Consumer Personas

Tips for crafting consumer personas from Elliot Roazen, a growth marketer at Unilever. 👥

The problem with crafting consumer personas is that most new brands stop there. 

But defining demographics and psychographics is only the first step.

Successful brands take consumer personas and turn them into a list of sources + quantify the pool of potential consumers. Elliot calls this an audience list.

Audience lists help you understand how many people potentially belong to your consumer segment(s) and where to find them, and by extension where you can run tests to attract them.

🤯 You can build an audience list template in just a few minutes with a spreadsheet:

Column 1: Name of the website/community/group.

Column 2: Number of people belonging to the website/community/group.

Column 3: URL linking to the website/community/group.

Once set up, your goal should be to populate the audience list template for your consumer segment(s). 

Elliot usually aims for at least one million potential consumers per audience list; you can definitely go over 1M but you don't want to be too far below it.

✅ Here are a few places for finding these people:

• Members in Facebook Groups
• Subreddits related to your product/category
• Twitter followings
• Instagram accounts
• Discord communities
• LinkedIn groups
• Newsletters and blog subscribers

Let's take Grailed as an example. Grailed is a p2p marketplace for reselling men's clothing.

Grailed's target consumer segment, which we will call the Fashionable Male Millennial, can be defined by the following attributes: 👇

• Male, 25 to 35 y/o
• Single, no kids
• Lives in large cities
• Affluent, working in media/finance/consulting
• Likes brands like Venmo, Apple, Nike, Commes des Garcons, Cash App, Robin Hood, Spotify
• Interested in fashion, pop culture, rap music, fitness

Where do Fashionable Male Millennials hangout? For starters, they might be a part of the Subreddit r/streetwear, which has 2.7 million members. Let’s say that 80% of them are male – that's 2,160,00 people we can add to our audience list.

Now keep doing this until you have a snapshot of all the groups of Fashionable Male Millennials online, linked and quantified.

Why is having an audience list important? 

It comes down to two things: ✌️

1. You now have a cheat sheet for finding and studying your target consumer profile(s).
2. You can use this list as a springboard for developing growth experiments targeted towards your ideal consumer profile.

Thanks for the insights Elliot! 👋

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