I started building Stash’s first social media playbook during my first month on the brand team. Before deciding on content pillars and the specific focus for each channel, I needed to better understand who Stash was talking to—or hoping to talk to.

First, I partnered with the business operations team to identify meaningful trends among Stash’s existing customers (using a Looker database that could be filtered by financial habits and demographic identifiers from >1M data points). They looked for correlations in investment behavior and product usage depending on users’ age, gender, risk tolerance, political affiliation, family size, occupation, location, etc.

From there, social listening helped add more nuance to my initial profiles. At the time, Twitter’s API allowed for analysis of Stash’s own followers based on keywords in their bios, which often included their interests, job titles, or motivators. I also referred to pain points from customer surveys, feedback from the product marketing team, comments on owned and competitor social media posts, and industry research to refine my understanding of who was downloading Stash.

Ultimately, I divided the target market into four personas that serve as examples of Stash’s typical customers. Take Anika (the Fresh Grad): she was inspired by real conversations with prospects, in-app savings goals created by customers aged 20–29, App Store reviews, and more (including my own experiences learning to adult). Her persona reflects the very real differences between many young, urban 20-somethings and their parents: they have less disposable income, place a bigger emphasis on experiences vs. things, and display greater trust towards digital apps and services.