Audience Strategist

The Audience Strategist is the second of four in the Strategy phase. It turns your Goals output and Research findings into three buyer personas tied to your Key Results, and grounds each persona's reach in empirical Meta data. Communication and Media use the personas as their target definition.

What it does

The Audience output opens with a Personas Overview section that sizes the campaign's online addressable audience, then describes the three priority personas in detail.

The overview has two parts:

• Campaign Addressable Reach: a single reach figure covering all three personas combined across every market in the campaign, followed by a per-market table breaking reach down by persona alongside a Category Interest baseline. Reach numbers are lower-bound monthly active audiences sized using Meta's audience targeting catalogue.
• Cross-Persona Insights: a quadrant chart placing each persona on the two tensions that matter most for the campaign, with bubble size proportional to its reach. Three short implication bullets follow, calling out what the chart means for downstream Communication and Media work.

Below the overview, each priority persona has its own section with:

• Job-to-be-Done: an italicised quote in the persona's voice describing what the product does for them
• Profile: four to five bullets covering demographics, psychographics, and lived context, closed by a single KR Alignment bullet naming the primary KR (and any secondary)
• Purchase Triggers & Barriers: a two-column table with three rows, separating the moments that pull a persona in from the resistance that holds them back
• Decision Criteria & Influences: a two-column table with three rows, separating evaluation factors from the people and platforms shaping the decision

A short Strategic Considerations section closes the output with three campaign-relevant strategic notes that span personas and market factors.

Audience reach sizing

Reach numbers in the Personas Overview come from Meta's audience-sizing API. The strategist describes each persona as a set of interest, behaviour, and demographic signals from Meta's targeting catalogue, asks Meta for an audience-size estimate per persona in every prioritised market, and renders the lower-bound results in the per-market reach table.

This is a proxy for the online addressable audience size, not a buy constraint. Meta's numbers are a real-world scale signal that grounds the personas in something measurable; they don't dictate where to spend or what platforms to run on. The combined per-persona size also appears as a Size (Meta) column in the Executive Summary persona table, and the underlying segment definitions for every persona are listed as a citation entry at the bottom of the page so you can audit how Meta sized each one.

Two notes on what the numbers do and don't represent:

• Lower bounds, not absolute reach. Treat the figures as relative gauges between personas and markets, not as guaranteed impressions.
• Markets follow Research. The per-market rows mirror the Market Prioritisation table from the Research Category Analyst, including any cluster rows (e.g., Miami, Atlanta stays as one row).

Where to find it

Navigate to Strategy inside any brand or campaign (after Research completes). Audience is the second of four tabs. A full Strategy run takes around 8-10 minutes; the Audience Strategist takes roughly 3 minutes of that.

How it works

The strategists run sequentially. Goals runs first; Audience reads the Goals KR table, then the brand profile, campaign brief, the Category, Consumer, Culture, and Social Research outputs, and attached documents. It then queries Meta's audience-targeting catalogue and audience-sizing API to size each persona and the combined campaign audience across the markets the Category Analyst prioritised.

How this differs from the Research Consumer Analyst: The Consumer Analyst maps the audience landscape without reference to campaign goals. The Audience Strategist works from the opposite direction: starting from your KRs, it defines the three personas you need to reach them and sizes them empirically. Consumer Analyst output is one of its inputs.

What you can adjust

Campaign brief specificity: Named KPIs, price points, and audience descriptors sharpen persona backgrounds. Specifying target markets in the brief feeds directly into the reach sizing.

Document attachment: Attach documents from the Documents page before starting a Strategy run. Segmentation studies or CRM exports feed directly into persona backgrounds.

Refine: Use the Refine button after a run to submit feedback. Refining Audience re-runs only this strategist (Communication and Media may also re-run). Prior versions stay in history. See Refine.

Limits and considerations

• Persona count is fixed at three. For very narrow campaigns, the third persona may overlap the second. Review all three before briefing teams.
• KR names follow Goals output exactly. Imprecise Goals KRs produce imprecise persona KR alignment. Refine Goals first if the framing is off.
• Meta reach is a proxy, not a forecast. The numbers are lower-bound monthly active audiences from Meta's audience targeting catalogue. Treat them as relative scale signals, not as a campaign reach plan.
• A market may not size. If Meta can't resolve a city or region (small market, ambiguous name), the per-market table renders an em dash for that row instead of a number. The Campaign Addressable Reach commentary notes when this happens.
• Beta software. The persona framework is opinionated. Validate before briefing creative or media partners.