What Is a Buyer Persona and How to Create One?

Marketers have more data than they know what to do with. Too much information leads to an excessive focus on data and nearly not enough on customers. Interestingly, major decision-makers still create marketing strategies based on past experiences and opinions — a situation that can be rectified with buyer personas.

A buyer persona or customer persona represents your ideal customers; prospects best suited for your product or service.

Marketing campaigns involve a lot of aspects, like content, copy, and design. However, the objectives are the same: engagement, conversions, and revenue. Buyer personas inform all your marketing efforts with consumer-centric insights that can help achieve these goals.

According to reports, 24% of businesses generated more leads and 36% shortened sales cycles with buyer personas.

Yet, simply using demographic data to create buyer personas is not enough — you need to enrich it with other qualitative and quantitative data sources for it to be truly effective. Only then can you tell the customer’s story and move away from traditional customer profiles that provide data irrelevant to marketing.

In this article, we will get into everything related to understanding and creating buyer personas for your business. You will learn about their origins, types, research methodologies, key components, benefits, and uses in marketing and sales. Let’s get started!

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers based on factors like age, gender, location, job profile, goals, challenges, interests, personalities, values, behavioral attributes, shopping preferences, and more. Also known as a marketing persona or audience persona, it is built using qualitative and quantitative data.

Buyer persona research includes past and present consumer data.

So, how many personas do most organizations create? Since they have different types of customers, organizations usually create anywhere between one to five buyer personas. Just think about it, even a simple B2B product can involve up to three decision-makers before it is purchased.

Regardless, you should have at least 3 buyer personas in place – B2C or otherwise.

Marketing personas help businesses visualize what their potential customers need and guide decision-making for better customer experiences. Similar to empathy maps, they reflect what individuals see, think, do, and say about your product or service.

• See: What does the prospect see in the marketplace – products, competitors, pricing, etc.?
• Think: What does the prospect think about your product – advantages and disadvantages?
• Do: How does the customer use your product or service?
• Say: What does the customer say about your product – feedback, reviews, and ratings?

You can use this information to refine your digital marketing strategies, improve product positioning, and create marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. Consequently, brands can personalize all their business processes, such as marketing, sales, product development, and customer support, using buyer personas.

Stats to prove the importance of buyer personas in business

We’ve said that creating personas is critical to the success of any marketing or advertisement campaign. But why are buyer personas important to your business? Are there statistics that support the validity of these statements? Or are they just baseless speculations?

Famous sites like HubSpot, McKinsey, and Demand Gen Report have extensively written about how developing your own buyer persona profiles can positively impact growth and business efficacy.

Listed below are nine important statistics that underscore the importance of personas in business.

• 90% of companies have developed a better understanding of their prospects with buyer personas.
• Three to four personas account for over 90% of a company’s sales.
• 82% of companies have improved their value proposition using customer personas.
• As per Hubspot, persona-informed websites are 2-5x times more effective and easier to navigate by users.
• 63% of marketers use personas to create customer-centric content.
• With personas, brands have seen a 14% increase in email click-through rates (CTR) and a 10% improvement in conversion rates.
• Persona-based content boosts engagement by 6X when warming up cold leads.
• 71% of companies that surpass revenue targets have buyer personas in place; they are also 2.4X more likely to use personas for demand generation.

A case study by MarketingSherpa shows that a business using personas in its marketing strategy achieved a 100% increase in website visits, a 111% improvement in email open rates, and a 171% boost in marketing-generated revenue.

Brief history of the buyer persona

Alan Cooper is credited with developing the first persona, named Kathy, in 1985. Built for a project management software program, Kathy was a composite sketch of a fictional user derived from multiple interviews, designed to make the software more user-friendly.

"Personas are not real people, but they represent them through the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. Although they are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision," writes Cooper in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (1998). It was in this book that he first introduced the term “buyer personas,” highlighting how personas enable one to identify the goals, pain points, and needs of their users.

Note that buyer personas were already being used by marketers as customer sketches or buyer profiles in the past; the only problem was that they were based on demographic segmentation.

In 1994, almost a decade after Cooper, Angus Jenkinson, a former professor of marketing, created Customer Prints. They were fictional profiles that described consumers in their actual environment, exploring their goals, values, frustrations, motivations, and attitudes.

Clayton Christensen's Jobs to Be Done Theory (JTBD) added another layer to the buyer persona, shifting the focus away from the product to the consumer. According to this theory, brands should identify the "job" users want to get done after purchasing their products or services. His concepts, along with the other factors mentioned were used to create qualitative and quantitative personas.

The year 2008 saw the adoption of data-driven personas.

K.L. Williams introduced the term back in 2006 to describe personas built with advanced AI algorithms, statistical analysis, and online analytics platforms. With artificial intelligence, easier data collection and processing options, and interactive technologies, brands can create human-like personas using graphics, voice-overs, and simulations.

Fast forward to today, you have automatic persona generation (APG) platforms that create buyer personas automatically for you – all you need to do is connect your data sources to the persona generator.

Are personas the same as your target audience?

A buyer persona is not the same as your target audience. While the former presents a detailed view of a desirable or undesirable customer segment, the latter offers generalized information about a broad group of individuals, such as their common demographic and socioeconomic details.

Target audiences take a macro approach, whereas personas are more micro in nature.

Customer personas represent the ideal buyers within the target audience. It sort of goes like this: your target audience tells you who you should reach out to – say, middle-income women in San Francisco. Personas give you a clearer idea of who these people are, what their pain points are, and what they need.

For instance, this will be your target audience (TA).

• Women
• 25 to 40 years old
• Live in urban areas
• Middle to upper-middle class income
• Health and fitness-conscious individuals

This is a classic example of a buyer persona.

• Name: Savannah Hill
• Age: 35
• Location: San Francisco Bay Area
• Occupation: Real estate agent
• Income: $104,400 per year
• Goals: Adopt a healthy lifestyle and eating habits
• Challenges: Balancing work with fitness routines and gym
• Interests: Gym workouts and outdoor activities

You can combine segmentation tactics to ensure user-centricity and personalize your marketing messages, content, product offerings, and events.

Negative buyer personas

While a buyer persona acts as a stand-in for your perfect customers, a negative buyer persona is the archetype of the type of prospects you want to avoid in your business. It’s someone who you don’t want as a customer since the cost of retaining them is much higher than the cost of acquiring them.

These are the kind of users who are difficult to work with, take up a lot of space with no significant value in return, and have a history of payment problems.

Here’s an example of a negative persona for a fast fashion brand.

You create a negative persona the same way you do a buyer persona. Collect data, find common characteristics, build audience segments, and give your persona a name and profile picture. Of course, you have to be on the lookout for attributes you don’t want in your target customers. Pro tip: develop negative personas in tandem with regular customer personas – this cuts down work and makes things easier.

Done well, a negative buyer persona can help marketing and sales teams filter out prospects who don’t have any say in the purchase decision or get any real benefits from the product.

Buyer Persona Examples and Key Characteristics

Buyer personas are much more than your one-page documents. They are dynamic, ever-evolving characters representing a multitude of customers, journeys, and user experiences. We have various types of personas for different purposes, which we’ll cover later in this article. However, each type shares certain characteristics and elements.

Here are the key components you must include in your buyer persona:

• Name: the nickname you assign to your fictional buyer. It makes it easier to identify and associate with them.
• Age: the age or age group your buyer belongs to; greatly helps with generational marketing.
• Gender: gender-based segmentation is a sensitive topic but is extremely useful in B2C markets.
• Income: notes how much your customer earns in a year and helps estimate spending capacity and product pricing.
• Education: the highest level of education, degree, or qualification.
• Location: the city, state, and country your prospects reside in.
• Occupation: lists what they do for a living, including their job title, company, and industry, which is crucial for B2B marketing.
• Family status: describes their marital and parental status.
• Goals: personal and professional objectives buyers wish to achieve with your company.
• Pain points: the problems or challenges they want to solve using your product or service.
• Interests: things they take a keen interest in, like sports.
• Hobbies: common activities that prospects enjoy doing; for example, writing a poem or sky diving.
• Values: opinions on social, economic, religious, and environmental issues. Brands should tread on these topics with caution and avoid them entirely if possible.
• Communication preferences: marketing channels and modes of communication (email, call, social media, messaging, or in-person) users prefer.
• Influencer entities: individuals, brands, and organizations that can positively or negatively affect consumer decisions.
• Factors influencing purchase decisions: features, benefits, pricing, and quality buyers look for in a product before buying it.
• Buying barriers: reasons that stop them from making a purchase.
• Jobs to be done: the function they want to perform with your products.

If you want to get a more in-depth understanding of these elements, read our article on the anatomy of a buyer persona.

For demonstration purposes, we’ve outlined two customer personas that a brand like Netflix – with over 270 million paid subscribers – caters to binge-watchers and family viewers. They will give you an example of what buyer personas look like.

Example 1. Zoe, the binge-watcher

We have Zoe, who lives in the most populous borough of New York: Brooklyn. She is an obsessive Netflix watcher who can finish an 8-episode series in one sitting. As a financial analyst, Zoe is a very busy person and greatly values her time off. She loves adrenaline-inducing shows and has subscribed to multiple streaming services for the same.

Name: Zoe Valdez

Age: 29

Marital Status: Single

Income: $110,000

Education: MS in Finance

Occupation: Financial analyst

Location: Brooklyn, New York City

Goals:

• Relax and cool down after a tiring day at work.
• Watch the latest movies, series, and documentaries.
• Not waste time on irrelevant and boring content.

Challenges:

• Limited screen time due to work responsibilities.
• Hard time choosing the right show to watch – too many options.

Interests: Crime thrillers, historical dramas, critically acclaimed shows, and romantic comedies.

Zoe is not too concerned about how high the subscription plans are priced as long as she gets to watch personalized, fun, and interesting content. Netflix can offer customized recommendations based on Zoe’s viewing history and notify her about trending shows via in-app notifications and emails.

Example 2. Donald, the family guy

Donald Miller, along with his wife and three children, resides in a suburban area of Chicago, Illinois. He works remotely for an MNC and is well-paid. Donald and his wife prioritize family time and enjoy watching child-friendly shows with their kids on weekends and evenings.

Name: Donald Miller

Age: 37

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Income: $150,000

Occupation: Software Engineer

Education: MS in Computer Science

Marital status: Married with three kids (6, 8, and 10 years old)

Goals:

• Watch safe, appropriate, and family-friendly shows and movies.
• Subscribe to content that is educational and mentally stimulating.

Pain points:

• Finding age-appropriate shows liked by all three kids.
• Regulating screen time and adopting outdoor activities.

Content preferences: animated films, cartoon series, family comedies, adventure movies, wildlife and nature documentaries.

The Millers need a library of specialized children’s content with parental controls. Netflix allows users to create separate profiles for individuals, parents, and kids. The brand can promote movie nights and series marathons to further increase app usage and engagement.

Types of Buyer Personas: B2C, B2B, and More

Let’s discuss the types of buyer personas you can create for different marketing audiences and businesses. After all, each business is unique, therefore its customers will have certain peculiarities and differences that must be taken into account while building personas.

In this section, we’ll cover the most popular types: B2C (ecommerce) personas, B2B personas, SaaS personas, and HR personas.

B2C or ecommerce persona

As explained by Investopedia, “Business-to-consumer refers to the process of businesses selling products and services directly to consumers, with no middle person.” It can be online, in-store, or a combination of both. You have ecommerce sites like Amazon, Temu, and Etsy that sell items to customers online, while brands like Nike and Ikea sell products online and in stores.

B2C buyer personas represent these end-users or buyers.

Demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes are more important in ecommerce personas, where age, gender, location, income, lifestyle, habits, personal interests, and shopping habits are given a preference. If Ikea wants to sell furniture in India, it will need a strategy that targets specific age groups with the desired spending capacity.

B2B buyer persona

A B2B persona is like your B2C persona but with a suit and tie. It is designed for businesses whose clients are mainly other businesses or organizations, hence the name business-to-business (B2B).

They differ from the former because B2B buyers have different requirements and buying criteria. Compared to their informal counterparts, such buyers are likely to spend more time analyzing and reviewing multiple sources and competitors before purchasing your product. Goals are more professional than personal – the primary objective being the growth of the company.

What makes it even more complex is the number of people involved in the buying process. One has to identify the different decision-makers at each stage of the customer journey and develop resources that cater to their individual needs.

SaaS and HR personas

We have various types of B2B companies, like manufacturers, wholesalers, service providers, and software companies. SaaS personas are made to reflect the ideal buyers for a SaaS (software as a service) company. Similar to your B2B personas, they involve multiple decision-makers – where the buyer may not be the end user of the product.

Marketers primarily collect firmographic and technographic data, along with other data types, to create SaaS buyer personas.

Note that personas can also be used for talent acquisition and retention purposes. Known as HR personas, they include two varieties – one for your job candidates and the other for your employees. Built using past and present employee data, feedback, organization surveys, ratings, and HR reports, they simplify the hiring process and help keep employees who contribute to a positive work environment.

You can get started on any of these four personas easily by downloading our free buyer persona templates.

Buyer Persona Development: Data, Research, and Methodologies

Buyer persona research can be easy or hard, depending on the circumstances. Start by listing out people who’ll be involved in the persona development process – the more, the merrier. Make it a point to include employees in customer-facing roles, like sales, customer support, and marketing.

Different people bring different perspectives and experiences, which is crucial to persona creation. Case in point: sales and customer service people directly interact with buyers and know a lot about their needs and pain points, while marketers come across heaps of customer data daily.

Once done, appoint a chief officer to oversee the task. They’ll identify potential data sources, interview candidates, and determine the right methodologies for buyer persona development.

Qualitative and quantitative data

In market research, you have two kinds of data sources: quantitative, which deals with numbers, and qualitative, which is all about textual data.

Qualitative data details the personalities, attitudes, values, beliefs, emotions, and sentiments of your prospects. It has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with understanding what, why, and how people think and do things in life. There are many ways to collect this information, but you mainly get it via:

• Focus groups
• Case studies
• Surveys, reviews, and ratings
• In-depth interviews and observations
• Customer service chats and transcriptions
• Longitudinal studies (observe people over long time periods)
• Ethnographic research (study consumers in their natural habitat)

Next up, we have quantitative data, which is numerical data acquired through government records, industry reports, competitor intelligence tools, CRM software, website analytics, and social media monitoring platforms.

A software like Google Analytics tracks online user habits, website traffic, topics of interest, product preferences, engagement, conversions, and revenue. Social audience research tools monitor brand mentions, comments, hashtags, keywords, conversations, and trends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Besides measuring email performance, you can leverage email analytics tools to analyze subscriber behavior.

CRM platforms like Salesforce can additionally be used to study transaction history, customer lifetime value, and sales cycle length.

Qualitative and quantitative data, when combined, ensure a 360-degree view of your customers. Yet, businesses struggle with this due to two reasons: lack of quality data and data silos within the organization. The problem persists in buyer persona development; however, it can be solved with the right tools and technologies.

Market research and interviews

Market research is important, whether you’re selling a new product, feature, or service. It is used for audience segmentation, competitor analysis, checking business viability, and spotting flaws in product design.

Ideally, you use the methods outlined before – especially the qualitative ones – to do this.

Clayton Christensen recounts a story – a notion he calls Milkshake Marketing – where his fellow researchers solved the mystery behind low milkshake sales at a fast-food restaurant chain through observations and casual customer interactions. Although the restaurant had done its homework, they forgot to ask consumers the most obvious question, “Why do you drink the milkshake?”

Customer interviews are a must to create efficient buyer personas. But how many persona interviews should you aim to complete? Like all things marketing, there isn’t a definitive answer to this question. However, keep in mind these four factors:

1. Business objectives
2. Product complexity
3. Market or audience size
4. Budget and time

These factors will help you determine the nature and number of your interviewees.

How to find people for interviews?

Customers provide the easiest and most valuable insights for creating buyer personas. They’ve engaged with your brand, purchased your product or service, and interacted with customer service. Present buyers have seen it all — the good, the bad, and the ordinary — and can help align marketing and products with user needs and interests.

You can also interview potential customers – prospects just one step away from buying your product.

Chances are you already have their contact details and can assess where they are in the decision-making process. Prioritize those in the consideration stage over those in the awareness or research stage and use existing data to see how they fit into your customer persona. You can connect with social media followers who show a strong interest in your brand for more information.

Referrals and third-party survey sites are another option.

Use referrals to connect with people closer to your target audience and reach out to your network for potential interviewees. LinkedIn is a great place for looking for B2B buyers matching your target market. If you don't have the time or the professionals, third-party websites can be leveraged for user testing, surveys, and gathering feedback from diverse participants.

Tips to get the most out of customer interviews

Here are a few tips for when you’re conducting buyer persona interviews:

• Be accommodating to customer timings and schedules.
• If they aren’t ready for an in-person or telephonic conversation, send a survey or feedback form.
• Ensure that your survey questions are simple and thought-provoking.
• Don’t have a one-sided conversation; involve the respondent as well.
• Never assume things about your buyers – ask probing questions to get the necessary information.
• If your interview runs long, incentivize interviewees by offering gift cards, discounts, coupons, or freebies.

Interviewing people is a skill, but getting the right information is an art. Sometimes, even conversations that seem redundant might give out insights that prove critical to your business strategy. One only needs to know how to spot them.

Traditional vs AI-generated personas

Buyer personas can be made manually or automatically. Manual or traditional personas involve a lot of work. You need a set of people to collect data, another set to analyze and compile it into different segments, and yet another to make these segments reflect actual human beings.

Let’s not forget the person who has to verify the end product.

The Nielsen Norman Group has found that it takes smaller companies 22.5 to 72.5 hours to create personas. For bigger businesses, the time ranges from 55 to 102.5 hours. Data collection takes up a big portion of this time, followed by analysis and profile creation, each taking roughly the same amount of time.

Since the creators are people, the probability of existing biases, stereotypes, and personal values influencing the buyer persona remains.

Companies have struggled to successfully merge qualitative and quantitative data, without which, one lacks credibility and the other lacks human context and understanding. Manual buyer persona creation is an expensive affair; it’s not economical to do it multiple times. However, consumer behavior, purchase preferences, and consumption habits change rapidly. Personas have to reflect this – they are pointless otherwise.

One way to combat the staticity of traditional personas is by using AI-generated personas.

Built with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, they take your data and enrich it with additional information from across the web. Personas can be created for diverse audiences in minutes, reducing the time spent on market research and persona development.

The best part is that AI personas are automatically updated with real-time user data, showing changes in the customer and the industry.

How to Create a Buyer Persona? Four Simple Steps

Suppose a company wants to create a buyer persona to understand its customer base better. From the way it works, the company will have to:

• Identify relevant information sources
• Conduct persona interviews
• Analyze and segment consumer data
• Create and validate persona profiles

If their attempt is successful, they will be able to create a tool that helps them spot high-value audience segments, save marketing costs, and improve communication strategies.

1. Determine relevant data sources

You won’t have a buyer persona without the right data. Gather audience data from surveys, field studies, interviews, industry articles, usability testing reports, analytics, and your CRM database.

• Web analytics data: Google Analytics (GA4), Clarity, Hotjar, and Search Console.
• Social audience data: Twitter Analytics, Meta Business Suite, TikTok Analytics, and LinkedIn Analytics.
• Interviews: Customers, prospects, and company employees.

In some cases, you can create buyer personas using only your Google Analytics data. Of course, you should cross-check it with sales and customer service teams. Nowadays, brands go a step further and use consumer personality and sentiment analysis tools to ascertain the attitudes, moods, and emotions of their buyers.

2. Conduct buyer persona interviews

Interviews must be conducted professionally, in a way that gets the answers while keeping your interviewees comfortable. These are some of the questions you can start with:

• Where are you from (city, state, country)?
• Are you married or single?
• How many children do you have?
• How much is your income?
• What is your highest level of education?
• What is your current job role and title?
• Can you describe your career trajectory so far?
• How many years of industry experience do you have?

For more in-depth information, continue with the following:

• What are your personal and professional goals?
• What challenges or pain points do you face in achieving these goals?
• What factors influence your purchasing decisions for a product/service like ours?
• How do you consume content (e.g., blogs, videos, social media)?
• How did you find our product/service online? What keywords or phrases did you use?
• What information were you looking for when you searched for our product/service?
• Have you used products/services from our competitors? What was your experience like?
• What made you choose our product/service over our competitors?
• What improvements or features would you like to see in our product/service?

If your persona is for a B2B audience, make it a point to include these questions:

• What are your main job responsibilities?
• What tasks do you perform daily?
• What skills are essential to succeed in your job?
• What key performance indicators (KPIs) are you measured by?
• How many people are involved in the decision-making process for new products/services?

Answers to these questions will help you collect all the necessary qualitative information required to create a well-rounded buyer persona.

3. Analyze and segment consumer data

Set a goal as to how many buyer personas you want to create for your business. Ideally, they should be three to four. Don’t forget to define the objectives and results you want to achieve from these personas.

Want to increase website traffic? Segment customers according to their online habits and search behavior. Wish to boost social media engagement? Focus on their likes, dislikes, shares, upvotes, downvotes, and hashtags.

Generalize first and then get specific.

You will soon start noticing similarities between users when it comes to their demographics, interests, communication preferences, product usage, personality traits, shopping behaviors, and more.

4. Create, test, and update persona profiles

After segmenting data, you’ll get a rough idea of how your customer personas are supposed to look like, including their common characteristics. Create a file (PPT, PDF, or Word) detailing each persona, giving it a name, address, profile picture, job title, and background story. If possible, update it with new data every six months or so.

You can use a person tool or buyer persona template if you want to – it will make it easier to add and visualize the information. Continuously test them against KPIs, refining or changing them whenever necessary.

5+ Ways to Use Buyer Personas in Marketing

Currently, 44% of marketers use buyer personas in their marketing. You too can leverage them for various marketing purposes, like ad targeting, content creation, social media marketing, SEO, product development, sales, and customer journey optimization.

Ad targeting

Ad targeting becomes easier with buyer personas. Different advertising platforms provide advanced targeting options that include multiple audience attributes and criteria. You can run ad campaigns aimed at revenue-generating audience segments using demographic, psychographic, and interest-related information (e.g. LinkedIn).

Consequently, ad formats, designs, and copy can be tested against various segments to check their effectiveness.

Content creation

The whole point of content marketing is to develop resources that solve consumer pain points and further your business goals. Buyer personas help marketers create better content across all channels. You can identify the content your customers prefer, the marketing platforms they frequently use, and the times they are most active online (or offline if you’re into events).

When you know who you’re creating for, you’ll be able to develop helpful blog posts, email sequences, and newsletters that inspire people to interact with your brand and products.

Social media marketing

With 62% of the world's population using social media, your omnichannel marketing strategy is incomplete without social media marketing. Social media personas enable you to develop profiles, especially for your social audiences, which help discover viral content, videos, posts, hashtags, influencers, and topics of interest.

You can tailor your plans according to these factors, building social campaigns that drive brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

Product development

A good product is a great solution to your customers' problems. So, if you know how, when, and in which instances they need your products, you can ideate, prototype, and sell products that are market-viable and useful to your buyers.

Personalization is key to the hearts and minds of consumers today.

In a Salesforce report, 73 percent of customers say that a brand must understand how they use products to win their business. AI personas can analyze product usage patterns and detect shifts in behavior. So, you can continually refine your products as per user needs and add features when opportunities arise.

Sales pitches

If your marketing strategies work out, your sales teams will be presented with high-quality leads who are either ready to buy your product or can be directed toward making a purchase. A buyer persona document will further empower them to personalize sales materials and connect with prospects on a deeper level.

Information related to customers' goals, pain points, and product usage patterns also enables one to create powerful sales pitches and cold emails.

Customer journey optimization (CJO)

Multiple persona segments help you map customer journeys for diverse audiences. You can group prospects with similar traits and habits to build a personalized marketing or sales funnel for each segment. Personalization includes highlighting relevant benefits, addressing pain points, and using a communication strategy that resonates with that particular customer group.

Nowadays, businesses can use AI to optimize customer journeys based on real-time data and feedback, adjusting marketing strategies when needed to improve engagement and conversions.

AI Personas: Combating the Errors in Manual Personas

Persona by Delve AI is an online persona generator that automatically creates buyer personas for your business, competitors, and social media audiences. We build AI personas using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, ensuring that your personas are updated with real-time data and inputs.

Here’s how it works: You sign up for Persona by Delve AI > Connect your GA4 and/or Search Console accounts > Generate buyer personas.

Our tool processes and segments online visitors by analyzing your site analytics, social media, and consumer data, then enriches the results with 40+ data sources. A business generally gets three to six buyer personas – each marked with a user distribution percentage – for their ecommerce or B2B website.

This is an example of what a typical buyer persona looks like for the cataloging website, Goodreads, which helps people find books, quotes, and reviews. We created one using Competitor Persona by Delve AI; you simply need to enter the domain of a competitor website – data is not required.

Besides a rough overview, Goodreads’ online persona, named Matthew, provides information related to:

• User aspirations, pain points, motivations, and barriers
• Lifestyle (e.g., Matthew rents a house, owns a motorcycle, and is a pet parent)
• News sources, social networks, and brands
• Shopping websites like Amazon
• Movies and music, including streaming platforms, genres, and titles
• TV shows and books
• Values, interests, and hobbies (he loves reading books)
• Content types such as articles, how-to guides, and quotes
• Preferences (news, movies, travel, music, and entertainment)
• Products, services, and tools he wants to purchase
• Places and events Matthew is likely to visit or attend
• Industry-specific insights or keywords related to book publishing

Under DISTRIBUTION, you can see traffic acquisition channels and keywords; organic plus paid. Goodreads’ persona further provides demographic (age, gender, language, and job profile), geographic (city, region, and country), and behavioral distribution (actions, intent, and decision-making process) of users within this segment.

The AI persona solves many problems associated with manual personas, such as time, cost, quality, and usability. It takes just a few minutes to create one, and the cost is negligible compared to the quality and multi-faceted uses of the personas generated.

Create Buyer Persona with Delve AI

Customer data helps you create buyer personas. Buyer personas help you understand your target audience, which ultimately leads to a successful marketing campaign. Thus, quality data and persona generation are pivotal to the growth of your business. So, what are you waiting for? Create your first persona with Delve AI.