How to Create Marketing Personas in 4 Steps (With Free Template)

by Brian Wolford

We’ve been in business for over a decade, and yet we’re still shocked to see how many clients make the #1 mistake in content marketing: creating content they like instead of coming up with ideas their audience would like. We’ve seen it a million times. You can hire the best designers, the sassiest copywriters, and an Oscar-worthy video crew, but if your content ideas don’t resonate with your audience, they won’t do a damn thing to achieve your marketing goals. That’s why every time a client comes to us complaining about their lackluster content strategy, we always ask to see their marketing personas. You’d be shocked how often they don’t have them documented.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 44% of marketers don’t use marketing personas to influence their content.

Marketing personas are one of the most valuable tools to transform your content strategy. They hold the key to your audience’s wants, needs, and frustrations. They provide a built-in framework for brainstorming. Yet so many marketers are functioning without them. Or, if they do have them, they’re collecting dust in a document that hasn’t been opened in 3 years.

If you relate to either of these problems, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about creating marketing personas: why they’re important, how to make them, and what to do once you have them in hand.

What Are Marketing Personas?

In essence, they’re a snapshot of who your audience is and what they’re interested in. They can include a combination of attributes (e.g., age, gender, etc.) and psychographic information (e.g., likes, dislikes, pain points).

Basically, marketing personas are a comprehensive “map” of your audience’s minds and personalities, helping you see the world from their perspective. By compiling these traits and distilling them down into different personas, you create a solid representation of the actual humans you want to attract.

Note: Marketing personas are always used in B2C marketing, but in B2B, you may also want to create Ideal Customer Profiles. These are similar to personas, but instead of individual people, these may refer to the type of business you want to target. For more on this, learn about the differences between personas and ICPs.

How Do Marketing Personas Help Marketers?

Content is the key to creating a strong community of like-minded people who will support your brand long-term. But how do you pique your audience’s interest? Engage them? Convert them? It’s easy; just create the content they care about.

If you don’t understand your audience, you don’t understand your business.

By using personas to get inside your target audience’s mind, you can brainstorm, vet, and tailor your ideas to the right people, ensuring your content is always interesting, relevant, and valuable. This intel can also influence other brand storytelling elements, such as your tone, messaging, or design aesthetic.

Remember: Standing out is more important than ever, especially in a sea of AI-generated content. If you’re working without personas, you’re working without a map, and it will be much harder to grab people’s attention through content marketing.

What Makes a Good Marketing Persona?

We’ve seen every version of “marketing personas.” We’re talking about everything from novel-length writeups to two-sentence descriptions. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself; you want to create a resource that is genuinely useful. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind as you build out your personas

Accuracy: As you’ll see in this guide, good personas require solid research. Even if you’ve been in business 50 years and think you know everything there is to know about your customers, going to the source is the only way to get the truth.
Brevity: You want your personas to be thorough, but you can easily drown yourself in data. Admittedly, we’ve been guilty of this in the past, logging every single piece of information about our audience (e.g., what podcasts they listen to, what car they drive, their pet’s name, etc.). While these details can paint a picture of a person, they don’t really speak to their core needs and how you can serve them.
Utility: There’s no point in doing all the work to create personas for them to be forgotten in a doc somewhere. This is one reason why brevity is so important. If you can create clear, distinct, and distilled personas, you can use them in your day-to-day content practice.

With these elements in mind, we’ve pared down our process to help you create personas that are practical and applicable.

How to Create Marketing Personas in 4 Steps

The Internet is full of all sorts of guides to create good marketing personas. (You may have even checked out a few before you landed here.) Each has its own merit, but the process can feel intimidating and overwhelming, which is why some marketers give up entirely or end up with half-formed personas that don’t really give them the insights they need. We don’t want you to get stuck, so we’ve broken down the process into four simple steps that make it easy.

STOP! Before you dive in, download our free marketing personas template.

This template will guide your conversations with customers and help you craft your finalized personas.

Step 1: Talk to people.

It all starts with a research phase. Even if you have long-standing relationships with your clients, it’s important to take the guesswork out and go directly to the source to interview them about who they are and what they need.

One caveat: If you have an established customer base, you’re in an ideal position. If you’re just starting out and working through product-market fit, look for surveys, studies, and other relevant research that might give you similar insights into your audience. (For more on that, see our tips to find your target audience.)

First, identify the information you want to get from your customers. To do this, take a look at the inputs we’ve included in the template:

Name
Age
Gender (if applicable)
Job title (if applicable)
Channels (where you can connect with them)
Pain points (the barriers to what they want/need)
How your product/service helps solve their problems (the messages you want your content to deliver)

This is the core information you’ll need to craft your personas, and you can use these attributes to shape the questions you will be asking people. Of course, depending on your unique business, you can add or tweak these inputs as you see fit. (For example, if you’re a makeup brand, you might also want to know what products your audiences are most likely to splurge on.) That said, try to keep your questions simple.

Next, start researching, reaching out, and documenting your findings. You can ask questions via in-person chats, calls, and emails. You can comb through customer surveys, online feedback, or other potentially helpful sources. (For example, we recently looked at the first contact emails we received from leads who became customers in the last year. This helped us identify common themes in why they’d chosen us.)

On that note, it’s also helpful to loop in sales and customer service at this stage, as these are the people who have the most direct contact with your customers and can relay feedback.

Your goal is to gather as much information as possible about your customers so that you can create the most relevant, accurate personas.

Step 2: Consolidate your responses.

If you’ve done your research thoroughly, you probably have a lot of great intel—emphasis on a lot. (And, yes, you may be overwhelmed. Don’t worry, you’ll get more clarity shortly.)

Once you’ve collected your research and responses, gather your team to collate, consolidate, and categorize the info. As you start to log answers, you’ll likely see common themes arise. (This is especially true when it comes to pain points.) For now, list out every potentially helpful data point you’ve discovered. One of the best things about this process is that you will inevitably discover surprising things about your audience—issues you didn’t realize they’re facing, things they like, etc.

For example, after reviewing those first contact emails from our converted customers, we were surprised to see three common themes arise—two of which we’d never prioritized in our messaging or content. This just proves that no matter how much you think you know your customers, they may still surprise you.

Step 3: Write a rough draft.

Block off an hour or 90 minutes, depending on how fast you move and how many personas you’re attempting to map. You might also want to whiteboard this out first to help your team to stay focused.

First, identify how many personas you’re going to create. Your business and your goals should dictate this. We recommend creating 3-5 personas—any more than that and you’re probably getting off course. (When we did this for Column Five, we created 3 different personas and envisioned them as individuals who work at the same organization but at different levels of seniority.)

Next, start to identify your persona segments.

Name: Give each persona a relevant name.
Age: You will likely include a range here (e.g., 25-35).
Gender: Include if applicable.
Job title: Include if applicable. In lieu of this, you may want to identify another defining characteristic.
Channels: Identify where they spend the most time online.
Pain points: You probably have a significant list of pain points. To narrow these down and consolidate them, try to identify three most popular pain points/themes.
How your product/service helps solve their problems: This should directly address the main pain points you’ve outlined. Let’s say you’re marketing Yum Snackz, a healthy kid snack, to moms. If one of mom’s biggest pain points is a lack of time to make healthy food, you might talk about the grab-and-go convenience of your product.

By the end, you should have a defined group of personas that are both specific and distinct.

Step 4: Finalize your personas.

Once you have your “rough” personas, it’s time to vet them. Circulate your personas for feedback from relevant people (e.g., your sales team or brand team), and refine as needed.

You can also use the info you’ve distilled for each persona to craft a simple story (just a paragraph or so) that captures who the target customer is. This can really help bring your personas to life and make them “stick” in people’s minds.

Let’s go back to our personas for Yum Snackz. Here’s what one persona story might look like:

Sara is a 35-year-old suburban mom of twin boys who are super picky eaters. She has an active lifestyle and wants to feed her kids healthy food. But as the owner of a popular Etsy shop, she doesn’t have the time or energy to make homemade snacks for their preschool lunches. While waiting in her car before school pickup, she was scrolling through Instagram and saw one of her favorite lifestyle bloggers post about how popular Yum Snackz are with her own kids. Sara made a note to pick some up on her next grocery run, and she’s been a fan ever since. Since Yum Snackz are perfectly portioned and easy to take on the go, she can confidently give the boys the nutrition they need without having to think about it. Plus, the variety of delicious flavors lets each finicky boy pick his favorite—without a fight. The truth is Sara loves Yum Snackz so much she keeps one in her yoga bag—just in case she needs a quick fix. But don’t tell the boys that or the snacks will disappear in a snap.

Once you’ve made your edits and have final approval, you can memorialize them in the template, Google Docs, an Excel spreadsheet—whatever works for your team. Just make sure to regularly review and update personas as well, especially any time you make changes to your content strategy.

How to Use Your New Personas

Once you have your brand new personas in hand, put them to work in your content strategy.

Use empathy when you brainstorm. Whether it’s inspirational, educational, or entertaining, make sure your content delivers something valuable to your audience. Note: If you can’t identify which persona a piece of content is for—and why they would be interested in it—it’s probably not going to work. For more ideas, learn how to do empathetic content marketing, and try these prompts to come up with strong content ideas.
Adjust your messaging. Personas make it much easier to tailor your brand messaging to different audiences. If you want to emotionally hook them, use our brand messaging framework to tell a unique brand story that resonates with your personas. (This messaging can apply to everything from homepage copy to sales enablement content.)
Measure your content success. You will likely need to adjust your content strategy on a quarterly basis to keep up with changing markets or audience preferences. But make sure to document and track the right metrics for your content strategy to see how you’re doing.

And if you need help with any aspect of your content strategy, bring in some reinforcements. You can start your search with our content strategy FAQs , or hit us up directly. We’re always down to chat.