The best marketing and sales teams use data to fuel their strategies. Customer personas present that data in a way that makes it easy to apply in daily tasks like building content marketing campaigns or handling leads’ objections.
They’re an invaluable resource for businesses that want to better understand their market’s different types of customers. Using them can improve decision-making across marketing and sales, resulting in better performance and more customers.
We’ve put together a simple step-by-step guide to help you tackle the personal development process so you can reap the rewards of understanding your customers more comprehensively.
What is a customer persona?
A customer persona is a fictional representation of a target customer created using real data gathered through customer research. Customer personas improve your understanding of your customers so you can more successfully target them with marketing and sales strategies.
Depending on what information matters to your business, they can cover diverse customer details. At a minimum, they typically include:
Demographic information
Key interests
Behaviors
Psychographics
Challenges or pain points
Businesses often name customer personas in a way that’s easy to remember and refer to. A B2B fintech company might call one of its customer personas “John the CFO,” for example.
They’re also known as buyer personas, audience personas, marketing personas and user personas. However, despite their similar names, they differ from ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
A customer persona is a fictional archetype of a specific customer your business sells to. It covers what makes them suitable and includes information that helps you understand their broader motivations and interests.
An ICP, on the other hand, is a less personal high-level overview of your most valuable customer type. Primarily used by B2B companies, it outlines firmographic details like your ideal customer’s industry, size and revenue.
Why are customer personas important?
Customer personas help you learn more about the people you’re selling to. They make addressing specific needs in your marketing and sales activities easier, increasing your chances of converting leads into customers.
This is particularly important in competitive sectors. For example, using customer personas to inform your sales strategy can give your business an edge. It ensures that your approach to nurturing leads better addresses your target customer’s needs and preferences than the competition’s.
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There are countless potential benefits to creating and using customer personas. The key reasons why many companies use them include:
Deeper customer understanding. Learning more about your target audience’s demographics, behaviors and preferences makes it easier to design marketing strategies and sales approaches that generate and convert more leads.
Sales and marketing alignment. Customer personas work as a single “source of truth” that aligns marketing and sales. They provide a playbook for both teams to work from to ensure customers get a consistent experience throughout the funnel.
Product development insights. The deep research involved in creating customer personas can unveil insights that inspire new product development directions. That can boost product-market fit and have a long-term impact on sales.
Better personalized marketing. Customer personas are the foundation of a segmentation strategy, enabling personalized marketing strategies, which a McKinsey study found make 76% of customers more likely to consider a purchase.
These benefits highlight that the customer persona itself is not the only valuable element. Creating it is a great opportunity to learn more about your customers and their needs.
How to create a customer persona in 5 steps
Although customer personas are fictional, they rely on real data. Without it, you’ll create personas based on assumptions, which won’t be as useful for inspiring effective marketing or sales strategies.
Accordingly, creating customer personas starts with research designed to build a full picture of what your target market looks like. You can then use the data you collect to define the different personas that make up your overall market.
Following this five-step process will ensure that your customer personas are detailed, accurate and valuable.
1. Gather data
There are several potential sources of data for your customer personas. For basic information, like demographic details, you can turn to your CRM or website data platform like Google Analytics. However, you’ll need to carry out primary market research for detailed insights.
Surveys, questionnaires, focus groups and customer interviews are all effective ways of gathering information. Each of these research methods offers control over the specific data you collect and who you collect it from.
There are two main groups of people you can target in customer research:
Existing customers are an excellent data source because you already know they’re a good fit for your products or services. They’re also easy to reach since you have their contact details and an established relationship.
Sales prospects can offer valuable insights into their pain points and motivations, but not all leads will be a perfect fit for your target customer. It’s also more challenging to involve them in research without affecting the sales process.
If you already have customers, prioritize them as your research subjects. Just make sure to stress in your outreach that your questions are for research purposes and their answers will be kept confidential.
2. Decide what you want to include
Once your research group is assembled, you can decide what information to include in your personas.
Categories of data you can collect include:
Demographic information like age, gender and location
Professional information like education level, job title, company size and daily responsibilities
Personal information like values, interests, priorities and hobbies
Personal or professional goals and challenges faced in reaching them
Behaviors and personal networks, including how they carry out product research and what communication channels they use
Pain points specifically relating to the need your product or service meets
The type of data you want to collect will determine what questions you need to ask your survey or interview participants.
Here are some prompts that can help you put your own research questions together.
Don’t be afraid to mix questions that generate qualitative and quantitative data. You can use both types of data in your customer personas, and the combination will provide deeper insights than either type alone.
3. Identify customer segments
With the data collected, you can identify the different segments for which you want to create customer personas. The key is looking for commonly shared traits representing distinct customer groups.
This process depends on your specific target market and business objectives. However, some common approaches to segmentation might be suitable as the basis for personas.
Demographic data is a great basis for segmentation in many product-centric B2C markets. Broadly speaking, college-age male customers will have similar needs regarding kitchen products, for example.
Pain points are particularly useful for segmentation in B2B markets. For example, you might identify a common thread that many respondents struggle to manage customer data, which could be the foundation for a persona.
You can then cross-reference other data types to discover commonalities shared by the segments you’ve identified, like similar job titles or behaviors.
This information will round out your customer persona, providing a more detailed overview of what the customer type “looks like”.
When you’ve identified several customer segments representing valuable personas, prioritize them. Create an order from best to worst fit in alignment with your perception of your ideal customers. Referring to the criteria you use in your lead scoring model can help with this process.
At this point, you can also identify opportunities to create negative customer personas that define “poor-fit” customers. These are customer types that you don’t want to try to sell to. This might be because they fall outside of your target demographic, for example.
Creating negative customer personas helps your marketing and sales teams save time. Given a clear summary of who they shouldn’t target, they can avoid activities that would attract “negative customers”.
4. Define persona details
You can now move on to creating your personas. As you get started, the key considerations are what data you’ll include and how you’ll display it.
Begin with basic demographic or professional details to create a solid foundation for each persona. Depending on your business, this might center around age, job title or location.
Then, using the more advanced data your research generated, add as many layers of detail as you feel are relevant.
Your customer segments are unlikely to be perfectly distinct, so set a threshold for what constitutes a commonality you can use.
Perhaps only 80% of your research respondents who were salespeople said making more money was a key motivation, for example. As long as that’s above your threshold, you can still feel justified adding that data to your “Salesperson” persona.
Remember, you’re aiming to maximize the amount of real data included in your customer personas. Avoid taking liberties in the form of assumed details wherever possible.
You’ll also need to choose a format to display your personas. There are several good options to pick from, including:
Persona format | Best for |
Document | High-detail personas with lots of qualitative information |
Graphic | Low to medium-detail personas with illustrative imagery |
Slide deck | High-detail personas that cover lots of different information types |
Spreadsheet | Personas with lots of quantitative information |
Pick the format that works for your business needs. Remember that it will be used by diverse stakeholders, including marketing, sales and customer support teams, so it should be easy to access and understand.
5. Validate your customer personas
Finally, you can involve stakeholders from throughout your business to get feedback. This will help steer final revisions to your customer personas, ensuring they’re accurate and effective.
The most important people to get validation from are stakeholders who’ll use personas in their daily activities, such as marketing, sales and customer support teams.
However, it can also be helpful to involve other teams like the C-suite, who might have particularly unique customer insights.
Send completed personas to your chosen stakeholders and ask direct questions that will help you understand where improvements can be made, like:
Does this accurately represent the customer group from your perspective?
Are there any key details missing that you would like to see included?
Is the customer persona format clear and easy to understand?
The responses will help you identify where your personas fall short. Apply the feedback directly in edits, ensuring not to make changes that affect the accuracy of customer data.
After this process, you’ll have a set of completed customer personas that represent your key target customers. However, they won’t be accurate forever.
Over time, your business evolves, your customer base grows and your goals develop. Accordingly, your customer personas should be updated regularly to ensure they’re always accurate and relevant.
An annual review involving the same stakeholders will help you identify when your personas have fallen behind reality. You can then repeat this process to refresh them.
Customer persona template
A customer persona template offers a great jumping-off point for creating your own personas. You can use a template as it is or adapt it to suit your specific persona development needs by adding or removing sections or individual data points.
We’ve put together a customer persona template that you can use as the foundation for your own personas. Download and edit our free template for a visual quick-reference guide.
Better understand your customers with our Buyer Persona Templates
Alternatively, you can copy the table below into a document to create a simple customer persona.
Name | A fictional name that makes the customer persona immediately recognizable |
Statement | A statement that summarizes the persona’s basic details and pain points |
Demographic information | Age Gender Marital status Income Location |
Professional information | Job title Education level Professional traits |
Personal information | Key values Interests Priorities |
Goals | What are they trying to achieve? What challenges do they have to overcome? |
Behaviors | Where do they find information? What social media networks do they use? What brands are they loyal to? What are their communication preferences? |
Pain points | What obstacles do they face relating to the need your product/service solves? |
Customer persona examples
Our customer persona template is adaptable to diverse use cases. You can edit it to suit your B2B or B2C business, regardless of what you sell or who your customers are.
The two buyer persona examples below show how our template can look once it’s been tailored to suit a specific business. Use them as a guide, but remember that you’re free to make changes or additions.
B2B customer persona example
This customer persona imagines a B2B customer who might be a target for a CRM company like Pipedrive.
Name | Sam the Sales Manager |
Statement | Improving sales revenue is challenging with my current resources, but I’m under pressure to surpass quotas. |
Demographic information | Age: 35-45 years old Gender: Male or female |
Professional information | Job title: Sales Manager Education level: College Professional traits: Data-oriented, high attention to detail, CRM power-user. |
Goals | What are they trying to achieve? Increasing sales quotas while keeping reps motivated. What challenges do they have to overcome? Limited sales team resources that make it difficult to increase total deals won. |
Behaviors | Where do they find information? Industry blogs, high-profile industry influencers. What social media networks do they use? LinkedIn. What brands are they loyal to? Nike, Mizuno. What are their communication preferences? Email, phone, LinkedIn. |
Pain points | What obstacles do they face regarding the need your product/service meets? Their current CRM doesn’t offer enough effective automation tools to free up their sales reps’ time. |
B2C customer persona example
This customer persona imagines a B2C customer who might be a target for a domestic productivity retailer.
Name | Kate the Teacher |
Statement | My top priority is ensuring my children are healthy and happy, but I’m also trying to progress further in my teaching career. |
Demographic information | Age: 30-40 years old Gender: Female Marital status: Married Household income: $120,000 Location: California |
Professional information | Job title: Teacher Education level: College |
Personal information | Key values: Hard-working, family-oriented Interests: Crafts, hiking, cooking |
Goals | What are they trying to achieve? Maintaining their family’s health and well-being while delivering outstanding education to their students. What challenges do they have to overcome? Balancing their home responsibilities with a stressful, taxing job. |
Behaviors | Where do they find information? Social media, news websites. What social media networks do they use? Facebook, Instagram. What brands are they loyal to? Solomon, Le Creuset. What are their communication preferences? Phone, text. |
How to use customer personas to improve customer experience
You’ll learn a lot during the process of creating customer personas, but their real value comes when they’re finalized. They can then be used as a critical source of information and inspiration by both marketing and sales teams.
Here are our top suggestions for using your customer personas to the fullest and improving customer experience to generate more conversions.
In marketing
Marketing teams must understand who they’re targeting to effectively generate and capture demand. Customer personas provide the information they need to build strategies tailored to suit target customers’ needs, preferences and behaviors.
This has lots of potential implications, including in the following areas of marketing:
Content creation. Information about your target customers’ interests, challenges and pain points can inspire content marketing approaches. Content strategies built around this information will be more likely to resonate and generate leads.
Campaign targeting. The detailed demographic information included in personas enables marketing team members to distribute campaigns more effectively. Most importantly, they’ll know what channels to use to maximize visibility with your target market.
Messaging approaches. Personas can inform the tone, language choices and key topics marketers use to create messaging that appeals to different audience segments. For example, this helps boost the impact of marketing messages used in emails and social campaigns.
Marketing teams can also be a valuable source of information for helping you refine your personas.
They might notice particularly low success rates when their marketing efforts target one specific customer segment outlined by a persona, for instance. This could indicate that the personal details need to be tweaked or that the segment isn’t as good a customer fit as you thought.
In sales
Sales teams perform best when they can apply a strong understanding of their leads’ pain points and preferences in the nurturing process. They can use customer personas alongside CRM data to build this understanding and create more relevant personalized experiences for leads throughout the funnel.
Here are some of the key areas of the sales process where customer personas can make a difference in performance:
Lead qualification. Personas help sales teams identify leads that suit the core target customer types. This enables them to qualify, score and prioritize leads more effectively, boosting sales efficiency.
Sales messaging. Sales teams can use the information in personas to improve their nurturing emails, product decks and other sales messaging. Tailoring these critical points of contact in the customer journey to address specific personas’ motivations can increase engagement and conversion rates.
Objection handling. Studying customer personas allows salespeople to proactively anticipate and address common sales objections. This can increase their success rate as they work on converting leads who are close to making a purchasing decision.
Sales teams are also uniquely positioned to feed back on potential additions or revisions to customer personas.
Suppose 90% of prospective customers who fit the “CFO” persona show interest in a product demonstration. In that case, that preference can be added to the persona, helping future sales efforts and providing more details about how best to nurture relevant leads in a way that suits their preferences.
Final thoughts
You might see them as leads or opportunities, but your target market is made up of real people. Customer personas help you understand who they are, what they like, what they struggle with and what motivates them.
Applying this information throughout the marketing and sales functions has broad implications. You can tailor your approach to suit specific needs and preferences, delivering a much more effective and cohesive customer experience.
Use the step-by-step guide, free template and examples above as a framework to build your own customer personas. They’ll help you target your ideal customers more effectively than ever.
