Free Social Media Brief and Customer Persona Template

Define your campaign goals and target audience, ready to share with a client or coworkers

Working in a globalized world means that social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach potential customers. But when it comes to social, planning is key to ensure that a campaign runs smoothly. Every touchpoint—the space where you interact with your audience—needs to work with every other, in an ecosystem that wins your brand the awareness, trust, and sales it deserves.

Digital strategist Ana Marín (@anamarinirl) specializes in finding opportunities, trends, and cultural insights by analyzing the technology that enables human connection. She has worked on a variety of content from infomercials to music videos, and is currently the digital integration and innovation vice president at McCann Worldgroup Mexico. She is “passionate about what can be achieved when we connect and cooperate; especially online.”

Below, she shares a set of templates to help you define the overall brief for a social media campaign, and the target customer who will respond positively to it.

The importance of a brief

Having a brief document—even if it’s only a page—will make managing a campaign from the top level so much easier, Ana says. Doing this early ensures that your project, campaign, or whole social media presence is clear and streamlined in one place.

At its core, a brief is about information management. You want to centralize details about your company, the market, key objectives, and specific plans for the project. But that’s not all: another key benefit of producing a brief is that it is shareable and communicable with clients and stakeholders.

Whether you’re designing your own social media presence or creating a big campaign for a client, it’s vital that everyone working on the project is on board with the whats, hows, and whos.

Components of a social media brief

In her course, Ana outlines all the parts that make up a brief for a social media project. When thinking about digital spaces, it’s important to understand that every post and interaction matters. It all exists within a dense web of touchpoints, which Ana calls an ecosystem. Whether the campaign is paid or organic, it needs to “feel” like your brand and foster a relationship with your audience.

A complete brief is made up of the following parts: the background, objectives, target audience, challenges, and parameters.

In the resource she breaks down what should go into the various stages, for example, the background explains the “why”: the context and reasoning for your project. When it comes to social, your brand and its beliefs are central to building trust with consumers. They want to feel a kinship with the brand, and feel proud to be connected with it. While the objectives are the measurable and relevant goals that you are aiming to achieve, for example “a fifty percent lift in website sales”. It’s essential that everyone involved knows all this top-level information.

Customer persona

Ana gives the example of a home furnishing company that wants to increase their client base, having opened just before the pandemic began. Their target audience is young professionals working from home, who need a better home working space. Before they can launch a campaign selling their products, they need to think carefully about who their audience actually is. Ana points out that through social media, you can target people far more specifically than with general factors like age and employment status. Instead, you can consider a diverse list of attributes, such as:

- aspirations
- daily routine
- social media habits
- pain points

And so on. Remember each customer is a unique individual, with a complex range of preferences and experiences. Using the Customer Persona part of the template, you can create these multifaceted customer profiles, and then consider exactly what they would want to hear from a social media campaign.

Download the Social Media Brief and Customer Persona Template

After clicking on the button below, you will find a PDF file in the Downloads folder on your computer titled Free Social Media Brief and Customer Persona Template by Ana Marin. Inside, you can learn more about Ana and her course, and get started with the templates for a brief and customer persona.

If you want to learn more, you can sign up for Ana’s course, Social Media Strategy: Design, Manage, and Launch Campaigns. You'll learn to create your own social media ecosystem and post content that drives sales. Or, explore Ana’s other course with Domestika, Introduction to Community Management, which introduces the fundamentals of fostering an active community online.

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