How to Create a Marketing Persona
that Actually Works

Lou
Kotsinis

If you ever hire an agency or marketing consultant, be forewarned. Here’s the first thing you’re going to hear: “You need to build a persona.”

In the world of marketing, there are few more over-hyped tactics than the persona. It’s revered by marketing professionals, misunderstood by clients, and most of the time, misses the mark in terms of what it’s meant to achieve.

But done right, a persona can be an effective tool in helping organize and direct your marketing efforts. It comes down to three key steps:

1. Focus on the problem — not the persona
2. Document what’s driving the behaviors
3. Turn patterns into a usable persona

In this post, I’m going to show you how to create a marketing persona that actually works. But it’s going to require you to rethink everything you’ve been taught about building one.

What Even Is a Persona?

A persona is a snapshot of your ideal audience member. And in theory, it’s a fantastic tool to guide and systematize your outreach. Rather than speaking to a general audience, you’re focusing your content, messaging, and brand towards one or two representative audience members. That clarity makes marketing more effective and nurtures a feedback loop, wherein you market to a specific audience, learn from your efforts, and then reinforce your persona with those learnings to improve your marketing, and so forth.

In practice, though, most personas fall flat. Here’s why:

The organization builds its persona based on a fantasy individual it hopes to attract. They then back in data to justify that persona, spend time and dollars marketing to them, and ultimately realize the persona was too vague to achieve worthwhile results.

Or

The organization does have an authentic, evidence-backed audience member, but that individual is defined so specifically that the audience they represent is too narrow to achieve significant results.

If you’ve fallen into one of these groups (and for the record, we have as well), not to worry. There’s a way to build a persona that not only captures the right audiences, but will actually help you market more effectively. It’s a three-step process, and once you get it down, you’ll never go back.

Building an Actionable Marketing Persona

Step 1. Focus on the problem, not the persona

In 2021, entrepreneur and digital marketing expert Rand Fishkin published a post called Marketing Personas Are Almost Always a Boondoggle. In it, he argued that the way most people go about building personas is all wrong. In short, they create a purely aspirational version of the audience member they want to attract—whether or not that persona type actually exists—stick a label on it, and then say, “Okay, this is who we’re going after.”

This approach, argues Fishkin, is “a solution searching for a problem.” It doesn’t tell you what to do differently in your marketing. Instead, it funnels resources toward a fictionalized individual whose description is so limited and superficial that it offers little real direction and can’t drive meaningful action.

Instead, he says, you should start your persona process by identifying the problem you’re solving for.

This makes perfect sense. By starting with the goal in mind, you’ll think in terms of the actions and decisions you need to influence, rather than simply the demographics of an imagined individual.

For example, say you run an association that’s reliant on memberships for revenue and you’re in the process of redesigning your website. Your first instinct may be to create a persona based on who you think is already coming to the site:

“Okay, we know from our data that our audience member is typically female, age 45, and living in the southeast US. Let’s make sure we include video, images, and content to engage that type of individual.”

That’s typically how most do it. But you’re different. In creating an actionable persona, you’ll start the process by asking:

How do we get more prospective members to come to our website?

Notice the shift. Rather than reflexively thinking about who’s coming to your site, you’re now forced to think about how they’re getting to your site, what’s driving them, how they’re using the site, and so forth. You’re focused on behaviors—i.e., actionable items—things you can now influence.

In addition, by framing things in terms of a problem, you’re not limited to some singular definition of an ideal audience member. Instead, you open the pool to multiple audience types, all of whom share similar desires and behaviors when engaging with your site.

This approach has myriad applications. You can apply it to virtually any marketing challenge across your digital outlets. For example:

• How do we engage interested families in applying to our school?
• How do we design our landing page in a way that drives more service inquiries?
• How do we develop our paid ads campaign to better educate our key audiences about what we do?

Step 2. Document what drives the behaviors

Once you’ve framed your persona in terms of a problem to solve, you can gather information around the motivations and behaviors related to that issue.

Referring back to our association example above, we can delve into the processes and actions our audiences are taking around our website:

• How much time are they spending on our site?
• What pages do they spend the most time on?
• What kind of experience are they having with the site to date?
• How do they hear about the website?
• What motivates them to go to the site?
• What actions do they take once they’re there?

Note that for every question we’ve asked here, there’s data right at your fingertips:

• Time on site / most popular pages? Google Analytics
• Site experience / motivation to visit? Survey or outreach to a handful of individual users
• Actions they take once there? GA, heatmapping (like Hotjar), form completion data

Step 3. Turn patterns into an actionable persona

Here’s the magic. As you gather and compile the data related to your problem question, you’ll begin to spot patterns of behavior, which you can then summarize into an actionable persona.

Now, you’re no longer guessing who your persona is—you’re building it from real data. Here’s how:

Cluster behaviors and motivations. Look across your data (analytics, surveys, interviews) and group common threads. Example: “People who find us through search tend to spend more time on our Member Benefits section before joining” vs. “People who come through referrals convert faster with less content.”

Name the persona by behavior, not demographics. Instead of “Susan, 45, lives in Atlanta,” use names that represent actions: “The Research-Driven Joiner” or “The Fast-Track Referrer.” These labels remind you of behaviors, not just who they are.

Translate insights into marketing actions. Your persona is only useful if it drives concrete marketing decisions. To that end, it should include not just a description, but a list of tactics derived from it. For example:

“The Research-Driven Joiner”

• Pattern: Blog readers and SEO visitors consume more educational content before taking action.
• Tactics to put in play:
  • Create a resource hub or “Getting Started” guide to support their research.
  • Add comparison charts, FAQs, and case studies to facilitate decision-making.
  • Deploy retargeting ads specifically featuring guides or webinars.

“The Community-Seeker”

• Pattern: Event attendees or in-person participants convert at higher rates than digital-only visitors.
• Tactics to put in play:
  • Expand the number of events, open houses, or community forums.
  • Capture event registrations in your CRM and follow up with personalized emails.
  • Use event video/photos to replicate a sense of belonging online.

Wrapping Up

Approaching persona development in this fashion has completely transformed how we direct our clients’ marketing efforts. As you can see, this type of snapshot is immediately practicable and offers real marketing value, rather than creating some limiting stereotype on which you’d have to spend significant budget and hours just to validate.

I hope this process inspires you as much as it’s inspired us. I encourage you to give it a try—and if you need help, we’re only an email away.

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