How to Create a Persona with Delve AI in 11 Steps (Examples + Templates)

User personas do not describe real people. However, they are made up of data that belongs to real users. Basically, they help you answer questions like, “What does the customer think about a product like yours?” or “How would an end-user use your product or service?” These questions must be answered before you create a product or launch a marketing campaign.

After all, personalization is the IT strategy to success today. With 71% of consumers expecting brands to deliver personalized experiences, creating personas has become essential for businesses.

Our post lists how to create a persona in 11 steps. Not just with a persona template, but by using Delve AI’s persona generator. We’ll show you how user personas can answer the three most important questions about your target audience: Who are they? What are their goals? What are their friction points and purchase triggers? So, let’s get started!

What Is a User Persona?

First mentioned by Alan Cooper in his book, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (1999), a user persona is a fictional profile of your ideal users based on their demographics, behaviors, jobs to be done, motivations, and goals. A lot of qualitative and quantitative data goes into creating a persona, from user research studies, competitor analysis, and web analytics.

But why do user personas matter? Well, a detailed persona can guide everything from product development to smooth user experiences. Also, knowing your audience further enables you to shape product roadmaps, refine features, and make product marketing decisions.

Done right, they can help you:

• Maintain customer-centricity
• Develop relatable product and marketing content
• Spot new business opportunities

Think about it. People use the same product to solve different problems – for example, a writer may use ChatGPT for grammar checks, while a developer might use it for debugging. Product and marketing should understand different user types (personas) to ensure relatability and product adoption.

Take, for example, a white American male who’s really into the Super Bowl. He drives a Harley Davidson, drinks ol’ mead, and is in the middle of rediscovering himself at the good old age of 65. What does this mean to the average person? Nothing. But for Harley-Davidson, it’s their new customer segment.

This is the idea behind persona-based marketing – creating products, messages, and experiences that connect with the right people (personas).

User personas vs buyer personas

People often use personas in content, UX, product management, sales, and marketing. Customer personas play a big role in personalization, targeting, and trend prediction. But here’s the thing. User personas are created before you build a product so you can design something that fits specific user needs.

Buyer personas? You can create those anytime. And no, they’re not the same thing. The person buying a product isn’t always the one using it. Sometimes, yes, but in the B2B context, not so much.

A user persona includes everything a buyer persona does, plus a few extras like:

• Product use cases – what consumers need the product or service for.
• User stories – how they use your product in real life.
• Scenarios – what happens when they use it.
• User journeys – the path they take to achieve their end goal with the product.

You can picture your product's end users and focus on how they interact with it, what they want to achieve, and what’s getting in their way. So, while buyer personas sell the product, user personas make it worth buying.

How to Create a Persona with Delve AI: A 11 Step Process

You can create user personas using templates, online tools, or AI persona generators like Delve AI. The process involves four steps on the basic level: collect data, analyze said data, create a persona, and update the persona.

Here are the basic persona creation steps in more detail:

• Collect data: Yes, even if you've done market research before, do it again. The goal is to collect as much information as possible about your customers.
• Analyze data: Look for patterns. Find similarities among users – common demographics, needs, or pain points – that allow you to put them in the same segments.
• Create personas: Fill the information into a structured persona template. Write a persona document detailing their goals, challenges, and motivations.
• Update personas: People change, and so should your personas. Add or update your persona segments to keep them relevant and useful.

And remember, no stereotypes, no assumptions, and absolutely no biases. Your customers and users are dynamic and diverse, so make sure your personas reflect that.

All of this is the manual bit of persona development. Let’s talk a bit about the automatic part of it. Several personas are built using interviews, surveys, and existing prospect data. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t easily scalable or responsive to real-time updates.

All of this is the manual bit of user persona development. Let’s talk a bit about the automatic part of it. Several personas are built using interviews, surveys, and existing prospect data. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t easily scalable or responsive to real-time updates. So online persona templates – like Make My Persona – are reduced to being mere data visualization tools.

A viable solution would be a tool that uses qualitative and quantitative methods (web analytics, competitor intelligence, user research data, and social insights) to create dynamic personas frequently updated with fresh user data. Personas with humanistic characteristics, say a name, a backstory, and a profile picture, that answer simple questions, like:

• How many types of users does my business have?
• Who are these users? What do they wish to accomplish with my product/service?
• What are the differences between the different user segments?
• What changes can I make to my product and value proposition to entice these users?

Now, AI personas can track shifts in consumer behavior and detect anomalies right when they happen.

User privacy is a big deal in this era. With more people using ad blockers and governments passing stricter privacy laws, brands need a smarter way to understand their audience. Instead of tracking individual users, you can focus on group behavior using AI-generated persona profiles. AI personas can easily track shifts in consumer behavior and detect anomalies right when they happen. They allow you to spot digital user trends, identify what jobs people need to get done, and improve your products and marketing strategies, without invading user privacy.

The following steps will help you create personas manually, but the last one will guide you through the process of building user personas with AI and machine learning technologies.

Step 1. Conduct User Research: Both Qualitative & Quantitative

To create personas, you need real data, otherwise, you’re just creating fictional user archetypes with no real-world applications. And user personas are based on real users. You can gather this information from multiple sources:

• user interviews
• customer support teams
• CSAT and NPS surveys
• existing customer data
• web analytics
• social media
• competitor intelligence
• third-party data providers

On-site surveys with a few open-ended questions are a great start. But don’t stop there, talk to your customers. Be an investigative journalist. Dig deep. Conduct usability tests to see how users interact with your site. Heatmaps and session recordings also answer questions like:

• How do users navigate your site?
• Where do they get stuck?
• What actions do they take before making a purchase?

The best way to bring personas to life is talking to people. You won’t know what they don’t tell you. Unless, of course, you’re a mind reader. Speak to your customers and the teams that regularly interact with them. Pro tip: you can gather an absurd amount of useful data just by analyzing support tickets.

Surveys, interviews, focus groups, use them all. The more people you talk to, the richer your data pool. Ask them how they feel about your brand, your product, their pain points, and their needs. Does everyone in your company know the same things about your customers? Or is there something new to learn?

Start with what you have: past customer interactions, old surveys, and educated guesses. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a solid foundation. Make assumptions and then validate them. If you have experience in your field, you probably have a few good hunches about your customers. And remember, personas aren’t just built on qualitative data. Your quantitative sources – Google Analytics, social media listening tools like Hootsuite, and competitor intelligence tools like SparkToro – are equally important.

You had the rhyme; now you have the reason.

You can outsource market research if you don’t have the time. Third-party research firms can collect data for you. Online survey platforms can help, too. You can also offer visitors a discount or free trial in exchange for answering your website surveys.

Assumptions don’t do you much good when developing personas. Your personas need to be built on data – lots and lots of data. Want a clever way to let users group themselves? Take a page from Harvard Business Review: when you subscribe, they prompt you to select interests for newsletters.

A simple method that can be used on existing customers and potential users.

On a separate note: If all you have is a business idea and a tentative target audience, don’t worry – you still have options.

First, conduct competitor research. Look at businesses in your space and spot the kind of customers they attract. A tool like Competitor Persona lets you build a persona based on your competitors’ user base. Plan B? Use Audience Persona by Delve AI to create an ideal customer profile for your business. Just enter your company name, product, location, and target audience, and it will generate a persona for you. And no, not the generic kind you’d get from a Gen AI tool like ChatGPT; this one’s tailored to your market.

Step 2. Analyze Data to Build Persona Segments

Now that you have information about your users, it’s time to segment it. Why? Because not all of your customers are the same. There are sets and subsets of people with similar interests, preferences, and shopping habits. Your goal is to group those who share attributes that benefit your business.

Let’s say you’re creating products for golf enthusiasts. Two people might both be Millennials, but only one of them plays golf. What is your primary criteria for segmentation — age or interests? In this case, interests take priority. While age can be a useful filter, purchasing decisions are driven by personal interests.

There are several other ways to segment your audience:

• Demographics – age, gender, income, education, location.
• Psychographics – interests, values, lifestyle, personality.
• Behavior – shopping patterns, brand interactions, product usage.
• Transactions – average order value (AOV), frequency, customer lifetime value.

Spot the right people and group them. Collect common data points – everything from spending habits to personality traits. As you work through this, ask yourself some questions. Check our post on persona development questions to find the most useful ones.

Don’t miss questions that reveal how this person behaves in his day-to-day. It can impact how he interacts with or buys your product or service. And help you build stronger user segments. Now, look at all the data and start segmenting. Experts recommend 1 to 3 persona groups; anything more is too much.

Step 3. Select the Type of User Personas You Want

Not all personas are the same. In B2C, we focus on demographic elements, while B2B personas emphasize job profiles. Take Delve AI’s persona templates, for example – we cover four types: B2C, B2B, SaaS, and employee personas. SaaS personas focus on technology, while employee personas highlight skills and career aspirations. So, select the user archetypes you need before creating a persona.

These are the three common approaches listed by the Interaction Design Foundation: goal-directed personas, role-based personas, and engaging personas.

Goal-directed personas

They have a clear objective — they use your product to accomplish a specific task. Your job is to analyze their process, challenges, and how they navigate obstacles along the way.

Role-based personas

Built using both qualitative and quantitative data, they focus on a user’s role within an organization. You must consider where they’ll use the product, their responsibilities, and decision-making power. Pay attention to job titles, seniority levels, and business objectives.

Engaging personas

A mix of goal and role-based personas, they add depth by exploring emotions, psychology, and personal stories. Include personality traits, hobbies, and motivations — that allow you to design for real people, not just abstract profiles. More colorful than the rest, engaging personas make you think that you’re building a product for a person and not just some random document.

Step 4. Choose the Persona Template or Tool You Want To Use

As mentioned, you can either pick a user persona template or an online persona generator to create personas. Templates make your work easier by giving you a structured document to start with; you don’t need to write down the main elements you want to add, or worry about the looks and presentation of your persona profiles. All you need to do is enter details into the pre-built fields.

Templates work if you’re just starting out and want to get a basic understanding of your audience. Most of them have the core persona attributes down pat, like user goals, pain points, scenarios, triggers, context, and other demographic details. You can try the different types of persona templates that exist on Figma and Canva for this purpose. Or you can use our editable persona templates, available in PPT, PDF, and Word formats free of cost.

However, if you’re not a beginner and have substantial data collected, we recommend going with an AI persona generator like Delve AI.

AI generated personas have a massive advantage over templates. For instance, the entire persona creation process is automatic, with hardly any manual steps. You can create personas by connecting any of your data sources (eg, Google Analytics), get in-depth audience details, and ensure that they’re always relevant and up-to-date.

Step 5. Fill in Demographic Details: Age, Gender, Location

You have the data. You’ve selected your persona types. And you’ve picked the tools. Now it’s time to flesh out your personas. We’ll be using Delve AI’s persona generator for this exercise. Sign up or log in to Delve AI, select the persona type, and start by filling in the demographic information.

Before we proceed, let’s clarify one thing: demographics are not the most crucial part of a persona. But begin with age and gender. Pick names that represent your audience's gender, age, and ethnicity. Don’t give popular names like Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts; that will make the personas hard to relate with. Next, write a quote that represents the main goal of that particular persona in relation to your product.

You can also add the marketing generation, locality, and location your audience belongs to. For example, we have Ji-ah Gym, a 23-year-old Gen Z Asian American woman residing in Seattle, USA. Do the same with the profile pictures. You can either upload your own or select from the 8+ options we’ve provided for that segment.

Step 6. Complete the Persona Summary & Jobs To Be Done

A person’s background is very important. So, in the section that gives you a brief description of the persona – the summary, responsibilities, and jobs to be done (i.e., what your users want to get done with your product), write down all you can gather on that audience group. Keep it straight to the point, and avoid unnecessary jargon. This will help people looking at your persona profiles relate to this audience segment.

If you’ve generated a B2C persona, it will be highlighted in blue and include the persona’s aspirations. B2B personas, marked with green in the figure above, list who your users report to, their work responsibilities, and the jobs they want to perform with your software.

Step 7. Add Psychographic Elements: Goals, Obstacles, & Triggers

Next up, we have sections outlining Ji-ah’s buying behavior, psychological drivers, and key obstacles. As you can see, Ji-ah’s persona profile covers other elements under each category, like her goals, motivations, needs, factors influencing buying decisions, purchase triggers, role in the decision-making process, core challenges, barriers, and day-to-day pain points.

Click on the edit icon available to add your inputs. In the figure below, we have written down Ji-ah’s buying behavior. It’s critical to learn your target audience’s behavior if you want to track usage patterns, refine pricing, and create products that meet user demands.

For example, when it comes to purchasing an item, Ji-ah values tools that are easy to use, relevant to her industry, and backed by success stories from other marketers. She is drawn to innovative solutions, case studies, and trusted recommendations, which encourage her to explore new marketing tools.

Step 8. Create a Personality Traits & Emotions Charts

To know the finer points of your persona’s psychographics, try adding an emotion analysis and personality traits module.

Delve AI’s persona generator uses the five-factor model of personality or the OCEAN model, which encompasses five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. For emotions, we use the 2D valence-arousal model or the circumplex model of emotion, as you can see below.

You may be wondering? Why personality and emotions? Well, consumer personality traits are crucial to a successful product development plan. After all, personality influences how people shop, engage, and interact within your product. Some like things flashy, while others don't. Personality traits dig into user emotions, allowing you to map the user journey, ultimately influencing decisions and experiences.

You can add or edit Ji-ah’s personality traits and emotions. All you need to do is select the values, ranging from 0 (low) to 100 (high), under each personality trait, and it will reflect in the personality chart.

Step 9. Map How Users Interact with Your Site

Nowadays, it’s essential to know how users interact with your site – their devices, marketing channels, and timings. Although not a priority, you can use this information to:

• Optimize your website for mobile and desktop
• Allocate budget to high-performing channels (organic, PPC, social media)
• Publish content, emails, and posts when engagement is at its peak

You can get this data from places like Google Analytics (if you have a functional website) and put it down in our ‘Device & Connection’ and ‘First Interaction’ modules.

As per the screenshot, the user (Ji-ah Gym) is likely accessing the website using a computer with a small display and a mid-range device running on Windows. She first visited the site through organic search, possibly on a weekday (Tuesday) at 2 AM (early morning).

Step 10. Find Popular Products, Topics, & Keywords

A good product plan is incomplete without a good marketing strategy. And you need to know the kind of content your users love to plan a successful content strategy. And not just content types but the products, pages, topics, and keywords they are buzzed about. This is the only way to ensure that they react and engage with your messaging.

‘Influential Resources’ section lists the most influential content sources for Ji-ah, including social media (LinkedIn), email, blogs/articles (Medium, etc.), tools (Google Docs), and educational content on our site. Under ‘Resonating Pages,’ we get the top five webpages Ji-ah likes on Delve AI, with page titles and URLs, like:

• What Is a Customer Persona?
• Top 12 Persona Tools & Templates
• 9+ Use Cases of Generative AI in Marketing
• How to Create Personas Using ChatGPT
• Consumer Personality Traits (Big Five)

The search terms most relevant to her, including delve ai, customer persona, what is a customer persona, and ai persona, are displayed in the ‘Resonating Keywords’ module.

You can fill in the keywords in the search bar and then set a value (on a scale of 0-100) against each of them. Note: You can easily gather page traffic and keyword data from Google Analytics and Search Console. SEO personas can further assist you in finding keywords related to your target market.

Step 11. Include Resonating Technologies, Tools & More

You’ve built the major part of your user persona. But besides these elements, you can add a bunch of other attribute modules to your persona document. For example, career profiles, communication preferences, social media channels, brands, websites, technologies, interests, tools, and more.

Here’s how each of these attributes tell you about your persona:

• Career profiles show factors shaping decisions.
• Communication preferences tell you how they like to receive information.
• The social channels, brands, and hashtags reveal who they trust and engage with.
• Their go-to websites signal where they look for answers.
• The tools and technologies show you the ecosystem you're asking them to fit your product into.

These elements really give your personas a more complete and all-rounded look, adding more information to the final output.

Tip: Add teammates who can come along and edit your personas. Persona creation should be a team exercise! Not only will it increase adaptability but also make your personas better. Much better. Once you’re happy with the output, you can download the persona document in PPT, PDF, or JPG formats.

Create a Persona with Delve AI’s User Persona Generator

We’ve created personas manually, but how about speeding things up a little? The right way to do this is leveraging Delve AI’s User Persona Generator to build personas for your target users. We use AI and machine learning systems to automatically process your first-party data (surveys, interviews, and existing user reports) and then enrich it with 40+ public data sources (from reviews, ratings, forums, etc.) to generate personas for your brand.

You get the ability to create personas for specific products, locations, and use cases, along with sample user journeys that give you a more human way to know your audience.

To develop an AI persona, visit Delve AI > sign up or log in > select Research Persona from the options provided. On the main dashboard, enter your audience name and description, then upload your supporting research files, like interview transcripts, product feedback, user testimonials, etc. Once you hit “Generate personas,” it can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour for your personas to be generated, depending on your data.

You can either have one persona for the entire audience or multiple persona segments for your business; you get to specify the number. In the figure below, we show a sample of a segment-specific persona (summary view) created by our platform.

Each user segment has three tabs: Persona details, distribution, and sample journeys. Under details, you can see all your persona attributes, like:

• Name, picture, age, generation (e.g., millennial), location
• Company, industry, job function, income
• Profile information, buying behavior, psychological drivers
• Lifestyle (marital status, family/pets, homeownership, automotive ownership)
• Communication preferences (phone, email, chat, social, in-person)
• News sources, websites, social networks, and brands
• Preferences (news, movies, sports, travel, music, food, and entertainment)
• Places likely to visit, values, interests, and hobbies
• Products, services, and tools used/purchased
• Likely interactions (device, connection, channel, day)
• Resources used in decision-making
• Industry-specific insights based on page views/searches or other interactions

Sample user journey maps are further provided to help you understand who your users are, including their goal, thoughts, actions, and experiences across each stage.

Bonus: you can use our Digital Twin of Customer software to chat with your personas and get feedback on your latest product, feature, or marketing plan in 15+ languages!

Some Do’s & Dont’s of Persona Creation

It’s important to know the rights (and the wrong) things to do while creating personas. For starters, use diverse data types, don't just pick one and stick to it. The more varied your data, the less room there is for error and bias. Mix qualitative and quantitative sources, and involve different teams and stakeholders in the process to avoid data silos.

You should use different attributes, modules, and data visualization techniques to make your personas more engaging and interactive. But at the same time, don’t the visuals consume a disproportionate amount of your time. Use quotes directly from user interviews, and support your personas with scenarios and journey maps.

Each persona should tell a story about how users interact with your product and what they want out of it. It shouldn't just be a profile of an individual, so keep the product context front and center, and focus on the attributes that actually help the product roadmap.

Avoid adding demographic details that serve no purpose. Behavioral attributes – workflows, user goals, decisions that impact UX – and psychological attributes will almost always be more useful. Don't create personas in bulk either; focus on the segments that matter most. And never guess. Personas built on assumptions rather than data will steer your product in the wrong direction.

Knowing your ideal users is only the half of it. It's equally important to define your negative personas (i.e., the users your product isn't built for) so your team knows who to deliberately deprioritize.

User Persona Examples for Nike & Cursor AI

We’ve built many personas using traditional and automatic approaches. In this section, we’ll show you some examples of personas we created for Nike and Cursor AI.

To start with, we generated a persona for Nike using Delve AI’s Research Persona tool (that’s the one we use for user personas). All we had to do was enter Nike’s audience description, and the software created several persona segments for us in minutes.

So, we have Bradley Schafer, a 29-year-old single man living in Los Angeles who is fitness-driven, tech-savvy, and has strong brand preferences. Here are a few more things you should know about him:

• Interests: Running, basketball, fitness, sports technology, sneakers, athleisure.
• Brands: Nike, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Amazon.
• Retailers: Amazon.
• Shopping Habits: Online shopping, follows major sporting events and product releases.
• Media: Follows sports news (ESPN, Sports Illustrated), watches documentary-style fitness content and podcasts, active on TikTok & Instagram.
• Hashtags: #sneakerhead, #justdoit, #running, #fitness, #nike.
• Personality: Optimistic, energetic, trend-forward.
• Emotional Analysis: Motivated, inspired, and driven by athletic achievement.

Bradley is an active brand engager who tracks personal bests on Strava and follows athletes and influencers across sports communities. Besides, he plays basketball, trains for marathons, and enjoys an active social lifestyle in Los Angeles.

That said, Nike should consider these insights when reaching out to this segment:

• Best time for engagement: Weekends.
• Daily interaction with Nike: High, especially during major sporting events.
• Resonating content: Documentary-style fitness videos, podcasts, and athlete endorsements from ESPN.
• Factors influencing purchase decisions: Innovation, quality, and peer reviews from Reddit, Discord, and Strava communities.
• Buying barriers: High price points, limited availability of running gear and peer validation.

If Nike wanted to target users like Bradley, they'd likely find success with athlete-led content and campaigns tied to major sporting events.

Moving on to Cursor AI, the AI-powered code editor built for developers and engineering teams. This is an example of what their typical users look like. Charlotte Rutherford, Cursor AI's online persona, delves into users' aspirations, pain points, and motivations.

Charlotte is a Scrum Master at Atlassian based in New York who "measures success by how safe, heard, and aligned her team feels." She acts as a connector between engineers, product, and leadership, curating tools and spaces that keep people engaged and emotionally understood.

Let's get some more info on this engineering-focused Scrum Master. According to the persona profile, she's:

• Motivated by reducing anxiety and conflict.
• Engages with topics related to management, corporate culture, remote work, and team engagement.
• Communicates primarily via chat and messaging (low phone and email engagement).
• Active on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Discord, Instagram, and TikTok.
• Reads Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes, and BuzzFeed.
• Likely to attend events and conferences like INBOUND and South by Southwest.
• Prefers virtual events, podcasts, and community sharing content formats.
• Interested in management, technology, corporate culture, strategic planning, and leadership.
• Uses collaboration tools including Slack, Miro, Discord, and Notion.

To attract a user like Charlotte, Cursor AI can highlight seamless developer collaboration features and integrations with tools she already uses daily, like Slack. Since Charlotte prioritizes transparency, messaging that emphasizes team visibility, async-friendly workflows, and frictionless communication will work better.

User Groups & Personas: We Still Have a Long Way to Go

You’ve learned how to create personas today. You know that generating a user persona is not a piece of cake. It’s tough. Right now, the process is still being carried out in a largely outdated fashion, primarily using quantitative methods based on user research, surveys, and interviews. Of course, there’s still the use of demographic data – age, gender, and location.

Individually, both methods do provide some sort of insight into user motivations. However, they are static and useless when it comes to real-time information about user preferences, interests, and jobs to be done. AI-generated personas are the way to the future and the only way to understand consumer wants and needs.

So sign up to Delve AI’s persona generator software and create your AI-powered personas today!