Creatopy is now The Brief. Read the full note from our CEO, Tammy Nam.
Creatopy is now The Brief. Read the full note from our CEO, Tammy Nam.
Most marketing teams have buyer personas somewhere — maybe in a dusty slide deck or a Google Doc no one's opened since Q2. The problem isn't that personas don't exist. It's that they don't connect to anything.
A buyer persona built on real data and actually used in campaigns changes how your team targets, messages and creates. This guide walks through what goes into a useful persona, how to build one from scratch and how to turn that research into campaigns that convert.
To create a buyer persona, you gather demographic, psychographic and behavioral data about your ideal customers through surveys, analytics and conversations with your team. Then you turn that information into a detailed profile with a name, photo, goals, pain points and motivations.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, built from real data rather than guesswork. You might hear it called a client persona or customer persona. Same idea, different name.
Think of it as a composite sketch that captures who your best customers actually are. It goes beyond age and job title to include what drives their decisions, what frustrates them and how they prefer to interact with brands.
Without personas, marketing becomes a guessing game. You end up creating content for "everyone," which usually means it resonates with no one—untargeted campaigns achieve just 0.2% conversion rates compared to targeted ones.
Personas give your whole team a shared picture of who you're actually trying to reach. When sales, marketing and creative all work from the same customer profiles, messaging gets more consistent and campaigns get more targeted, helping generate 209% more revenue from marketing.
Most B2B purchases involve an average of 13 stakeholders, each with a different role in the decision. Understanding who's who helps you craft messaging that lands with each stakeholder.
Decision makers hold the budget. They care about ROI, risk and strategic outcomes. Your messaging to them typically focuses on business impact rather than product features.
Influencers research options and make recommendations, but they don't sign the check. They often care about features, ease of implementation and how a solution affects their team's daily work.
End users are the people who will actually use your product every day. They focus on workflow, usability and time savings. A product that impresses executives but frustrates end users rarely succeeds long-term.
Equally important: defining who is not your customer. Negative personas help teams avoid wasting resources on poor-fit leads, like prospects who lack budget, operate in industries you don't serve or have problems your product can't solve.
A persona document captures everything your team needs to understand and reach a specific customer segment. Vague personas lead to vague marketing, so the details matter.
Start with the basics: age, location, job title and seniority. For B2B personas, include company size, industry and the person's role in the buying committee. This information shapes everything from ad targeting to content tone.
What does success look like for this person? What are they trying to accomplish professionally, and sometimes personally? Understanding motivations helps you position your solution as a path to their desired outcome.
What frustrates them? What problems keep them up at night? The more specific you get here, the more your messaging will resonate. Generic pain points like "wants to save time" rarely drive action.
How do they research solutions? Who influences their decisions? What content do they consume during the buying process? What objections typically come up? This information shapes your content strategy and sales enablement.
Where do they spend time online? How do they prefer to be contacted? Do they engage more with video, long-form articles or quick social posts? Meeting your audience where they already are makes every campaign more effective.
| Persona Element | Example Questions to Answer |
|---|---|
| Demographics | What is their job title and seniority level? |
| Goals | What outcomes are they trying to achieve? |
| Pain Points | What challenges do they face daily? |
| Behavior | How do they research and evaluate purchases? |
| Channels | Where do they consume content and engage? |
Building a useful persona follows a clear sequence: gather data, spot patterns, define characteristics and document everything in a format your team can actually use.
Start with what you already have. Your CRM contains patterns about your best customers: job titles, company sizes, industries and deal cycles.
Internal data only tells part of the story. Direct conversations with customers reveal motivations, frustrations and decision factors that don't show up in analytics. Even 5–10 customer interviews can surface insights that transform your personas.
Surveys help you validate patterns at scale. Ask about challenges, goals and how customers discovered your solution.
Look for commonalities across your data sources. Which job titles appear most frequently among your best customers? What company sizes convert at the highest rates? What content do they engage with before purchasing?
Group similar customers into segments. Most companies find 3–5 distinct personas cover their primary audiences without creating confusion.
Synthesize your research into clear statements about what drives each persona. Use their language, not internal jargon. If customers describe their challenge as "drowning in manual tasks," don't translate that to "operational inefficiency."
Give the persona a name and photo. It sounds simple, but it makes the persona feel real and memorable. Write a realistic backstory that captures their career path and daily responsibilities.
Personas aren't one-time projects. Share them across teams for feedback, then review and refresh at least once a year. Markets evolve, customer priorities shift and your product changes. Your personas need to keep pace.
Concrete examples make the concept tangible. Here's what finished personas actually look like.
Marketing Manager Maria
*Mid-size retail company, 500 employees*
Maria manages a 4-person marketing team responsible for digital campaigns across paid social, display and email. She reports to the CMO and is evaluated on lead generation and campaign ROI. Her biggest frustration? Waiting on the design team for creative assets while campaign windows close. She spends hours each week resizing ads manually and rebuilding performance reports.
"I know what campaigns I want to run. I just can't execute fast enough to test everything I want to test."
Weekend Warrior Will
*35-year-old suburban homeowner*
Will works in finance but spends weekends on home improvement projects. He researches purchases extensively on YouTube and Reddit before buying, values quality over price and prefers brands that offer clear how-to content. He gets frustrated by products with poor instructions and companies that don't respond quickly to questions.
A few principles separate useful personas from documents that gather dust.
Every persona element traces back to research, interviews or analytics. Assumptions feel efficient but lead to targeting the wrong people with the wrong messages.
Limit yourself to 3–5 personas. Each one needs to be specific enough to guide real decisions. If a persona could describe almost anyone, it's too broad.
Personas only work if the whole team uses them. Make them accessible in shared drives, reference them in campaign briefs and revisit them during planning sessions.
The real value of personas emerges when they inform every campaign asset. Platforms like The Brief help teams apply persona insights to creative production automatically, so the research actually shapes the work.
Personas translate directly into campaign decisions:
Personas are only valuable when they inform action. The research, interviews and documentation all lead to one outcome: marketing that resonates because it's built for real people with real challenges.
The gap between persona insight and campaign execution is where many teams struggle. Turning detailed customer understanding into on-brand creative at scale requires systems that connect strategy to production. That's exactly what The Brief is built for.
Most companies find 3–5 buyer personas cover their primary audiences effectively. Fewer personas mean clearer focus; more personas often create confusion and dilute messaging efforts.
A buyer persona represents the person who makes or influences purchase decisions. A user persona represents the person who actually uses the product daily. In B2B contexts, buyer and user are often different people with different priorities.
AI persona generators can analyze data and suggest persona attributes, which accelerates the research phase. However, human review remains essential to validate accuracy and add strategic context.
Review and update buyer personas at least once a year. More frequent updates make sense when entering new markets, launching new products or noticing significant shifts in customer behavior.
The best tool depends on your workflow. Standalone persona makers work well for documentation, while integrated platforms like The Brief connect personas directly to campaign creation and creative production.
Let's put these insights into action. Build, scale, and automate campaigns with AI-powered workflows.
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