How Life Sciences Brands Can Enhance Social Media With Personas

Life sciences brands face unique communication challenges. In a complex, highly regulated, and rapidly evolving industry, your messaging must be as precisely engineered as your products.

As we discussed in our previous post, social media can be a powerful tool for driving brand awareness and engagement, but a scattershot strategy will likely lead to scattershot results. One way to focus and refine your social media messaging is to develop customer personas that give dimension to your key demographics.

In this post, we’ll explain what personas are and how they work, provide a few examples, and share some tips that you can put into action.

What Are Personas?

Most marketers have a solid understanding of market segmentation based on customer data and competitive research. A persona is a semi-fictional representation of a specific market segment or group of stakeholders, embodying its essential traits, behaviors, pain points, and goals.

By transforming a collection of discrete data points into a relatable personality with a name and face, it’s more intuitive to craft digital content that informs, engages, and converts. Whether your business model is B2C, B2B, or a mix of both, buying decisions are ultimately made by human beings, so it makes sense to start building your content marketing strategy on a human level.

3 Examples

Let’s say you manage marketing for Synaprog, Inc., a micro-cap biotech company delivering innovative solutions for neurological diagnostics and treatment. After careful analysis of your customer base and broader industry trends, here are three personas you might develop:

1. Ramona (the Researcher)
Ramona, age 42, is a noted researcher specializing in neurodegenerative diseases. She directs a lab at a large state university in the Midwest and constantly seeks cutting-edge diagnostic tools to help her push the boundaries of understanding in her field. Ramona’s research activities depend on highly competitive grant funding with extensive reporting requirements that cut into her time in the lab and classroom, so price and convenience are also significant considerations.

2. Peter (the Patient)
Peter, age 68, is a retired social worker in the Pacific Northwest. He was recently diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that has put a damper on some of his favorite leisure activities, like hiking and biking. He has taken a proactive approach to his health, consulting multiple specialists and staying informed about all the latest research breakthroughs and experimental treatments. Peter is especially motivated by success stories about people who share his diagnosis.

3. Ivan (the Investor)
Ivan, age 53, is a venture capitalist focusing on the biotech sector. He is looking to invest in companies that have proven their viability and want to grow within their niche. With a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and an MBA, he is scientifically literate, but he is equally interested in firms’ stock prices, partnerships, patents, and other indicators of financial health. Ivan is sure to see product launches through a market lens.

5 Tips

While Ramona, Peter, and Ivan are each vital to Synaprog’s success, it’s clear that their needs and aspirations are very different. So, how can you ensure your social media strategy resonates with all these key personas? Read on for some actionable advice:

1. Consider the Platform: As a digitally savvy retiree, Peter favors Facebook, while Ivan is most active on LinkedIn, and Ramona networks with neuroscience communities on Subreddit. While there’s considerable overlap, each social media platform has a distinctive user profile, and a fleshed-out persona should discuss typical browsing habits.
2. Vary Your Post Types: Ramona is most likely to engage with concise text posts or mobile-friendly infographics that link out to scholarly articles for further investigation. Meanwhile, Peter is always ready to dive into long-form storytelling and in-depth news items. With a diverse array of media types and formats, you can reach different kinds of people at different inflection points.
3. Cross-Promote With Purpose: Consider personas as you develop partnerships with suppliers, research institutions, trade associations, and other entities. Whether it’s resharing an Instagram post or co-hosting a professionally produced vodcast on YouTube featuring experts in your field, strategic collaborations can have multiplicative power.
4. Have One-on-One Conversations: Interacting with users one-on-one is a crucial component of a humanized social media strategy. Replying to comments and questions in a prompt and friendly manner is a great place to start. Leveraging user-generated content – with proper permission – can be a highly effective way of conveying social proof to prospects with similar objectives.
5. Analyze and Iterate: Developing personas isn’t a one-and-done initiative. Your understanding of your ideal audiences can evolve, as can the audiences themselves. Use advanced analytics tools to track how well you’re reaching each persona and continuously tweak your messaging across all platforms.

Ready to take your social media strategy to the next level? The specialists at LIGHTSTREAM are here to help you make it happen. Reach out today.