Create personas: a guide with examples for B2B & B2C companies

If you’re interested in creating marketing personas, this article has everything you need to know to get started! We will cover: 

• What personas are 
• Why personas are a brilliant tool  
• What you can use a persona for  
• What a persona can include  

We have also added examples that you can use for inspiration.  

After reading this article, you will know enough about personas to tailor your own for your business. Let’s get started! 

What is a persona? 

A persona is a fictional character that represents a part of your customer base. In a persona, you gather the most important information about one of your target audiences and present it as one person that stands for an entire group. 

For example, a bookstore that receives many student and tourist visitors could create a persona for each of these groups: “Sterling Student” and “Toby Tourist.” 

You can create personas in many formats, but the most common is to create a character card or a sheet that’s compact and easy to read. You’ll want to keep in front of you at your screen or desk as a reference while you work on content for the target group it personifies. 

The information you include in your persona depends on what data you have and what’s most important for you and your content. Let’s take a closer look at what might be useful to include in a persona. 

What should a persona include? 

A persona should be based on actual data and relevant information that you have available. Even though the character is fictional, the information in a persona needs reflect reality to be useful. A persona should mainly be used as a tool when creating content, so it’s essential to base it on correct data. 

We’ll break down what is usually included in a persona, and some optional elements that you might choose to include if they are relevant to you and your work. 

Basic information in a persona

A fictional name and image to introduce the character

Since a persona is a representation of a fictional character, it needs a fictional name and image. The name can be associated with the product or service you are trying to sell to the customer group, or other relevant key information related to the customer group. 

For example: 

• Hilda Hiker 
• Daniel Documentary 
• Eve Entrepreneur 
• Mark Municipality 
• Harold Healthcare 

A name that ties directly to your target group makes it easier to quickly understand the relevant target group. 

The fictional image you choose should also be relevant to the customer group, for example by being of approximately the same age. You can find free images online to use.  

Age

If your target group spans multiple age groups, you can choose the average age or the age that is most typical for the group. 

Location

The same applies to location. If your customer group is spread across multiple cities or countries, choose the place that is most typical for the customer group or where most of them are from. 

Finances and income

Even if you don’t have an exact overview of your customer group’s income, and it will vary from person to person, it can be helpful to include some information about this in a persona. Understanding your audience’s income can give you an idea of whether good deals or exclusivity will resonate best with this customer group. 

Personality

If you have insights into the customer group’s interests, values, lifestyle, and other more personal characteristics, it can be beneficial to include them. 

In marketing, there are referred to as “psychographic attributes,” and they help you get to know your target audience on a more personal level. It provides a deeper understanding of how they react to different types of content and which factors influence their decision-making. 

There are many ways to find facts about your target groups. Read our article on how to find your target group for tips on where to find the information you need. 

Other relevant information for a customer persona

Depending on what you have access to and what is relevant for your business, you can also include the following in a persona: 

• Which devices your audience uses most often 
• Which channels and social media platforms they are on 
• What time of day they browse the internet 
• Media consumption  
• Web and mobile habits 
• Email usage 
• Work situation 
• Household size  

If there’s other details that are relevant for your specific customer personas, it’s certainly acceptable to add them in. Personas should be tailored specifically to your business and your needs! 

Characteristic details in a persona

A customer group can be a very abstract concept to work towards. Breaking down information into a visual presentation of a person is also a great way to work with a lot of data in a context that is easier to understand and relate to. 

Making a persona more human can help you focus more on the people who make up the target group you are working with. Add points that tell a little more about who this person really is to help humanise them.  

You could include, for example: 

• A challenge in their daily life that your business can solve. 
• A goal or dream that the person has. 
• Their strengths and weaknesses. 
• A short biography of four to five sentences that sums up who the person is. 
• A relevant quote that represents this person. 

Review the information you have available about your customer group and consider whether there’s anything that would be helpful to keep in mind as you work on relevant content.  If so, you can include it in a persona.  

Do keep in mind that a persona should be easy to read and not overloaded with information. 

Why should you create customer personas? 

There are many good reasons to create customer personas. Both the process of putting them together and using them as a tool during a busy workday can make your content creation much easier.  

Let’s break down six benefits of creating and using customer personas: 

1. Sharpens focus on the target audience 

Creating content is a complex process. You need to figure out so many aspects, from the basics of what to create content about, to which channels to display it in, all the way to the actual writing, designing, or filming of the content itself. Maybe you are marketing many products simultaneously, having a sale across the entire store, or creating new content for the entire website. 

Regardless of your situation, it’s safe to say that there’s plenty to think about for someone who creates content. Instead of diving into heavy data, analyses, and graphs about your target audience, you can refer to a persona and quickly find the most vital information. 

With details about the target audience you want to reach fresh in your mind, it will be easier for you to put together content that reaches them. 

2. You get to know your target audience better 

Creating a persona is also a great way to put any collected data into a context that makes sense. Visualising data and putting it into relevant context makes it easier to read and remember. 

Both the process of creating a persona and then reviewing it help you view your customer group from a new and possibly more reflexive perspective, with key findings in focus. 

3. Create more targeted content 

A persona gives you a better basis for making targeted content. The reflections you and your team make when developing customer personas give a deeper understanding of who the target audience is and what influences their decisions. This makes it much easier to understand which tools, media, channels, and messages will influence the audience. 

As a result, you can now create content that is more personal, more relevant, and more targeted at the audience. Content that the audience recognises and shares values, humour, or relevance with is much more likely to create a positive impression and lead to conversions. 

4. Your team gains a common understanding 

Data can be extensive and overwhelming, and sometimes it can be difficult to know what is important to use and how to interpret it. 

In creating a customer persona, you and your team have gathered key information about the target audience. You have also reflected on the group’s challenges, motivations, and desires, meaning means that the entire team you work with now has a common understanding of the target audience. 

Now working from the same starting point and with a clear idea of who you’re trying to reach, it’s much easier to work together with purpose. 

5. You can increase traffic and engagement on your website 

The improved knowledge of your target audience can strengthen your marketing and overall help you make better decisions about your website. 

While it is always important to have a recognisable brand with a consistent tone of voice, you can still make some decisions based on what you believe the target audience will like best. 

This can include: 

• Which images or visual tools to use on the website 
• Which colours to use on your website 
• How product categories should look in your online store 
• How to write product descriptions that resonate  
• How to phrase the text on your website 

And much more! A website with content that is both SEO-optimised and created to resonate best with the target audience has a great chance of achieving increased traffic, engagement, and conversions. 

6) You can tailor products and sales to your audience’s preferences 

When creating a persona, you reflect on the target audience in a way that you might not have if you could only look at numbers and stats. A persona often involves reflecting on the audience’s goals and challenges. These reflections make it easier to come up with good solutions for how products should be improved, or when and how a sale in your online shop should be completed. 

How many personas should you have? 

The number of personas you need depends on your business type and how many different groups of people you are trying to reach. 

For example, if you have an online store with several product categories that attract different audiences, it’s a good idea to create a persona for each product category. 

A B2B company that primarily sells similar services may want to differentiate between small, medium, and large businesses. In that case, you can create a persona for each business size if you find that the approach and motivation vary between the different business sizes. 

A B2B company can also create a persona for each industry they operate in. Perhaps they sell services that are suitable for companies in construction, but also transport and logistics, and oil and gas? A good approach might then be to create a persona for each of the individual industries. 

Consider your own business 

Start the work of creating personas by looking at your customer base as a whole and assessing specific target groups. This gives you a good basis for creating personas based on people who might be interested in your brand. 

A smart tip is also to create one or two personas for your most important target groups first. This make it easier to get started, and you can test how it is to work with this process and how it affects your content. If you see the need to create more personas, there’s nothing stopping you from working on them later. 

A persona is not static and should, of course, be updated if you find or notice new information that should have been included. 

Customer persona examples – B2C and B2B 

Now let’s look at some concrete examples of what a persona might look like. We have created one persona each for three fictional companies.  

We have intentionally made them a bit different from each other so that you can more easily assess what you think might be useful to include when creating your own personas. 

Persona for a bookstore (B2C) 

Let’s return to the bookstore we talked about early earlier in the article. We imagined that they have a customer group that consists of students. Here is a persona that the bookstore could have created for that target group: 

Name: Sterling Student 
Age: 20 
Location: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK  
Image: A picture of a smiling young man around 20 years old 

Economic situation: Low income, works part-time alongside his studies but has many expenses. It’s important that the money spent is worth it. Often uses discounts and coupons. 

Interests: Attends student events, subscribes to several streaming services, and is concerned about keeping a healthy lifestyle. 

Lifestyle: Lives in a student collective. 

Biography: Sterling is a hardworking student who likes order and organisation. He needs several things from a bookstore: textbooks, writing materials, and office supplies for his studies. At the same time, renting an apartment is expensive, and a good part of his money goes to the student events he regularly attends. Sterling carefully considers his needs before buying anything. 

Goal: To be a good student with a structured study technique that doesn’t spend all her money on overly expensive writing materials. 

Persona for a restaurant (B2C) 

In this example, we will look at a persona for a restaurant. Whether it’s a large family restaurant or a fine dining establishment, they are all likely to have different target groups they are trying to reach with both their marketing and their restaurant’s website. 

For this fictional restaurant, we have created a persona for a target group that is social and enjoys going out with others. 

Name: Sidney Socialite 
Age: 25 
Location: London 
Image: A picture of a happy man around 25 years old 

Economic situation: Medium to high income 

Interests: Social events, various gatherings, everything lively in the city 

Daily challenge: Sidney loves to gather people for meals – but finds it challenging to find something that suits everyone. 

Solutions we offer that he should know about: We have something for everyone with a large menu, spacious venues for big gatherings, an inviting cocktail menu, and monthly events. 

Strengths: Social, good at bringing together friends and colleagues, persuasive. 

Weaknesses: Can be indecisive, considers it important to please everyone in the group. 

Quote: “We went to the coolest restaurant last weekend. This weekend I’m ready to find an even cooler one!” 

Persona for a software company (B2B) 

Personas can be a valuable tool for a B2B company. As mentioned previously, a B2B company could create a persona for the different sizes of companies they want to reach, or alternatively create a persona for each industry they work with. 

In this example, we imagine a B2B company that sells software for project management and workforce organisation. They have developed software that helps employees in a company organise and manage their tasks. Here is a persona for one of their target groups: 

Name: Surprised Sean 
Age: 42  
Image: A picture of a professional man in his 40s in an office 
Role: Owner and CEO of a medium-sized growing business 

Summary: After a few challenging years, Sean’s company has finally turned around, and the company has suddenly grown faster than before. In a short time, Sean has hired more staff and is managing more projects than before. Sean is a creature of habit and doesn’t really know that there are easier solutions than the ones he currently uses. 

Challenge: It’s becoming difficult to keep track of projects and tasks within the company. Sean is aware of this but doesn’t know that there is a good solution to the problem. He also doesn’t take the time to try to find a solution. 

Strength: Focused on success and interested in ways to strengthen the company. 

Weaknesses: Busy with his own business and prioritises urgent tasks over finding a solution to the challenge of better project and task organisation. 

Create personas for your business 

Whether you’re working alone or planning a workshop within your company, you now know the importance of customer personas and have a good starting point for this work.  

Remember that personas must primarily be based on facts, but they can and should be spiced up with reflections on what is typical for your customer group. 

A persona helps you quickly grasp the most important information about the target group you are trying to reach and humanises your data. We are reminded that it is primarily real people with genuine needs, challenges, and motivations we want to reach, and it helps us make the right choices to create content that is relevant to the target audience. 

It is entirely up to you how many personas to create, but we recommend starting with one or two based on your most important target groups. That way, you can get started and experience what it’s like to work with personas. 

Good luck with your personas!