If you work in marketing, there’s a high chance you’ve heard of buyer personas. You’ve probably even created one yourself. After all, 77% of marketers report having created a buyer persona at some point in their careers.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional personification of your ideal customer that helps you refine your marketing approach and offerings to drive more conversions. It clarifies who your target audience is and how you can solve their pain points, help them accomplish their goals, and make them long-term customers.

Why are buyer personas so important?

Most businesses start because their founders have discovered a problem they can solve for others. If you already know vaguely which types of people your product will help, why do buyer personas matter?

The answer is in the word “vaguely.”

It’s easy to assume what your audience wants when you don’t have a clear idea. Take chatbots for example. While so many websites have a chatbot, surveys show that only 10% of B2B buyers will engage with a chatbot even when the message is relevant.

Marketers use buyer personas to get specific about their audience’s needs and even adjust their brand voice to fit their audience. With buyer personas, marketers can accurately understand many things about their customers, including the following:

• Pain points
• Motivations
• Priorities
• Language (the words they use to describe their pain points or work)
• Influences and trusted sources
• Preferred marketing channels
• Buying process and the way they make purchasing decisions

With such a well-rounded look at their audience, it becomes easier to tailor marketing to them, employ successful campaigns, and retain customers who have become company advocates.

Are there different types of buyer personas?

Contrary to popular expectation, there are no widely accepted types of buyer personas.

Buyer personas vary from industry to industry and are often unique to individual businesses. However, there are different types of customers, and it is possible to categorize your customer personas based on certain criteria.

For example, some people group personas based on decision-making capacity in organizations. Some products may be best marketed to more junior employees while others are aimed toward company decision makers. With such categorization styles, your target audience may fall under a specific section based on their ability to make decisions.

You may also find some classifications based on the buying process and general customer journey behavior. For example, while some buyers may move predictably through the content marketing funnel, others may be more spontaneous and quick to commit—and still, others may be more objective or analytical, taking time through the sales process.

Technically, every buyer persona is a mix of different types, so it may not be the most effective or resource-efficient process to focus on a specific type of persona. We recommend focusing on the process of building your buyer persona.

How to create buyer personas: A step-by-step guide

Creating a buyer persona is no small task. It takes time and a willingness to dig into some real research. If you don’t have the resources to do this within your company, it’s worth outsourcing to an expert who can help you. Here’s our four-step process for creating spot-on buyer personas.

1. Interview your customers

This step is essential to creating buyer personas that actually work. The best way to interview customers is to run persona interviews—preferably over voice calls (this could be on the phone or using a videoconferencing tool). We’ll dive deeper into what you should discuss on these calls, but the goal is to learn more about your customers.

Not sure which customers to interview? Talk to those who are fans of your product. Find out what problems you’ve solved for them and which features have made them stick around. Also ask what other related challenges they’re having and how you can make the product better for them.

If you’re a new company with very few (or no) early adopters, this step can feel intimidating. But it’s not impossible!

In this case you’ll want to reach out to potential customers—people you think your product could help—and interview them about their current pain points. When you contact potential interviewees, whether they are customers or not, keep in mind the following courtesies:

• Be clear about your needs and the time commitment. Make sure they know you’re not selling them anything, you just want their help.
• Offer them an incentive such as a month of trying out your product in exchange for feedback, or if that’s not a strong enough incentive, a gift card or donation to a charity of their choice.
• Leave the ball in their court by letting them schedule the meeting at their convenience. Just be sure to follow up.

Remember, interviews don’t have to be full of glowing reviews to be successful. The best interviews provide insight—positive or not—about how your product fits into your customers’ lives and roles. Sometimes the interviews may even reveal that your ideal customer is not so ideal after all.

To get the most out of your interviews, you can ask permission to record the conversation so you can focus on listening instead of scribbling notes throughout.

2. Do audience research

Audience research elevates your buyer persona because it reveals more about your target audience than their opinions about your product. It shows you what relevant content your customer base likes to consume, whom they follow on social media, and which topics they’re constantly thinking about.

Performing audience research doesn’t have to be complicated. Two great ways to do it are by using audience research tools and running surveys.

Audience research tools

Audience research tools like SparkToro give you information on your audience’s influencers, the websites they frequent, podcasts they love, hashtags they follow on social media, and so much more.

Here’s an example of whom people interested in B2B marketing follow on social media:

It’s an impactful way to gain insight on your customer base and see which of their pain points you can solve.

Surveys

You can send surveys to a wider group than your interviewee selection. Share survey links on social media and on industry groups for more participants.

To be effective, surveys should be tailored from the information discovered on your calls with customers. Use them to see if others in your audience have similar feedback and dig deeper into any unanswered questions from your calls.

Other ways to survey your audience include studying Google Analytics to see common site visitor search terms and referrers. You can also talk to your customer service and sales teams to see which issues routinely pop up in their conversations with customers.

3. Organize your findings

Next, it’s time to organize all that data. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of recurring preferences, pain points, and winning features. Also look out for the problems that your winning features are helping users solve.

For example, note the beloved feature and the resulting benefit in this customer feedback:

“We love using your software because my marketing team can access and edit content at once in the content hub, instead of having to send share links back and forth!”

Customer interviews can be a gold mine for helping to distill and highlight your product’s key benefits, which in turn makes you shine and attract more customers.

In your spreadsheet, you can sort your findings into categories as needed. A good system is to separate them into customer pain points, winning features, specific benefits, edge over competitors, and potential improvements.

When you tie the results of your surveys together with insights you gain from interviews, you’ll have a treasure trove of information about who your ideal customer is and what they need from you. Add the data from your audience research tools, and you’re all set for the next step!

4. Build your personas

Even though you’ve done all the legwork, building a persona requires more than throwing everything together.

It’s time to decide which insights are useful and which are outliers. What did your productive customer interview subjects have in common? Which roles do they have at work? Which pain points do they have in common?

Knowing these details will help you to segment your customers into different categories based on their work goals, demographics, response to your product, industry, company size, and other criteria.

As you follow the patterns in these categories, you’ll naturally start to come up with different personas, because buyers come in different shapes and sizes. There’s no single buyer persona for any product—they need your product for different reasons and have different customer needs and pain points. Your task is to represent as many potential buyers as possible in your buyer personas.

If you want to remember what’s unique about each customer persona, it’s important to name them wisely. This means Marketing Mollie and Sales Sammy may not be the best choices. Consider using their job titles, responsibilities, customer journeys, or customer needs instead.

And no, you don’t need a stock photo to make your persona feel like a real person. After all, real people are made up of their goals and desires, not just their appearances. More importantly, that way you can focus on the facts and avoid bias.

You also don’t need to add demographic information like age and gender as often these have little impact on customers’ purchasing decisions.

Once your personas are built, you can start marketing in a way that’s tailored to your target market.

20 Questions to ask in persona interviews

If you’re stuck wondering what in the world to ask your customers during persona interviews, help is here. We’ve rounded up 20 sample questions you can tweak for your own use—but we have to say, the best answers will come from asking, “Why?” or, “Could you share a bit more about that?” after the customer answers one of these questions.

1. What’s your role at work?
2. Whom do you report to?
3. From whom did you have to get approval to purchase our product?
4. Does anyone report to you?
5. Can you tell me about a typical day at work for you?
6. What work accomplishments make a good work day for you?
7. What’s your main challenge [related to this product] at work?
8. How did you hear about our product?
9. Why did you decide to try our product?
10. Which other tools had you tried before ours?
11. What do you think our product does better?
12. What’s the most useful feature of our product for you?
13. How does our product make life easier for you?
14. Which feature do you wish you could tweak? What would you change?
15. How large is your company?
16. Does anyone else at your company find our product useful?
17. Which other tools/software do you use?
18. What goods or services does your company provide?
19. What are your company’s unique value propositions?
20. What are your company’s future goals? Which key performance indicators (KPIs) are you working to improve?

2 Buyer persona examples to inspire you

If you’re nervous about creating your own buyer personas, we’ve prepared two buyer persona templates you can experiment with. We’ve also gone the extra step and filled them out with information matching a certain target market to give you an idea of what they should look like.

You can always (and should—this is only a snippet!) add more information based on your customer interviews and audience research. We’ve also added some tips on how you can use your buyer persona, instead of letting it collect dust after all this hard work.

Persona 1: Head of content marketing

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What they do: Involved in the planning, ideation, creation, editing, and publishing of content. They also analyze content performance to ensure that they’re driving conversions and try to fix it when they’re not.

Pain point: Needing to keep track of all the moving parts of content production in multiple different applications—instead of using one simple software tool.

Motivation: Wants to help their company scale by creating impactful content—if they can only get organized.

Buyer journey: Hears of a product from an industry colleague → researches it and reads G2 reviews → informs leadership → needs to prove the value of the product → if approved, purchases it

Takeaway: From the pain points and job titles, we can see there’s an obvious need for a content hub. However, we also see that the buyer’s journey isn’t necessarily straightforward. Although this persona feels certain this product will solve their problems, they need to convince their leadership. If more of your target market is in this situation, consider including a free trial in your offerings so they can show the product in action to the decision maker.

Persona 2: Freelancer looking for all-in-one business management software

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What they do: Mid- to top-level freelance writer, editor, graphic designer, or photographer with the budget to finally invest in paid tools for running their business.

Pain point: Keeping track of projects, invoices, deadlines, and all the moving parts of a freelance business on multiple applications is becoming draining. They need a hub to track everything.

Motivation: Wants to be more organized, invoice on time, and keep to deadlines so they can have more brain space to run a profitable business.

Buyer journey: Learns of new software on Twitter → checks it out and reads reviews but can’t decide → waits three months → stumbles upon the product again on TikTok → tries it free for a week → decides to commit.

Takeaway: This buyer persona is a decision maker, but still takes a while to commit to the product—making for an interesting buying process. They also discover the product via social media, not on a blog or by a referral. As you build your marketing strategy, this information can show you where to focus your marketing efforts.

Make your content process better with buyer personas

Creating a buyer persona is an invaluable part of building an effective content development process. It can help you understand the motivations and needs of your potential customer, which helps improve your ability to map the customer journey.

As you build personas, remember that they’re designed to be used. They should not be a static file, but rather should be updated regularly. When your personas are ready, and you’re up for some content marketing, you’ll need a place for all your ideas and teamwork.