What Is a Persona? Definition, Examples, and Templates

Every business has a target audience—the group of people they serve best. This audience typically is defined by demographics—age, gender, ethnic background—and psychographics, such as interests, hobbies, and budgets. Target audiences are deliberately abstract, used primarily for high-level decision-making around market size and brand goals.

To make informed decisions about your product and marketing plan, and to win your customers’ hearts, you need more than a broad target audience—you need to understand your customers’ values, pain points, and goals and make them feel personally served. Enter: personas.

Personas are powerful tools for guiding product and marketing decisions. Learn what they are and how to build your own. 

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional, generalized character that represents your business’s target users or customers. Personas are idealized clients—characters with the exact pain points your product solves, the goals your product or service helps achieve, and sensibilities that align with your brand.

A persona is typically defined as a single, nameable person. For example, “Our persona’s name is Emma.” They have specific characteristics instead of ranges. For instance, Emma would be 34, not “31 to 45” or “mid-30s.” However, the most important part of a buyer persona typically isn’t demographics, it’s goals and pain points related to your product.

Why create personas?

Effective personas help you make better business decisions by thoroughly describing your customer or end user. It’s hard to identify the specific goals of an entire group of people, like your target audience. By giving your hypothetical customer a name, story, and fictional personal details, you can imagine yourself in their shoes.

User personas vs. buyer personas

Different teams or functional roles at a company use personas for specific reasons. But while the use cases differ, the hypothetical customer behind the fictional persona should be the same. You wouldn’t want your marketing team designing messaging to reach one person while the product team builds for someone else. 

Here are the two types of personas:

• User personas. Design teams employ user personas and journey maps in product and UX (user experience) design. For example, if they know their persona obsessively manages their email inbox, they might prioritize a feature allowing users to control the notifications sent by their email app.
• Buyer personas. Buyer personas are used in every form of marketing, from branding to digital. Creating buyer personas helps teams craft marketing messages and decide which marketing channels to leverage in their strategy. 

If you have more than one product, use case, or target market, consider creating a persona for each customer segment. If you do this, it’s important to use sales or usage data to understand which persona is most important to your business (your primary persona) and which are less important (secondary personas).

Get your buyer persona template

What makes a good persona?

Personas are all about specificity. The more you do as a designer or marketer to specify your buyer persona, the better your team will be able to create great products and run effective marketing campaigns.

For example, if you are a mattress company like Parachute, you might say your persona’s pain point is that “typical affordable mattresses are uncomfortable.” That could help you write a copy about your mattress’s comfort, but ultimately, it is a limited insight.

Be as specific as possible to create realistic characters. For example, “Ana lives in a big city and feels like she’s already paying too much on rent, so the idea of spending a month’s rent on a mattress feels excessive. At the same time, she doesn’t want to feel like she’s in college anymore. She shares a bed with her partner and they often get too warm. So she’s open to investing in the right product if she feels it’s sensible.” 

This level of detail will lead to evocative marketing copy focused on the product’s cooling materials and better decisions about the overall product roadmap.

How to create a persona

1. Research your customer

Start by learning as much as you can about your customers or potential customers. You can collect data through market research like individual customer interviews, focus groups, and surveys, and by reviewing third-party research such as “a typical day in the life” recounts. If your product is digital, such as an app, you can also research trends in real users’ data and behavioral patterns.

Customer research helps remove personal bias from the process. You might assume your customer values one product feature over others, but thorough research could tell a different story.

2. Hypothesize based on findings

Once you’ve gathered enough data to understand your customers’ profiles, pain points, and goals, begin hypothesizing how to develop personas based on your findings. You could create a short persona description that includes personal details like:

• Name
• Age
• Preferred language
• Interests
• Family status
• Income
• Job title
• Challenges
• Goals or motivations

The more precise you are, the better. These buyer persona examples can function as templates for achieving an effective level of detail. Just remember that everything on your one-pager remains a hypothesis until you can validate it through testing.

3. Test and validate your personas

There are many ways to test your persona. Product and marketing teams have different approaches for reaching the same outcome: establishing confidence in their persona’s definition.

A product team validates their personas through additional UX research, such as watching their user base interact with prototype designs and asking UX-driven questions. They may also test their hypothesis by making persona-oriented changes to their product then tracking usage data for improvements. Their goal is to find answers or data that validates their persona hypotheses.

A marketing team validates persona definitions through quantitative test marketing campaigns. For example, they might launch social media advertising campaigns targeting users that represent two versions of their persona to see which performs better. Or they may target one audience with multiple messages, to see which one resonates. These are effective ways to prove persona hypotheses.

Examples of user personas

Ecommerce marketers rely on user personas in their marketing plans. They write specific points, like their target audience’s age, most-used social media platform, influencers they follow, and the pain points that drive them to purchase. Each of these aspects inform the broad marketing plan, determining things like social media channels the business will use, creators they’ll partner with, and ad campaign messaging.

Customer service teams also create user personas to predict how to best serve clients. If your buyer persona is a millennial, for example, Instagram might be their first port of call for any customer support. They might also be young parents who are time poor and value brands that take tasks off their plate. In practice, this might mean customer support completing tasks for your customer, like initiating refunds or resending order confirmations (as opposed to providing instructions for them to do it). 

User personas in different industries

What you’ll include in a persona differs depending on your industry and sector. A retail store, for example, would create personas of real people in the local area. They’d detail the suburbs and neighborhoods near the physical location, perhaps listing competing stores in the area that target customers currently visit. 

A wholesale distributor, on the other hand, would include company-related information in their user personas. This might include annual revenue, job title of the main decision maker, number of stakeholders involved in the buying process, and average lead time. 

Updating and maintaining personas

Creating user personas isn’t a one-time task. Industries, competitors, and consumer preferences are constantly changing. Your personas need to evolve with your business. 

Make it a regular task to update and maintain your personas. Every six months is a good starting point, but try to make a conscious effort to note patterns as you discover them. This speedy approach helps you remain competitive and relevant before the persona review period arrives.

Do you need a persona?

Remember that your user and buyer persona is never going to be 100% “true,” as it’s based on a fictional character. But the exercise of creating and validating personas can hone your understanding of your customer. Whether you’re on a product team or marketing team, or you’re a business owner doing it all yourself, there’s almost nothing more important than that.