How to Create a Persona in 11 Steps + Examples & Templates

Personas do not describe real people. However, they are made up of data that belong to real people. Basically, user personas 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?”

Questions must be answered before you create a product or launch marketing efforts. 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.

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. Done right, personas can help:

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

Our post will list down the 11 steps it takes to create a persona. How? By using Delve AI’s persona generator – simply visit our site, create your free account, and start building personas! If you’re completely new to persona creation, you can start with our persona templates.

We’ll show you how customer personas can answer the three most important questions about your target user base: Who are they? What are their main goals? What are their major pain points and challenges? So, let’s get started!

What Is a Persona?

A buyer persona (or user persona) is a fictional profile of your ideal customer based on customer demographics, user behaviors, motivations, and goals. A lot of qualitative and quantitative data goes into creating a persona, like consumer research, competitor analysis, and web analytics.

But why do they matter? A well-defined persona guides everything from product development to user experiences. Knowing your audience further empowers you to shape product roadmaps, marketing decisions, and sales pitches.

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 messages, products, and experiences that connect with the right people (personas).

People often use personas in content, UX, product management, sales, and customer service. A new persona use case, HR personas are being adopted by headhunters and recruiters alike. Customer personas play a big role in personalization, targeting, and trend prediction, especially in design and marketing.

Now, 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 B2B, not so much.

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

• Product use cases – what they need it 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.

You can picture the end users of your product 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 in 11 Steps with Delve AI

You can create personas in several ways – templates, online tools, and AI persona generators like Delve AI. The process involves four steps on the most basic level: gather data, analyze data, create personas, and update personas.

• Gather 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.

So online persona tools – like Make My Persona, Userforge, and Xtensio – are reduced to being mere presentation and collaboration tools.

A viable solution would be a tool that uses qualitative and quantitative methods (web analytics, competitor intelligence, and social insights) to create dynamic personas frequently updated with fresh customer data.

Personas with humanistic characteristics, say a name, backstory, and profile picture, that answer simple questions, such as:

• How many types of users does my business have?
• Who are these users?
• What are the differences between different user segments?

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 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 steps below will help you develop personas manually, but the last one will guide you through the process of building personas with AI and machine learning technologies. Read along!

1. Conduct User Research: Both Qualitative & Quantitative

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

• user interviews
• customer support teams
• 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 reveal amazing insights into:

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

A simple way to bring personas to life — talking to people. You can’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.

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 Quick Persona by Delve AI (coming soon) to create an ideal customer profile for your business. Just enter your company name, industry, 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.

2. Analyze Data to Build Persona Segments

Now that you have information about your customers, 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 selling 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. Begin with 1 to 3 groups; anything more is too much. Don’t forget, less is more in this situation.

3. Select the Type of Personas You Want

Not all personas are the same. In B2C, the focus is on demographic elements, while B2B personas emphasize career profiles and company details.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Fill in Demographic Details: Age, Gender, Location

You have the data. You’ve selected your persona types. Let’s write a persona using Delve AI’s online persona generator. Sign up or log in to your Delve AI account, select your persona – say, Customer Persona, and start by filling in the demographic information.

But before we proceed, let’s clarify one thing: demographics are not the most crucial part of a persona. Anyway, begin with age and gender. Pick names that represent your audience's gender, age, and ethnicity.

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

Tip: You can add teammates who can come along and edit your personas. Once you’re happy with the output, download the persona in PPT, PDF, or JPG formats.

5. Complete the Persona Profile Information Section

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, write down all you can gather on that audience group. Keep it straight to the point, and avoid unnecessary jargon. This part is supposed to 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.

6. Add Psychographic Attributes: Goals, Pain Points, & Decision-making

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

Click on the edit icon available on each of these tiles 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 buying patterns, refine pricing, and create products that meet consumer demands.

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.

For a brand selling martech products, she would be the ideal customer – one who actively influences buying decisions in her organization.

7. Create a Personality Traits + Emotions Charts

To know the finer points of your persona’s psychographics, try using our 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.

Consumer personality traits are crucial to successful marketing. After all, personality influences how people shop, engage, and interact within the marketplace. Some like things flashy, while others don't. There's more. Personality traits dig into user emotions, allowing you to map the buyer's journey – ultimately influencing decisions and creating meaningful connections.

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

8. Describe How Users Interact with Your Site

Nowadays, it’s essential to know how users interact with your site – their devices, marketing channels, and timings. With this info, you can:

• 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

Put this data 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).

9. Find Resonating Pages, Keywords, & Resources

You need to know the kind of content your users love to plan a successful content strategy. And not just content types but the topics, resources, and keywords they are buzzed about. This is the only way to ensure that they react and engage with your messaging.

‘Influential Resources’ 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.

10. Include Other Persona Attributes

You’ve built the major part of your 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, hashtags, popular websites, technologies, business interests, tools, content types, and more.

These elements really give your personas a more professional look and add depth to them. Just look at our complete user persona example with all the attributes.

11. Create Personas with AI Persona Generator

We’ve created personas manually, but how about speeding things up a little? The right way to do this is to leverage Delve AI’s AI Persona Generator to build personas for your business, competitors, and social media audiences. How? We’ll explain.

Delve AI is the world’s first software that automatically develops personas with digital data. Instead of relying on surveys and interviews, we use AI and machine learning to give brands a deeper, easier, and more human way to know their customers.

Our platform generates personas using a variety of data sources, as shown in the figure below. A persona is built with your first and second-party user data and then enriched with 40+ public data sources (VoC data from reviews, ratings, community forums, etc.).

You can even use filters to create personas specific to certain products, countries, and channels. Here’s the complete list:

• Channel, Social network, and Device type
• Continent, Country, Region, and City
• Landing/exit page, Products
• Date range

We offer four products: Website Persona, Customer Persona, Competitor Persona, and Social Persona.

Each product uses different data sources to create new persona segments. For example, the Website Persona uses Google Analytics and Search console data, the Customer Persona employs CRM systems, and the Social Persona leverages social audience data, which brings us to the Competitor Persona, a tool that builds a persona by processing your competitors’ audience data.

To develop an AI persona, visit Delve AI > sign up or log in > select the type of persona you want to create. If you want to create a Website Persona, simply connect the Google Analytics property you want to build personas for. Side note: your first website persona is free, no card is required!

Depending on the data, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour for your personas to be generated.

You can either have one persona for the entire audience (as is the case with Competitor Persona) or multiple persona segments for your business. In the figure below, we show a sample of a segment-specific persona (summary view) created by our platform.

Each segment has three tabs: Persona details, distribution, and sample journeys or influencers. Under details, you can see all your persona attributes, such as:

• 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 journeys are provided in Website Persona to help businesses gain a better idea of who their digital users are, along with their intent. Customer and Social Persona, in turn, give you a list of influencers and brands your audience engages with regularly.

If you’re a B2B business utilizing the Website Persona tool, you will receive organization visit alerts (through Slack and email) and lead notifications automatically categorized into one or more of the following:

• Business prospects
• Partners/competitors
• Job seekers/recruiters
• Service providers
• Blog readers
• Government
• Investors
• Press

Bonus: you can use our upcoming Digital Twin of Customer software to chat with these personas and ask them questions related to your marketing, sales, or product strategies!

Buyer Persona Examples from Nike & Goodreads

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 Goodreads.

To start with, we generated a persona for Nike using Delve AI’s Social Persona tool. All we had to do was enter Nike’s website domain, and the software created several persona segments for us in minutes. The primary segment (73%) represented the profile of an urban sneaker enthusiast who is deeply engaged in sports, streetwear, and sneaker culture.

So, we have Cameron Cavett, a 33-year-old married man living in New York who is socially active, digitally engaged, and has strong brand preferences. Here are a few more things you should know about him:

• Interests: Sneakers, streetwear, sports (especially basketball), fitness, hip-hop culture
• Brands: Nike, Adidas, Puma, NBA, New Balance
• Retailers: Walmart, Target, Foot Locker
• Shopping Habits: Online and in-store shopping, following sneaker release calendars
• Media: Follows sports news (ESPN, Complex), watches sneaker-related content on YouTube, active on TikTok & Instagram
• Hashtags: #nike, #sneakers, #streetwear, #basketball, #hypebeast
• Personality: Energetic, enthusiastic, competitive, fashion-forward
• Emotional Analysis: Engaged, inspired, and sometimes frustrated with the resale market.

Cameron is a brand mentioner who shares sneaker releases and follows influencers online. He frequently visits sites like nike.com, stockx.com, and sneakernews.com. Besides, Cameron plays basketball, follows the NBA, and enjoys street-style fitness.

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

• Best time for engagement: Night-time (likely after work)
• Daily interaction with Nike: High, especially during sneaker drops or major sports events.
• Resonating content: Sneaker reviews, unboxings, and sports highlights.
• Factors influencing purchase decisions: Authenticity, brand reputation, design, and limited edition status.
• Buying barriers: Limited availability of sought-after Nike sneakers, high resell prices, and insufficient buying budget.

If Nike wanted to target users like Cameron, they’d likely find success with limited-edition releases, influencer collaborations, and interactive social media campaigns.

Moving on to Goodreads, the cataloging website that helps readers find books and reviews online. This is an example of what their typical users look like – we created a profile using Competitor Persona by Delve AI. Heather Mccabe, Goodreads’ online persona, delves into users’ aspirations, pain points, and motivations.

Heather is a 37-year-old married woman living in urban Las Vegas who “believe[s] in building strong relationships, staying fit, and indulging in magical entertainment to brighten [her] days.” She takes a strong interest in literature, particularly self-help, biographies, and children's books.

Let’s get some more info on this millennial book lover. According to the persona profile, she’s:

• Motivated by self-help and motivational content.
• Engages with topics related to community issues and fitness.
• Communicates in person, via phone, social media, chat, and messaging (low email engagement).
• Active on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Interested in The Ashes (sports), Les Misérables (musical), and A Christmas Carol (literary event).
• Likely to visit beaches, libraries, lakes/rivers, bars/clubs.
• Prefers Children's literature, poetry, audiobooks, and literary classics.
• Interested in left-wing politics, entertainment/celebrity news, and opinion/commentary.
• Uses calendars, productivity tools, scientific equipment, and proxying/filtering tools.

To woo a user like Heather, Goodreads can sponsor theater-related book discussions or highlight literary classics and audiobooks in curated book lists. Since Heather uses calendars and productivity tools, they could integrate book-tracking features where she can set goals for reading biographies.

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

You’ve learned how to create personas today. You know that building a 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 customer 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 for Delve AI’s persona generator software and create your AI-powered personas!

Write a persona with free persona templates

When you’re just starting, it’s a good idea to find a persona template or tool online to guide you through the process. That way, you won’t have to worry about designing each module from scratch or wasting time trying to make it look perfect.

Delve AI has four editable templates in PPT and PDF formats: B2C persona template, B2B persona template, SaaS persona template, and employee persona template. You can download any of them free of cost – just log in to Delve AI, click on Free Tools in the sidebar, and download the persona template you like.