How to create buyer personas in the AI era

“If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one.” — Will Francis, DMI Expert

Imagine that every time you hit the Publish button, your posts attract qualified traffic that converts.

No wasted ad budget, no irrelevant clicks — just customers who value your offer.

The secret?

Buyer personas.

Why buyer personas matter for small business

Small business owners who try to reach “everyone” end up speaking to no one. Personas help you create:

• Focused messages.
• Reduce wasted spend.
• Produce content that resonates.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that represents your ideal customer.

Built from a mix of data, interviews, surveys, and educated assumptions.

It captures demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits — and it tells you exactly how to talk to that customer.

Key benefits of creating buyer personas

• Higher conversion rates — marketers using personas can see up to 73% higher conversions.
• Better content engagement — persona-driven content can boost engagement by multiple folds.
• More efficient ad spend — target only who will likely buy with relevant messages.
• Improved customer experience.

What to include in a buyer persona

Your persona should include three main areas:

• Demographics — age, gender, marital status, education, occupation, income range.
• Psychographics — values, goals, motivations, fears, pain points, lifestyle, sources of influence.
• Behavioral — purchase habits, channel preferences, content consumption, typical day.

They are many things that you can include in your buyer persona.

But Those will be enough to help you create a message that resonate with your audience.

Full step-by-step process to create buyer personas

This step-by-step workflow is built for small business owners who want to make their marketing efforts more effective.

Step 1 — identify which questions you want to answer

The below questions are essential to answer in your research.

Add questions based on your goals and business.

• What are your customers goals?
  
  This will help you tailor your message, offer, or even your product to their goals.
  
• What are the challenges they face to achieve their goals?
  
  The answer will help articulate how your products or services will address their pain-points.
  
• What are they interested about?
  
  This can help in ads, choosing influencers, and create content around their interest to keep them engaged.
  
• How old are they? What is Their occupation? Gender? Education? Income level? Are they married or single?
  
  Those will help you tailor your message and effectively target them if you run ads.
  
• How frequently they purchase? Which social media channels they use? How they spend their days?
  
  Those will help identify when and where to reach them.
  

Now, that you know what information you need, it’s time to conduct interviews: The part I hate the most 🙁

Step 2 — Conduct semi-structured interviews

A semi-structured interview uses a predefined set of open-ended questions (called an interview guide),

But the interviewer can change the order, ask follow-up questions, or explore new ideas during the conversation.

It’s flexible yet focused — designed to collect in-depth insights while keeping the discussion aligned with knowing who they are.

Remember to have fun and engage with them to help them feel comfortable and open-up truthfully.

A rule of thumb, conducting between 12 and 15 interviews will be enough.

However, keep up until you see a pattern in your data.

Step 3 — Use Ai to analyze interviews

Firstly, record interviews transcript in Google docs for each person and question,

Then, upload the document into your favorite Gen Ai
And write this Prompt:

“

I’ve conducted several semi-structured interviews to understand my target customers. Google Doc document below contains one by one respondent’s answers to a list of consistent questions (demographics, goals, challenges, behaviors, etc.).

I want you to analyze all responses and create distinct buyer personas that represent the main customer segments.

Instructions:

How to Market to Them (specific tone, approach, offers)

Identify patterns, similarities, and differences among respondents.

Group them into 2–4 clear personas (depending on diversity).

For each persona, include:

• Persona Name (e.g., “Eco-conscious Emma”)

• Demographics (age range, gender, location, income, job title, etc.)

• Psychographics (goals, values, motivations, lifestyle)

• Pain Points & Challenges

• Buying Triggers & Barriers

• Preferred Channels (where they search or interact online)

• Content Preferences (topics, tone, or type of media they consume”

“

The above prompt will be enough to trigger a powerful response.

Step 4 — Use Build my persona by HubSpot to visualize your buyer personas

Once you’ve gathered all the data from your interviews and research, it’s time to turn that information into something tangible and shareable — a professional, visual buyer persona profile.

One of the easiest tools for this is HubSpot’s Make My Persona. It’s a free, interactive tool that helps you transform your raw insights into a structured persona document that your whole team can use.

Conclusion: Start Marketing Smarter, Not Harder

In today’s AI-powered world, marketing is no longer about guessing what your customers want.

It’s about understanding them deeply.

Creating detailed buyer personas helps you move from random posts and ads to strategic communication that truly connects with your audience.

By identifying who your ideal customers are, what they care about, and how they make decisions, you’ll:

• Craft messages that feel personal and relevant.
• Save money by focusing only on the right people.
• Build stronger customer relationships that last.

And the best part?

You don’t need a huge budget or a marketing team.

With tools like ChatGPT to brainstorm and HubSpot’s Make My Persona to visualize, you can build data-driven personas in just a few hours.

Start today!

Review your existing customers, conduct a few short interviews, and bring your first persona to life.

Once you do, every blog post, ad, and social media update will have a clear purpose — to speak directly to the people who matter most to your business.

Because when you know your audience, you don’t just market better — you grow smarter.