heritage and sense of tradition and relies mainly on regional influencers in Punjabi to disseminate the message.

Despite expected success in Korea and India, the planners of the social media campaigns in South and East Asia decided against creating entirely new pages, but instead focused on geotargeting and localized content via their existing page.

East Asia

Long trends and strong emphasis on modern folk culture have led to heteronormative beauty routines among men receiving less attention than in many other countries. Accordingly, South Korea is considered a promising market for make-up and skin and hair care products, especially in cosmopolitan Seoul.

Their advertising on Instagram and Facebook is more subtle and neutral in language and visualization than in Europe or North America.

However, the team faces issues in localizing in the Korean market. While the German marketing team has no issues working with the existing target audience and the English campaigns for India and North America present little difficulty due to their native German speakers, the challenge lies in the Korean language. In the creation of content, Gunsmoke is largely dependent on translators from an external agency. This increases costs and time investment for the team, and external coordination also becomes more difficult.

North America

Canada and the United States are among the most important markets for Gunsmoke due to their economic status, intensive social media use and progressive societal approach to gender equality.

However, there is still a lot to be done, and selling make-up to men remains a challenge. To take full advantage of this opportunity, the social media team decides to set up completely new social media pages specifically for this market under the name "Gunsmoke America" ​​on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok - a platform they have so far completely neglected.  The team expects that its character models will more easily identify with a brand that is more locally oriented.

These new pages were created to handle the likely enormous increase in interaction resulting from the dimension of the potential market and growing consumer behavior. They also focus exclusively on English-speaking content and rely on a mysterious, "traditionally" masculine branding based on dark colors and clear lines, but unlike some competitors, they avoid aggressive product names that sound like action movie titles.

However, the social media team is also aware that it is walking a fine line between appearing traditionally masculine and supporting the societal change it aims to promote.

Social media is about building relationships with people. But as people are so different and so complex, building these relationships is extremely difficult. But this challenge also offers the greatest opportunities for your social media strategy.

Now that we have analyzed the various markets and derived initial strategic approaches for Gunsmoke, we now come to the creation of buyer personas.

How you create your "digital mannequins"

To identify the target audience in the selected regions, the company's marketing team creates a series of characters that are supposed to represent the buyer demographics.

Let's get to know them:

Jonas - Munich, Germany, 31, finance advisor with a master's degree. Speaks German and English. Longtime fan of Gunsmoke products. Mainly interested in skin toner, eyeliner and moisturiser. In this scenario, Jonas represents the company's existing, loyal customer base and social media followers. He spends most of his social media time on Instagram.

Bahadar Singh - Chandigarh, Punjab, India. Bahadar is 28 years old, scriptwriter for video games and a devout Sikh. He speaks Punjabi, English and Hindi. He is mainly interested in Gunsmoke's multi-award-winning hair and beard care products. He is particularly active on Facebook and Twitter.

Hyun-woo - Seoul, South Korea, 21. Speaks Korean. Hyun-woo studies business administration at university. He wants to keep up with the popular Korean beauty trends among men and uses concealer and subtly tinted lip balm on a daily basis. His preferred social media channels are Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Karen - Vancouver, Canada, 27. Speaks English. Karen is not the end consumer, but is looking for a gift for her boyfriend who doesn't currently use beauty products and is still hesitant about the gender equality theme in regards to cosmetics. She is looking for a aggressively masculine sounding brand in the hopes of convincing him despite his reservations. She is highly active on Snapchat, Pinterest and Instagram.

Karen is a less common target persona, but all the more important, as her attitudes and views have a huge impact on whether her boyfriend himself becomes a loyal customer or not. Therefore, it is absolutely justified to include her as a lead.

By creating these buyer personas, Gunsmoke's digital marketing team has recognised that it is important to focus the regional awareness campaigns each on the differing product requirements and cultural perceptions. For this reason, some new employees are hired, a PR market research agency is brought on board and a list of freelance translators is created to support content localization.

Then the areas of responsibility and the employees' skills are divided depending on the requirements of the region in which the team wants to be active.

Buyer personas are generally created using various research approaches, including analysis of the company's existing social media followers. This is usually quite simple, as the team can easily access reports and data and the content simply needs to be tailored to this existing group.

How to apply the Gunsmoke example to your own company

Gunsmoke is a greatly simplified example of creating international buyer personas.

Some companies only need to create buyer personas for a single new regional campaign, e.g., for Punjab. Others, however, need to work with a variety of regions and therefore personas, e.g. for entire continents like North America.

In some cases, it is advisable to create multiple personas, even within a single region. In this way, a marketing team can get a more detailed picture of its potential customers. For example, different cities within a market may require special treatment. A North American team might use different marketing tactics in Boston than in San Diego, as it needs different buyers due to cultural factors, demographic characteristics and even identity political considerations. Companies with different products targeting men, women, older buyers, younger buyers, etc., need a separate persona for each category.

Regardless of how many characters are created, the rules still apply. First, identify your buyers! In the case of our hypothetical company, the process was relatively simple and straightforward, but normally much more time, effort and detail are required.

6 Tips for creating buyer personas

These tips can help you create buyer personas:

1. Assign your teams and responsibilities clearly. Depending on the size and scope of your organisation, this can involve communication between multiple sites.

2. Carry out diligent research about your target groups. This is one of the most important phases. A cultural misstep can have catastrophic consequences, trigger scandals and completely backfire. However, these consequences can be completely avoided with a little care.

3. Double-check or triple-check localization efforts like language or design, ideally with a native speaker of the target language.

4. Keep personas up to date. As with any digital marketing, these things can change over time as new information and feedback come in. The community managers are responsible for staying up-to-date.

5. Keep detailed success reports of every step of the process.

6. Don't be afraid to make changes if needed.

In social media, it's mainly about connecting with people, something almost every organisation or company has in common with yours. Since people are so different and complex, building these connections poses a real challenge. However, the more variations you add to the mix, the more extensive the process becomes. But it's a challenge and effort that pays off.

How Social Media Management Tools such as Facelift Cloud can simplify the management of international campaigns 

Thanks to the audience and geotargeting features, it is possible to send specific content to specific individuals based on language, country and other demographic information. Easily customizable "drag-and-drop" report features can be configured to only take into account the data required for a team. This makes segmentation easier for international teams or campaigns. Complete social media solutions like Facelift for example, are ideal for large social media teams that want to manage their international social media campaigns effectively, coordinate better and provide top-notch customer service.

Buyer personas form the basis for your new social media campaigns and help create a framework around which you can produce content and interact with your communities. But they are really just the first step on the path to social media success. Facelift can help facilitate this success in social networks by providing many of the tools required for the proper creation and maintenance of international social media campaigns across different teams, in a holistic way.