Why Personas Matter

Customers don’t care about your product. They care about their problems, pressures, and goals.

Personas force you to stop looking inward and start mapping outward—capturing your audience’s jobs-to-be-done, pain points, and language. Done right, a persona feels less like a marketing sketch and more like a cheat sheet to your customer’s anxieties. When you use those anxieties as raw material, your copy feels sharper, more personal, and harder to ignore.

The Flaw of Demographic Personas

Too many teams stop at demographics:

“Sarah, 35, Marketing Manager, lives in Chicago, makes $85K, likes yoga.”

That might help for ad targeting, but it’s useless for messaging. Sarah’s age and salary don’t tell you what she’s struggling with at work or how she talks about those struggles.

Two totally different demographics can share the same jobs, pains, and be equally perfect customers.

Example:

• Slack user #1: 24-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, new to the workforce.
• Slack user #2: 58-year-old project manager in Omaha, 30 years of corporate experience.
• Demographics couldn’t be more different. But both share the same JTBD: “Keep team communication fast and organized without drowning in email.”

That’s the persona. Not their age, not their location.

Another example:

Peloton customer #1: 29-year-old single professional in NYC.

Peloton customer #2: 47-year-old parent in Texas with three kids.

Demographics are worlds apart.

But both share the pain of “I don’t have time to get to the gym, but I still want intense, structured workouts.”

The real persona is the shared job and pain, not the demographic wrapper.

The Power of JTBD + Pain + Language Personas

A strong persona focuses on:

• Jobs-to-be-done → What are they “hiring” your product to accomplish?
• Pain points → What feels frustrating, costly, or emotionally draining right now?
• Language → How do they describe those pains in their own words?

Weak Example (demographic-only):

Persona: Sarah, 35, Marketing Manager in Chicago.

• JTBD: Not defined.
• Pain points: Vague — “wants to be more efficient.”
• Language: None captured.

Resulting copy:

"Flowline helps busy professionals be more productive."

Strong Example (JTBD + pain + language):

Persona: Operations Manager at a mid-sized company

• JTBD: Keep projects moving without constant oversight.
• Pain points: “Approvals get lost in email.” “Projects stall for days over one missing signature.”
• Language: “I feel like I’m babysitting instead of managing.”

Resulting copy:

"Stop babysitting projects. With Flowline, approvals route automatically and updates stay in one place — so work moves forward without you chasing it down."

This hits harder because:

• The job is clear (keep projects moving).
• The pain is concrete (lost approvals, stalled projects).
• The language is lifted directly from the persona (“babysitting”).

The resulting copy feels like it was written for them, not at them.

How to Choose Personas (The Venn Test)

Not every customer type deserves its own persona. Use the overlap test:

• If their jobs, pains, and motivations mostly overlap, they can share one persona.
• If they’re mostly distinct circles, create separate personas.

Example:

Slack: Engineers, marketers, and sales all had the same JTBD (reduce email, collaborate faster.) One persona.

Notion: Students vs. startup teams. Both wanted organization, but students needed personal study systems while startups needed team collaboration. Distinct pains, distinct JTBD = separate personas.

What to Capture for Each Persona

Each persona card in your Story System should capture:

• JTBD (in plain words).
• Pain points (as specific as possible).
• Motivations/aspirations (what “better” looks like).
• Objections (why they’d say no).
• Language style (formal, playful, ROI-focused, etc.).
• Optional: demographics only if they directly shape behavior or targeting.

Common Mistakes

• Too many personas. More than 3–4 means you’re slicing too thin.
• Demographic fluff. Age, hobbies, job titles aren’t messaging fuel.
• Aspirational personas. Don’t build for who you wish was buying—build for who is.
• Generic pains. “Save time and money” is not a pain. “I can’t prove ROI to my boss” is.

End Result:

With personas anchored in jobs, pains, and language, your Story System becomes practical. You’ll know exactly who you’re talking to, what keeps them up at night, and what words will stop their scroll.

Persona Discovery Exercise — Step-by-Step (jobs, pains, language)

Personas here aren’t demographics, but jobs to be done, pains, and the exact language people use. They exist to make your story specific and persuasive, not pretty.

Step 1: Gather raw material

Collect voice-of-customer (VoC) in a single workspace (Notion/Sheet is fine).

Note: If you did the Core Story exercise above, you should already have a lot of this.

Sources to mine

• 6–10 customer/sales calls (recordings or notes)
• Support tickets, chat transcripts, pre-sales emails
• Reviews of you + competitors (G2/Capterra/App Store/Reddit)
• Community threads (Slack/Discord/Subreddits)
• Internal sales notes/CRM fields (reasons won/lost)

What to capture (copy/paste verbatim)

• Triggers: “What was happening when you started looking for a solution?”
• Jobs: “What are you trying to get done?”
• Pains: “What made this hard/annoying/expensive?”
• Objections: “What almost stopped you from buying?”
• Desired outcomes: “If this worked perfectly, what changes?”
• Exact phrases/idioms: keep them word-for-word

Pro tip: Don’t paraphrase yet. Verbatim language is a goldmine for future copy.

Step 2: Cluster into proto-personas

Do a fast affinity map:

• Group snippets that share the same job + similar pains.
• Name each cluster with a working label:“Ops Manager chasing approvals”, “Founder overwhelmed by setup”, “IC drowning in context switching”.

You now have 3–7 proto-personas (not final yet).

Step 3: The Venn pressure test

For each pair of proto-personas, look at Jobs ∩ Pains ∩ Language:

• If the overlap is high, merge them.
• If overlap is low, keep them separate.

Rule of thumb: If you can’t write a single hook that would resonate with both, they are different personas.

Also check channel differences: if you’d reach them in totally different places (e.g., CFO vs. IC on Reddit), that’s another split signal.

Step 4: Decide who “earns” a full persona

A group earns a persona when it forces different messaging. Use these three tests:

• Hook Split TestWrite one top-of-funnel headline you believe both groups would click.If you can’t, they’re different personas.
• Objection Split TestList the #1 buying objection.If they’re different (e.g., “security & compliance” vs. “time to set up”), they’re different personas.
• Value Proof Split TestWhat proof would each need to believe you?If one needs SOC2/ROI calculator and the other needs “works with Notion & Slack,” split.

Step 5: Prioritize with a quick scoring matrix

If you have 6–7+ candidates, prioritize 2–3 primaries and relegate the rest to secondary.

Score each (1–5) on:

• Urgency (pain now)
• Willingness to pay
• TAM/volume (how big is the market?)
• Reachability (can we target them?)
• Strategic fit (aligns with core story)

Primary personas: Top 2–3 by Total.

Secondary personas: Keep notes, but don’t optimize your core funnel for them (yet).

Anti-persona: Anyone who looks attractive but consistently stalls/churns.

More than 3 primaries = diluted story, slower creative, fuzzy salience.

Step 6: Fill the working Persona Table (make it actionable)

Use this exact structure (you can copy/paste):

Naming tip: Use a handle that encodes the job (e.g., Ops Olivia — Unblock approvals). It’s a mnemonic for the team.

Step 7: Sanity-check against your Core Story

Read your primary personas side-by-side with your Core Story. Ask:

• Do they all ladder up to the same central promise (same sandbox)?
• Can you express your promise in each persona’s exact words?
• Are there any personas whose needs force you to tell a different story? (If yes, consider making them secondary or spinning up a separate campaign path.)

Step 8: Quick validation loop

You don’t need perfect personas; you need useful ones. Validate with tiny tests:

• 3 headline smoke tests per persona (ads or social): Measure CTR differences. You’re checking if distinct hooks land.
• LP snippet test: One hero + subhead per persona (Unbounce/Framer variants). Check first-fold conversion (click-through to signup/learn more).
• Sales/email reply test: Send 20 cold emails per persona using their exact words in the first sentence. Track reply rate.

Good-enough signal: One persona’s variant beats baseline by ~20%+ on at least one metric and your qualitative calls confirm the language feels “seen.”‍

Input your Personas in your Story System here.