The persona problem
Most marketing personas follow the same format: "Meet Sarah, 38, Marketing Manager at a mid-sized B2B company. She enjoys hiking on weekends, uses LinkedIn daily, and is frustrated by her CRM not integrating with her email platform." She has a stock photo, a salary range, and a list of pain points that could describe literally any marketing manager at any B2B company.
This persona is useless. Not because the format is wrong, but because "Sarah" was invented in a conference room without speaking to a single real customer. She describes a demographic, not a decision-maker. She tells you who your buyer is, not why they buy — or why they don't.
What a useful persona actually is
A useful persona is a compressed model of a specific type of buyer, built from direct customer conversations, that tells you: what job they're trying to do, what alternatives they considered before choosing you, what nearly stopped them from buying, and what language they use to describe the problem you solve.
The last point matters more than most marketing teams realise. The specific words your customers use to describe their problem are the words you should use in your ads, your landing pages, and your content. No amount of clever copywriting outperforms using the exact language the buyer has in their head.
Jobs to be done — the better framework
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework, developed by Clayton Christensen, is a better lens for personas than the demographic model. The core idea: people don't buy products or services — they "hire" them to do a job. The job isn't a feature, it's a progress the buyer is trying to make in their life or work.
Classic JTBD example: people don't buy a drill because they want a drill. They hire it to make a hole. But they don't want a hole either — they want a shelf, or a picture hung, or a home that feels finished. The job is the deeper motivation. If you understand the job, you understand why they chose your solution over alternatives.
For a marketing consultant: clients don't hire you because they want "content strategy." They hire you because they're losing to competitors in search, because their LinkedIn presence is embarrassing them in front of prospects, or because their founder is spending 8 hours a week on content that isn't generating leads and they desperately want that time back. Those are the jobs. Everything else is a feature.
How to build one from real data
The minimum viable research process for a useful persona:
Step 1: Customer interviews (10 minimum)
Interview 10 customers or recent prospects. Not a survey — a 30-minute conversation. The key questions:
- What were you doing or trying to do when you first realised you needed something like this?
- What were you using before? What were the alternatives you considered?
- What nearly stopped you from going ahead?
- What would you tell a friend who was in the same situation you were in before you bought?
Record the calls (with permission). Transcribe them. Highlight every phrase where the customer describes a pain point, an alternative, or an outcome they were hoping for. These phrases are your persona.
Step 2: Pattern matching
Across 10 interviews, you'll start to see patterns in the jobs, the alternatives considered, and the language used. A persona emerges from these patterns — not invented top-down, but bottom-up from what real buyers actually said.
Step 3: Validation
Write up the persona draft. Share it with 2–3 of the people you interviewed. Ask: "Does this feel like an accurate description of your situation when you first came to us?" Their answers will tell you whether you've captured it or just written another conference-room hypothesis.
What to put in it (and what not to)
A persona that drives decisions contains:
- The job: what are they trying to accomplish? Written in their words, not yours.
- The trigger: what event or situation pushed them from "this is a problem" to "I need to fix this now"?
- The alternatives they considered: what else did they try or think about? This tells you who your real competition is (often not who you think).
- The decision criteria: what mattered most when choosing between options? Price, speed, credentials, trust, specific capability?
- The objections: what nearly stopped them from buying? These are the things your landing page and sales conversations need to address.
- The language: 3–5 direct quotes, in the buyer's words, describing the problem.
A persona that wastes space contains:
- Stock photo and a name. (No one makes decisions based on whether their buyer is called Sarah or James.)
- Demographic data not linked to a decision. (Age, location, and salary are only useful if they change what you do.)
- Psychographic generalities. ("Values work-life balance" describes 90% of working adults and tells you nothing.)
How to actually use it
A persona is only valuable if it changes something. Here's where it should show up:
- Your homepage headline: does the opening line speak to the job your persona is trying to do, using language from your interviews?
- Your lead magnet: does the resource you're offering directly serve the job your persona is trying to do at the moment they're most likely to download something?
- Your content topics: are your blog and LinkedIn posts addressing the questions your persona is asking, not the topics you find interesting?
- Your services framing: are you leading with their pain point or your credentials? (It should be their pain point.)
- Your objection handling: are the objections from your interviews answered explicitly on your services or FAQ page?