How to create a marketing persona: the interviews, the template and the test

Build a marketing persona from eight to twelve interviews with real customers, not from a demographic profile. The method is four steps: pick who to talk to using your own sales data, run the interviews around the moment they decided to look for a solution, find the patterns in what they said, and write each persona on one page that leads with the job they are trying to get done and the words they used. A persona that names the trigger, the alternatives considered, the objection and the actual phrasing is a tool your writers and your sales team will reach for. A persona that opens with age, income and a stock photograph will sit in a slide deck unopened.

Step one: decide who to interview

Start from your own records, not from a guess. Pull your closed won customers from the last twelve months and look for natural clusters: by what they bought, by the problem they came in with, by the size or type of organisation, by who signed. Then recruit across the clusters:

• Six to ten recent customers, ideally within three months of purchase while the decision is still fresh.
• Two or three who evaluated you and chose somebody else. These are the most informative conversations you will have and the ones most teams skip.
• Two or three who churned, if you sell a subscription.
• Every distinct role in the decision if you sell to organisations: the person with the problem, the person who evaluates, the person who signs, the person who gets blamed if it fails.

Offer something for the time, keep it modest, and have somebody other than their account manager run the call. People tell an independent interviewer things they will not tell the person who sold to them.

Step two: the interview

Thirty to forty five minutes, recorded with permission, conversational rather than a survey. Ask about the sequence of events, not about preferences. Opinions are unreliable, timelines are not.

• Take me back to when you first realised you needed to do something about this. What happened that week?
• What were you doing about it before? What specifically stopped working?
• Who else was involved, and what did each of them care about?
• Where did you look first? What did you type into a search box, and what did you ask anybody you asked?
• Which options did you consider, including doing nothing?
• What nearly stopped you buying? What did you need to see to get past it?
• How did you justify the money to whoever had to approve it?
• What did you expect that turned out differently?
• If you were recommending us to somebody in your position, what would you say?

Ask why three times when an answer is vague. The third answer is usually the real one. Write down verbatim phrases, because those phrases become your page headings and your ad copy.

Step three: find the patterns

Transcribe the calls and tag the quotes. Five tags are enough: trigger, alternative considered, decision criterion, objection, and words used. Then look for clusters across interviews.

A real persona boundary exists when two groups have different triggers or different decision criteria. It does not exist when two groups merely differ by age, job title or company size while wanting exactly the same thing for the same reason. Most teams build too many personas by splitting on demographics. Two or three personas is right for most businesses, and the test is whether you would write a different page for each one. If you would not, merge them.

Step four: the one page template

Field	What goes in it
Name and one line	A short label that your team will say out loud, plus one sentence describing the situation
The job to be done	What they are trying to achieve, in their words, with the progress they want
Trigger	The event that starts the search. Specific, dated, concrete
Current approach	What they do today, including spreadsheets, a junior person, or nothing
Alternatives considered	Named competitors, in house builds, and doing nothing
Decision criteria, ranked	What they actually compared on, in their order, not yours
Objections	The three things that nearly stopped the purchase, and what resolved each one
Who else is involved	Each role and what each one needs to hear
Where they look	Search phrases they used, communities, publications, people they ask
Verbatim quotes	Four or five exact sentences from the interviews
What we will do about it	The pages, proof and messages this persona requires

Leave out age, income bracket, favourite coffee and a stock photograph unless one of them genuinely changes what you would write. Detail that does not change a decision makes the document longer and less used.

Make the persona do work

A persona earns its place when it is attached to something that ships:

• A page per decision criterion, written in the words the interviews produced.
• A page per objection, answering it directly instead of avoiding it.
• A comparison page for each named alternative, accurate and fair about the other option.
• Proof assets matched to the criteria: a case study from the same situation, a security document, a reference customer, a trial.
• Sales enablement: the discovery questions and the objection responses, taken from what resolved the objection in real deals.
• A keyword set per persona, seeded from the search phrases they reported and expanded with your Search Console data.

Keep them current

• Two fresh interviews a quarter keeps a persona accurate without a project.
• Add a how did you hear about us and a what nearly stopped you field to your own forms and read them monthly.
• Re read your Search Console queries each quarter. New phrasing appearing there is the market vocabulary moving.
• Review the personas properly when you change price, enter a new market, or launch a product that solves a different job.

This page covers building the persona. For choosing the buyer questions worth tracking once you know who the buyer is, see buyer prompts. For turning the output into a content plan, see how to build a content marketing strategy and keyword research in five steps. For committee buying in business to business, see B2B content marketing.

Where people get stuck on create a marketing persona

How many personas should we have?

Two or three for most businesses. The test is whether each one would get a different page, a different proof asset and a different first sentence. If two personas share all three, they are one persona.

How many interviews are enough?

Eight to twelve for one market. You will usually hear the same triggers and objections repeating by the seventh or eighth call, and that repetition is the signal to stop.

Can I build a persona from analytics and third party data?

Use analytics and market data for sizing and for demographics, and use interviews for the trigger, the criteria and the words. The interview content is what changes your copy, and only a conversation produces it.

Should a persona include demographics at all?

Include only the attributes that change your message or your media choice. For most business to business products that is role, seniority and organisation type. Age and household income rarely change a sentence.

What is the difference between a persona and an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile describes the organisation worth selling to: size, sector, technology, geography. A persona describes a person inside it and what they are trying to get done. You need both, and they answer different questions.

Your persona already has a research assistant

The persona you built from interviews has habits: the questions they ask before buying, the words they use, the doubts they raise first. Those same questions are now typed into assistants, in nearly the same words, and answered with a recommendation.

Take the three questions from your interview notes that came up most, and put them to an assistant exactly as the persona phrased them. Then compare the companies named with the ones your persona told you they compared. Where the two lists differ, you have found a gap the persona document could not show. AI Knows Us runs that comparison for a set of questions.