User personas: The Ultimate Guide, Process & Template

What we will cover

• What is a user persona?
• How personas will improve your marketing
• Why create a user/marketing persona?
• How to create a marketing persona
• Exercise 1: Who
• What makes a good persona?
• Demographic information in personas
• Exercise 2: What
• Exercise 3: Where
• Exercise 4: Values
• Exercise 5: Goals
• Exercise 6: Personality
• A free User Persona template
• Assumption Vs Data
• Where can I find data
• How many personas?
• Common mistakes
• Personas & AI
• How often should I review
• Internal use cases

What is a user persona?

For businesses, a user, buyer or marketing persona, also known as an avatar, is a fictional profile representing your target buyer, customer or user. 

Personas remind organisations to place buyers, customers and users at the centre of strategy and campaign decisions. As a tool for generating empathy, they also make it easier for marketers to create engaging content.

As with a character in a story, a persona has a name, physical characteristics, fits into particular groups (demographics), and has particular habits, behaviours and preferences (psychographics).

Depending on the type of business you run, you may need one persona or several. For example, some marketers will benefit from creating separate buyer, customer and user personas while others may only need one or two of these.

The process of personas

When creating personas at Vu, we use workshops to capture lots of small bits of information and group them together. From there, we can do customer research to back up or dispel those assumptions.

So we recommend you get some recyclable post-its (from a green supplier), marker pens and a blank wall as we go through the process, but of course you can use Zoom or Miro to create and move virtual stickies around.

We will assume you have these ready for our exercises later on so that you can then populate your template.

The difference between buyer, customer and user personas

The distinction between buyers, customers and users can most easily be understood in a B2B context. In this case, the ‘buyer’ is the decision-maker responsible for deciding whether the business needs your product or service. The ‘customer’ is the owner of the company – the one who will ultimately benefit. The ‘user’ is the person or team who will be actually using the product or service.

In a B2C context, one persona may cover all of these or you may need to craft a buyer/customer persona and a user persona (e.g., an educational toy will be bought by a parent but used by a child).

When should you start working on creating your personas?

Because they will inform your decision-making, we say they should be the very first item on your marketing agenda.

How personas will improve your marketing

“You don’t need to resonate with everyone, you need to resonate with someone.”

From a marketing perspective, personas make it far easier to create relatable content. Why? Because it’s much easier to write for a single person, even if that person is semi-fictional, than it is to write to a group.

The benefits of well-crafted personas benefit the entire business. Sales cycles are shorter, customer journeys are smoother, campaign spend is more efficient and time is focused on developing products and services that people are likely to buy.

By the end of this exercise, you will probably be thinking of running your campaigns very differently to how you are now.

Why create a user/marketing persona?

Personas can improve both the targeting and messaging of your marketing campaigns. 

The more you know about your audience, the easier it is to target them. Personas give you a broad idea of what types of media – including social media – they prefer, what devices they own and when they are most active online. 

For example, is your typical buyer is a time-pushed mobile user with a preference for visual content? Then focusing your budget on high-impact Instagram or Pinterest ads and posts is likely to be more cost-efficient than writing long-form articles on LinkedIn.

In terms of content, personas will help your team create relatable articles, videos, adverts and social media posts because they can refer to and visualise a real person rather than an abstract concept.

So how do you go about making a persona?

How to create a marketing persona

So how do you go about creating marketing personas? First, you can save yourself some design and admin time by downloading a decent persona template

Think of a persona as being built from three elements. In priority order, these are:

1. Psychographics. These are the characteristics, personality traits and values that drive your buyers’ behaviours. What are their hopes and goals? What are their fears and frustrations? How do they spend their days? What are their hobbies? It also includes the media they prefer. Do they scour X for the latest news or watch it on the BBC? Do they spend their time building social groups on Facebook or professional networks on LinkedIn? Do they doom-scroll Instagram or browse media boards on Pinterest?
2. Demographics. These classic marketing categories are still important when you want to target your buyers geographically or by disposable income. Age and gender may also be important depending on your business.
3. Fictional identity. By this time, you may already be developing a hazy picture of a person who matches the psychographic and demographic profile of your typical buyer. Naming your persona will help to solidify them and communicate their characteristics throughout your team. It can help to use a memorable name (e.g., Bob Budget, the buyer who always prioritises the bottom line).

Note: Whether or not to draw a portrait of your personas is an area of debate. On the plus side, it can help to relate to your buyer when creating content. However, there is the risk that you exclude buyers by reinforcing stereotypes.

You are aiming for a broad representation of your typical customer, so avoid getting bogged down in detail.

Exercise 1: Who are they?

Post its ready?

Write down the last 10 Products/Services you sold on individual post-its. (eg. website, Google Ads, SEO)

Now write down the job role of the person that bought it and attach it to the Product Service. (Marketing Manager, Founder, Comms Lead)

Group together your job roles and Products & Services. (eg. Comms Lead & Marketing Manager both bought a website)

You should now have at least on persona and something they have bought.

What makes a good persona?

By this stage it is probably apparent that creating a persona could be an extremely long-winded, detailed process.

This is not the intention.

A good persona will contain just enough detail to positively impact your marketing campaigns – no more or less.

The key questions that our persona process will be able to answer are:

• Who is your customer?
• What do they care about?
• How should you talk to them?

“And what about the User personas I hear you cry!?” (thank you one person), this will also be uncovered further in the next steps, so either skip the above or consider buyer/marketing personas as a part of the exercise too.

Demographic information in personas

Next step is honing down on some general information.

Without predudice lets try and build a frankensteins monster of these customers from our first exercise.

Exercise 2: What are they about?

Start pinning answers for the following questions onto your persona groups:

1. What age are they? (30’s is fine, try to avoid 18-65 eg everyone at work)
2. What gender? (We apprechiate there wont be a single answer, be general, 70% female for example)
3. Eductional background? (Did they leave school early or study a phD?)
4. Income? (Do you know roughly what earn or what spending power they have in their role?)
5. From? Family? (Do you have any idea about their family background or current family setup?)
6. Where are they based? Or How big is their organisational reach? (South West or Nationwide supplier for example)

Calling out the BS*

We have done these exercises 1000 times over, some get it and others are more challenging, “what is the point in this?”, well if thats you, then lets explore deeper…

Connecting with your audience is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Truly understanding where they’ve come from helps you make sense of how they think and why they make certain decisions.

And don’t forget these are your customers. Gaining this insight might even reveal why they chose you in the first place.

Theres probably a small space for a quick football aside here, In the documentary Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, Sir Alex discusses how he encouraged players to draw inspiration from their family histories, using personal pride as a motivational tool. 

This deep-seated empathy and attention to individual backgrounds were not just about creating loyalty; they were strategic, enabling Ferguson to tailor his management style to each player’s unique circumstances.

Exercise 3: Where are they hanging out?

Start pinning answers for the following questions onto your persona groups:

1. Interests? (eg. Reading about new cuisine)
2. What hobbies do they have? (eg. Cooking)
3. Communites they are apart of? (Local council, clubs etc… – these often unpick values based decisions)
4. Where do they hang out online? (social platforms, blogs, forums etc..)
5. Where in person? (the pub, the gym – depending on mindset)

You should have quite an array of conext for each of your persona groups now, and despite the fact they are all your customer what you might be discovering is how different they all are.

If not, then its possible you dont have the answers.

Our suggestion is to get to know them better, we have a section on where you might find some data later on, but we would advise that calendarise some time every 6/12 months to have a checkin call with some of your key customers.

When you do this, dont sell! Its an opportunity to ask about them and their challenges, dont put them off by feeling like you are funnelling them into a sales process.

Exercise 4: Values alignment

“Values underpin our feelings, choices, and behaviours — they guide how we interpret the world and make decisions.”
Schwartz, S.H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65.

• Next up, lets consider what values might be important to our personas and attach some, heres a guide to start you off:

• If you havent already, it might also be a worthwhile to consider your own values, perhaps there is an alignment you weren’t aware of?
• What beliefs may come from these values? (eg sustianbility may instil a belief of how someone wants to do business)

Exercise 5: Goals & Frustrations

This section really gets into the User persona, their experience and expectations, the following questions can help you go on the empathy journey of being in their shoes.

• What does a ‘win’ look like for this persona?
• What are they actively trying to improve, grow, or change?
• What desires/positive impact are they trying to achieve?
• What wastes their time, drains their energy, or causes repeated friction?
• What are they tired of hearing, trying, or being promised?
• What underlying anxieties or pressures might influence their decisions?

Goals can be both practical and emotional, for example, improving campaign performance, building brand awareness, or simply feeling more confident in their strategy.

Frustrations reveal what’s slowing them down or causing stress, for us that might be poor tacking, disjointed tools, or pressure from leadership.

Capturing these helps you align your messaging and solutions with what matters most to them, not just what you’re selling.

You can take this step further by journey mapping their aspirations, thoughts and feelings at each touch point with your brand.

Exercise 6: Personality Dimensions

Here, you look at the traits and tendencies that shape how someone thinks, works, and makes decisions.

Are they data-driven or instinctive? Fast-moving or methodical? Independent or collaborative? Understanding these dimensions helps you shape not just what you say, but how you say it.

It also helps you anticipate what kind of customer experience they’ll respond to, whether it’s hands-on support or tools that let them take the lead.

Setup your matrix for each persona with two opposing ends eg conventional or rebellious and create a scale in the space inbetween.

Then pop a marker where each one sits.

This would be someone fairly rebellious.

A free User Persona template just for you

so thats it!

All thats left is to create an alliterative name for each persona based on how you understand them now – you will have discovered something funny or deeply personal about them – dont miss this chance for a bit of fun.

Then you can help yourself to our Customer Persona Template and populate the various sections. You will need to find or generate a profile pic for them, and all of a sudden you have a type of CV that brings them alive.

Another fun resource is Hubspot’s persona creator.

We will leave you with a couple of things, assumption vs data (and where to find it), a few mistakes to avoid when doing this and some good use cases from here.

Assumption Vs Data based personas

So far we have worked within the assumption of you and your team.

These are often based on past experience, gut feeling, or internal beliefs, and can be spot on, but they aren’t always grounded in evidence.

While they can be useful starting points, relying on assumptions alone can lead to blind spots or missed opportunities.

Data, on the other hand, gives us something to test, validate, or challenge those assumptions. It helps turn vague impressions into informed insights. In practice, the most effective decisions often come from holding assumptions lightly and being willing to adjust them as real data comes in.

Where can I find data to help me build my persona?

Data can be broadly divided into quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data can be reduced to numbers which makes it a lot more scalable than qualitative data. On the other hand, qualitative data provides richer detail. Both are valuable when constructing your persona.

You can quickly design and circulate an online poll which provides enough data to make some generalisations about your main customers. You might find out, for example, that most of your customers shop at Sainsbury’s and that 80% of them do so because they believe the quality of the produce is better.

From this information, you could invite a small number of willing interviewees to form a focus group. This would help you to delve deeper into their buying habits, personal values, brand loyalties and other psychographics.

By picking out common themes from these discussions you can begin to create a picture of your ‘typical’ customer.

Some sources of quantitative data include:

• Google Analytics
• Customer surveys
• Online polls
• Questionnaires
• Product star ratings

Qualitative data can often be collected from:

• Focus groups
• Talking to front line staff
• In-depth surveys
• Product review text
• Call centre logs

How many personas do you need?

During the data collection process, you may find that two or more distinct types of customer start to emerge. Should you try and blend these together or create distinct personas for each type? How many personas do you need?

Some sources recommend no more than three personas but ultimately, it is up to you how many you create. The more personas you target, the more accurate your marketing can be. On the other hand, you will need to direct more resources into your campaigns. At the end of the day, every individual customer is unique so you will have to make some compromises.

To go back to our fictional Sainsbury’s shoppers, the 80% of quality-focused shoppers could be represented by ‘Vicky the Value Shopper.’ You might decide to focus all of your campaigning on this persona or target more of the market by appealing to ‘Carol the Convenience Shopper’ and ‘Henry the Health Food Shopper’ too.

Common mistakes to avoid

Before you get to work on creating your first persona, here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• Reinforcing stereotypes. It is possible that your research will reinforce an existing stereotype. For example, you may find that the bulk of your washing product customers are women or that more young men take up your boxing classes. While you need to target your key market, you should avoid alienating other customers or falling foul of the ad regulators.
• Focusing on demographics. In the early days of marketing, audiences were targeted mainly on demographic factors: age, gender, occupation, household type, etc. While these factors are still important today, they don’t deal with the powerful psychological factors that often guide people’s buying decisions. This is why your personas need to include as much psychographic information as possible.
• Not seeing the wood for the trees. If you are arguing about whether your persona should be called Steve or Stephen, you are missing the point. Names, photographs and other individual details are merely a way to represent abstract data in a relatable form. 

Following your gut. Where data is missing, there is a tendency to fill the gaps with assumptions. The danger is that you can then start sketching a portrait of your ideal customer rather than your real buyers.

Personas & AI, the next steps

AI is currently in space where if you put rubbish in then you get rubbish out, however if you feed your personas and business goals in, it can start to create powerful lines between them with the context it now has.

Spending time in the bridge of human creativity, personal customer research and AI will give you powerful outputs.

For example you could begin to flesh out a business plan to change your products and services, amend a business plan for better financial forcasting or create a marketing or content plan.

Here’s some marketing staples:

“Suggest campaign ideas for [Persona Name], who works in [industry], prefers [media type], and typically finds solutions via [channel]. Tie them to common seasonal trends or decision cycles.”

“Write five blog titles aimed at [Persona Name], a [job title] who cares about [value] and struggles with [frustration]. Make them engaging, solution-focused, and SEO-friendly.”

“Draft a follow-up email for [Persona Name], who downloaded our [lead magnet]. They’re [personality trait], use [preferred platform], and are motivated by [goal].”

How often should I review my personas?

Personas aren’t a one-time task — they’re a living document. As your business evolves, so do your customers.

Shifts in market conditions, product offerings, service models or even internal priorities can all change who you’re really serving.

Regularly reviewing and refreshing your personas ensures they continue to reflect your current reality, rather than an outdated snapshot. For some businesses, this might be a light quarterly check-in. For others, a more in-depth annual review aligned with strategic planning cycles is ideal.

One of our clients took this approach from the beginning. They started by targeting a single, price-conscious local buyer, but year after year of growth and broader engagement, they now serve multiple buyer types, including regional leads and national decision-makers.

By revisiting their personas each year, they’ve been able to update their messaging, shift their campaign focus, and avoid the trap of assuming their audience stayed the same.

It’s a strong reminder that your customer base isn’t static — and your personas shouldn’t be either.

Internal use cases for personas

We mentioned getting the whole team involved, and thats powerful for a number of reasons.

Personas aren’t just for external-facing marketing, they can be a valuable internal tool too.

Sharing well-crafted personas with new team members helps them quickly understand who your audience is, what matters to them, and how to communicate with them effectively.

Whether it’s a marketer writing copy, a designer creating a landing page, or an account manager preparing for a client call, personas provide a shared reference point that keeps messaging, tone, and priorities aligned.

We’ve seen clients use them in onboarding packs, pitch prep, and even internal training sessions, they act as a shortcut to empathy and consistency, especially in growing or cross-functional teams.

Hopefully, this is good enough to get you started creating marketing personas, please share your journey with us and if you want a facilitated expert to take you through a persona building workshop then just give us a shout.

Do you know anyone who may be interested in this project?

Click to share: