Updated June 24, 2026
You’ve probably heard in marketing conversations about the concept of a buyer persona. You may have been told you need one or several. But what is it exactly, and why would you need one?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer or group of customers, typically based on market research and available data about your existing buyers. Depending on your business and its products or services, you may need more than one persona.
What Are Buyer Personas Used For?
Your buyer personas guide your marketing campaigns and your business’ overall voice toward its prospects. Defining these personas allows you to determine where to find your ideal buyers, refine your messaging, and speak to them in a way that offers real solutions to their unique pain points. In order to effectively attract and convert the right leads for your business, you need to know who they are, where they are, and what they need that your business can provide.
Buyer personas are also used in the development of the buyer journey and customer journey. These are the predicted paths a specific persona will take from the moment they discover they have a problem to beyond the purchase.
An Example of Buyer Personas
As an example, let’s suppose your business designs and manufactures educational toys for children. Looking at your purchase data, you discover that a large number of your buyers are young mothers, but your sales team is also telling you they are receiving inquiries from schools about purchasing your products for classrooms.
These are two very unique types of buyers, both of which purchase for different reasons. In this specific case, you’d develop two buyer personas: one for young mothers and one for school district purchasers. Each persona requires different messaging to address pain points and offer your products as solutions. You could also expand this a bit further and develop two personas for purchasing groups: one for individual consumers (such as parents, grandparents, friends), and one for wholesale purchasers (such as schools, daycares, and therapists).
Steps to Creating Your Buyer Persona(s)
1. Collect Past Customer Information
Information about your past customers provides valuable insights into what type of prospects have converted into buyers already. Leverage information from your sales and marketing teams, as well as your CRM and analytics tools. Think about where you might collect data about your buyers and start assessing how it translates into categories of buyers.
2. Define Trends and Common Traits
Once you’ve started collecting the information in the first step, you can start to dive deeper and identify any trends, common traits, and similar pain points or purchase behaviors. Categorize your buyers into groups of similar traits.
3. Discover Key Demographics
Demographics such as age range, gender, and education may not actually be a defining factor for your business’ buyer personas. Although these factors may affect your messaging in small ways, in the overall definition of your buyers, it likely won’t affect it by much. Key demographics that may be more significant can include geographical location, budget range (applicable if you sell products/services with varying price ranges) and job position.
4. Explore Psychographics
Psychographics have become more important in reaching your ideal audience in recent years. Psychographics represent the values and belief systems of your potential buyers, including whether your business aligns with their goals, motivations, and preferred methods of communication. Defining your buyers’ attitudes and interests helps guide your messaging and marketing decisions.
5. Create Your Persona Profile(s)
Once you’ve completed the steps above, create your buyer persona profile(s). Use these profiles as official guidelines for your marketing and communication efforts to target and reach your ideal buyers. They’re also useful for internal staff.
6. Test in the Real World
While this process is guided by existing data, some of it can also be speculation. Once you’ve defined your persona(s), test them using real marketing campaigns, and track results against your efforts. Ask for feedback from your team as well; they may have valuable insights to help gauge whether your efforts need adjusting. Of course, your buyer persona(s) are fluid documents and should be adjusted over time as market behaviors change.
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Developing your business’ ideal buyers in official Buyer Persona documents gives your team a powerful guide for your marketing efforts. Using these guidelines will refine your target audience and your messaging, and convert real prospects into buyers more efficiently.
