Since you’re here, I think it’s safe to say you’re on a mission: to make a meaningful impact on the world with your business. 

But even with your passion for what you’re creating and your purpose for your business, defining exactly who your most likely paying (and happy) customer is can be wildly overwhelming. Am I right? 

Even when you already have an established business, it’s easy to lose sight of your true target audience and forget who your core customers truly are. 

That’s where brand personas come in.

In this post, you’ll learn:

What is a Persona?

The concept of marketing personas is by no means new, but it’s one of those things I’ve seen many of my clients wanting to skate over. 

But here’s why you shouldn’t. 

Imagine sitting down for coffee with someone who perfectly embodies your ideal customer. Like an old friend, you know what makes them tick, what they value, and what keeps them up at night. 

That’s a persona, sometimes also referred to as a buyer persona or a marketing persona—a vivid, detailed representation of your ideal customer. 

It’s not just about demographics; it’s about crafting a full picture of their inner world, including their personality traits, hopes, fears, dreams, and motivations to name but a few. 

Once you have taken the time to get to know your customer on a deeper level, creating compelling brand messaging will become a lot easier, I promise. 

Why Do You Need a Persona?

I once took a course on creative writing by James Patterson. In it, he said that he always pictures his reader across the table from him so that he can always keep in his mind’s eye who he’s writing for. 

Without meaning to, he was referring to the concept of marketing personas. 

Since then, I’ve always thought of my ideal client sitting on the other side of the table as I’m writing my content, creating my masterclasses and dreaming up my next coaching service package. It’s like a compass that shows me the way.

Here’s what a strong brand persona will help you do: 

1. It makes empathy your strongest marketing tool: Understanding your customers at a deep emotional level lets you connect with them in ways that resonate beyond just transactions. You create an emotional connection that can help turn potential customers into actual ones.
2. It helps keep you focused: Personas help you zero in on where to direct your energy, ensuring that your efforts are not just well-intentioned but also strategically helpful for your target audience, and therefore your business. Creating marketing strategies, blog posts, social media posts or any other content has never been easier. 
3. It helps keep your team focused: imagine presenting your new virtual assistant, sales team, marketing team or content creator with a well-defined persona during your first call together. The level of conversations you can have from then on increases drastically, not to mention their output. You have just taken a huge amount of guesswork out of their to-do list. 
4. It reminds you to use your most authentic voice: When you know your target audience intimately, your messaging becomes more genuine, and your brand speaks with a tone of voice that truly represents your mission. Not to mention how easy it will be for your sales team and your marketing team to keep to that same communication style throughout their interactions with your customers. 
5. It helps you build a strong brand personality: Knowing who your real customers are not only helps you develop a unique tone of voice but also gives you invaluable insights into how to craft your visual identity, product offerings, product design, customer support touch-points and so much more. In other words, it helps your business stand out in a crowded market while offering your customers a cohesive experience with your brand. 
6. It helps you fulfil your purpose: By aligning your products or services with your core customers’ real needs, you’re not just making sales—you’re making a difference.

How to Craft a Compelling Brand Persona

Creating personas is a mix of art and science. 

I suggest you grab a pen and paper because I’ll walk you through the exact steps to create your persona. 

Answer the questions below as best as you can about your target audience and remember–your customer persona will shift and evolve as you build your business and learn more about your customers (more on that below).

1. Demographics and Background

Age: What is the typical age range of your ideal customer?

Gender: Is there a specific gender or gender identity that your target customer typically identifies with?

Location: Where do your ideal customers typically live (city, state, country)?

Education Level: What is the typical education level of your ideal customer?

2. Lifestyle and Interests

Occupation: What are the common occupations or professions of your ideal customer?

Hobbies and Interests: What are your ideal customers’ hobbies, interests, or passions?

Values: What values are important to your ideal customer (e.g., sustainability, community, innovation)?

Lifestyle: How do your ideal customers spend their time? What are their daily routines like?

Core values: What does your ideal audience hold dear? What do they believe in?

3: Goals and Aspirations

Goals: What are your ideal customer’s short-term and long-term goals?

Aspirations: What are their aspirations for their personal and professional lives?

Catalysts: What motivates them to take action?

4: Challenges and Pain Points

Biggest worries and fears: What keeps your ideal customer up at night? 

Day-to-day challenges: What challenges do they face in their daily lives or businesses?

Pains: What are their biggest frustrations or pain points?

Hurdles: What prevents them from achieving their goals?

5: Your Hero’s Heroes

Where they hang out: What social media platforms do your ideal customers use most frequently?

Whom do they follow online or offline: Whose opinions matter to them? What personality traits do these people have (a gold mine for your brand tone-of-voice, incidentally)?

Where do they search for information and products: Is it blogs, magazines, friends, social media, or podcasts?

What kind of people do your customers trust? How do they speak? What values do they hold dear? 

Notice how none of these questions has anything to do with your product or service yet?

That’s how I like to build the personas because your ideal customer doesn’t exist to consume your products and services. They are people with their hopes, dreams and challenges that you just might have the right thing to offer. 

Here’s What a Persona Might Look Like

Real-Life Example 1

Your Business: Business Consulting for Solopreneurs

Persona: Julia, The Overwhelmed Entrepreneur

1. Demographics

Age: 35-45

Gender: Female

Location: Urban area, likely a major city

Education Level: Bachelor’s degree or higher

2. Lifestyle and Interests

Occupation: Small business owner or freelancer

Hobbies: Yoga, reading, spending time with family

Values: Work-life balance, personal growth, making a positive impact

Lifestyle: Busy, often working long hours, juggling multiple responsibilities

Core Values: sustainability, personal freedoms, responsibility, authenticity

3. Goals and Aspirations

Short-term goals: Increase revenue, improve work-life balance, reduce stress

Long-term goals: Build a sustainable business, achieve financial freedom, make a difference in the world

Catalysts: Personal growth, inspiration from successful entrepreneurs

4. Challenges and Pain Points

Overwhelm and burnout due to multiple responsibilities

Difficulty finding time for self-care and personal growth

Struggling to balance work and family life

Feeling isolated and lacking community support

5. Your Hero’s Heroes

Online influencers: Marie Forleo, Brendon Burchard, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert

Business books: “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber, “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear

Podcasts: “The Tim Ferriss Show,” “The Marie Forleo Show,” “How I Built This”

Real-Life Example 2

Your Business: Coaching Certification Courses

Persona: Jack, the Aspiring Coach

1. Demographics

Age: 28-35

Gender: Male 

Location: Suburban or rural area

Education Level: Master’s degree or higher

2. Lifestyle and Interests

Occupation: Recent graduate or early-career professional

Hobbies: Sports, fitness, volunteering

Values: Helping others, personal growth, making a difference

Lifestyle: Active, goal-oriented, seeking new challenges

Core Values: authenticity, helping others, perseverance

3. Goals and Aspirations

Short-term goals: Transition into a coaching career, build a client base

Long-term goals: Become a recognized expert in their field, create a successful coaching business

Catalysts: Personal experiences, inspiration from successful coaches

4. Challenges and Pain Points

Uncertainty about the coaching industry and how to get started

Building credibility and establishing oneself as an expert

Finding the right clients and building a sustainable business

5. Your Hero’s Heroes

Coaching mentors: Tony Robbins, John Maxwell, Brendon Burchard

Coaching podcasts: “The Coaching Podcast,” “The Coaches Podcast”

Business books: “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, “High Performance Habits” by Brendon Burchard

But All of My Customers Don’t Look Exactly Like That…

I know, I know. Everyone in your target audience isn’t called Mary, they’re not all 34 with 2.5 kids, live in Missouri and dream of becoming a chef one day.

But that’s not a problem. Really!

The way a persona works is that when you gear your messaging very precisely towards someone with specific characteristics, people who share these characteristics, and, most importantly–want to share these characteristics–will hear your call.

Not all people. Your ideal customer-people. And these are the people who matter here.

These are the ones who feel spoken to by your brand messaging. The people who are ready to engage with your brand, products and services because they feel they have something to be gained from it. 

And if you happen to have a number of very different services or products that can’t be addressed with a single persona, feel free to create multiple. They can represent different audience segments and help you tailor your messaging to them.

However, I urge you to start with a single persona, develop it well and only then add another. Otherwise it can get overwhelming as heck and you’ll find yourself spinning your wheels with your marketing messages before long.

How to Gather Persona Insights

To create personas that are as close to real life as possible, it’s essential to gather insights from multiple sources. 

I recommend going through the questions above using your own ideas of who your customer is, first. 

We all have a little perfectionist living inside us (mine is extra large, though) and if you wait until you have all the details on your ideal customer, you’ll wait for a very, very long time. 

Once you have the foundations, you can start to test your hypotheses. 

A really good way of doing it is by engaging directly with your customers through interviews.

Listen to their stories, their challenges, and what they’re passionate about. This qualitative data is invaluable for building a detailed and accurate persona.

Social media is another rich source of information (even if you’re not posting anything). By monitoring online conversations and communities where your ideal customer hangs out, you can uncover what matters most to your target audience. 

Pay attention to the topics they discuss, the language they use, and the issues they care about. These insights help you understand their world and the factors that influence their decisions.

Surveys and questionnaires are also useful tools for collecting quantitative data on your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and challenges. The more specific your questions, the more detailed the data you’ll collect, which in turn leads to more accurate personas.

Customer feedback, whether it’s in the form of reviews, emails, or support tickets, is a gold mine of insights. It reveals what your customers appreciate, what frustrates them, and what they’re looking for in your products or services. This feedback is crucial for refining your personas and ensuring they reflect the real experiences of your customers.

Remember: as you’re developing your personas and learn more about them, don’t forget to add direct quotes to your notes so that you can speak to your customers in the words they actually use. There’s nothing more powerful in a brand’s messaging than hearing your own words spoken back to you.

Interlude: How I Realised I Had Made a Fundamental Mistake With My Persona Creation

When I set out to create a persona for Heroes & Guides the first time, I made one crucial mistake that, I think, many first-timers make.

I had pretty much created the persona to look almost exactly like me. 

Same age, interested in the same things, same values, same dreams, same challenges. 

Perhaps you’ve already spotted the issue here? 

Here it is: I couldn’t be my own ideal customer, because, well, if I was, I wouldn’t be here building a company to solve my problems but out there, looking for a service provider to solve them for me or at the very least with me. 

I’ve seen many of my clients make the same mistake because they often used to be where their customers are today, just a few steps ahead. 

However, it pays to do your research on who your actual customers are, because that’s what will actually help you build your strong brand identity. 

So, over time I realised that my ideal customer is actually in the wiser age group (10-20+ years my senior) and sometimes even much further along on their business journey. They’re just lacking the specific skillset I can bring. 

All I can say is: don’t be afraid to venture out and let your customers guide you in who they are and what they need. Your impact on the lives of your customers can often be much greater, further away from home, so to speak. 

Using Personas to Transform Your Business

Personas aren’t just a nice-to-have—they’re essential for shaping every aspect of your business. In product development, they guide you in creating solutions that directly address your persona’s unique needs. For instance, if you were designing a service for Julia, you might develop a coaching package that vows to take her through building simple systems in her business for sustainable growth and no overwhelm.

In marketing and messaging, personas help you craft campaigns that speak directly to your customer’s language and aspirations. For Jack, you might highlight how your coaching course will give him the tools he needs to define his strengths as a coach, build a coaching structure, to be responsible as a coach and guide his customers through the process, land his first clients and build a sustainable business. 

In customer service, understanding your personas allows your team to respond in ways that resonate with your customer’s values and concerns. When a customer reaches out, your team can respond with empathy and insight, making the customer feel understood and valued.

Finally, in content creation, personas guide you in developing material that addresses your persona’s specific questions and challenges. For Julia, this might be a blog series on time management hacks, while for Jack, a podcast on business coaching with a twist of social good could be the perfect content to engage him.

Personas are the heartbeat of your heart-led business. They transform your efforts from well-meaning to truly impactful by ensuring that everything you do is aligned with the people you serve.

 By deeply understanding your customers, you’re not just running a business—you’re creating a movement, building relationships, and leaving a lasting legacy of positive change.