Before you scale your brand, before you even figure out your voice, you need to know who you’re talking to. Who is this for? What do they care about? What do they need help with? What are they worried about? What motivates them to click and what stops them from buying?
Understanding this changes everything. It makes your content more focused, your messaging more effective, and your results way more consistent. It also sets you up to build an omni-channel strategy that actually works, because you’re optimizing for real people on real platforms, not some generic version of your audience.
This may sound counterintuitive, but we don’t start here. Before building personas, we start by posting. Testing. Watching. We let the content tell us who’s watching and who’s responding. Because no matter how smart your assumptions are, data always beats guesswork.
When we launched Monark Wild Rice, we didn’t assume we knew who would resonate with the product, we let the platforms show us.
On TikTok, our viewers turned out to be 77% female, heavily engaging with food content and creators like Taco Bell and viral recipe accounts. That told us we weren’t just reaching health-conscious shoppers, we were reaching people who love to watch food as entertainment.
On Instagram, our audience was 81% women, mostly aged 35 to 44, followed by 25 to 34 and 45 to 54. Most were based in Canada, with a growing U.S. segment. This data gave us clarity: Instagram was where our core community lived. These were the people interested in the product, the story, and the brand.
Facebook is still small for us, but the people commenting tend to be local community members, people already familiar with wild rice or interested in supporting something rooted in place.
All of this gives us a demographic map a snapshot of gender, age, and location. But that’s only the surface.
Demographics tell you who is watching. Psychographics tell you why. This is where we start to explore values, motivators, fears, habits, and purchase drivers. Are they trying to eat healthier? Looking for easy recipes? Managing health issues like inflammation or blood sugar? These insights usually come from conversations. DMs. Comments. Questions. Customer stories. Psychographic data isn’t always neat, but it’s powerful. Because once you understand the why behind the behavior, you can create content that feels personal, relevant, and irresistible. For example: someone in their 30s might buy wild rice for its fiber content and complex carbs. Someone in their 50s might buy it to manage blood sugar or heart health. Someone in their 20s might be buying because they saw a viral wild rice recipe on TikTok. Same product, three different reasons and three completely different content approaches.
Once we’ve gathered both demographic and psychographic data, we build out personas. These aren’t real people, but they’re based on real behaviors, patterns, and motivations. And once you have them, everything becomes easier. For Monark Wild Rice, one of our personas is a 39-year-old mom in Toronto who’s trying to cook healthier family meals. Another is a 27-year-old guy in Vancouver trying to hit his macros while keeping his pantry stocked with real food. Another is a 56-year-old auntie in Winnipeg who’s deeply invested in buying local and supporting a Canadian product. These characters help us shape our content pillars. They guide our tone, visuals, captions, and call-to-actions. And when a post doesn’t land, we don’t panic. We just ask: Which persona was this for? And did it speak to what they actually care about?
We don’t talk about this part of the process enough. But this is why our strategies work. We’re not chasing trends. We’re listening. Testing. Paying attention. And then we’re making decisions based on data that actually reflects the people we’re trying to reach. Because your audience is on social media. They just might be on different platforms. And if your message isn’t landing, it might not be what you’re saying, it might just be who you think you’re talking to. Stay tuned for the next post in this series, where we’ll show you how we turn these personas into content pillars and how that maps across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more.
Want us to audit your brand’s personas or help you build your content map? Book a free discovery call. We’re always up for turning chaos into clarity.
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