Discovering
The Audience
Creating audience personas has helped me refine my copywriting when understanding a client's brand voice. Managing different accounts requires me to quickly gauge how to keep the performance consistent without creating major changes to the established branding. I will break down my process by going over my research for The Mattress Hub (TMH), an account I managed while I worked for Hexcode Marketing.
Preliminary research phase goes a long way to determine how to attract the right audience.
01 - Page Evaluation
Can I find what I need, where I need it?
The caption should inform potential customers about your business.
1.) What is the point of this page?
2.) Where is your business located?
3.) Specifically, what is your business offering through this page?
Social media is often the first time people engage with your brand. Links navigate people to important resources related to your services and drive website traffic.
On Instagram, business pages can see a range of success, often at the lower end, with only a few likes. This tells me that there is a lot of room to engage more of the 4,694 followers to be active enjoyers.
Comparatively, at the time of this analysis, this post received ten likes, better than the average posts that received 2 likes. Drawing more inspiration from popular media helps TMH remain more relevant to audiences.
Reviewing analytics helps understand how audiences from different platforms respond to the same content. The sleep accessory post, asking audiences about their favorite in-store-branded scents, yielded better results on Facebook than on Instagram. The Facebook post gained fourteen likes with 17 comments, while the Instagram post gained one like and zero comments. This allowed me to understand that Facebook is a better source of active listening to know what products customers like and could potentially want.
02 - Company positioning
Let's talk about competitors, but also what industry we were working in. What are we creating awareness about
TMH focuses on the retail of home furniture, primarily of mattresses, to individual customers. Centered around the customer experience in a saturated market.
The social media strategy is centered around sleep facts, showing a comfortable and helpful environment, along with competitive pricing.
03 - Establishing the audience
"So why aren't the posts performing well?"
That's a question I often ask myself, and the main point of creating personas is to have a tool to reinforce the people I am trying to communicate with. I used base-level social media search and company services to create a baseline of what The Mattress Hub's potential clients could look like.
Scrolling through the list of followers to learn more about their regular habits in relation to the company's product offerings. Under posts, I saw patterns of followers who came back to like new posts, helping me to see what they enjoyed engaging with.
Based on the information I was able to gather and supported by my team at Hexcode, we understood that our target demographic was middle-aged adults between the ages of 30 and 70, with teenage to adult children looking to obtain quality sleep with a mattress that offered a high level of quality. Getting proper rest to be active with the family and reduce aching pain and health concerns like sleep apnea was important.
We named the personas Chris and Jessica Beasley: adults in their late 40's living on the east side of Wichita. They have a dog and teenage children in high school. Their family car is a Lincoln Navigator, and they share a family membership at the local YMCA.
The Couple is looking to address Chris's sleep apnea and hyperhidrosis.
