When ads underperform, the first instinct is usually to rewrite the copy or raise the budget. Often the real issue is upstream: the ad is written for "everyone," and copy written for everyone tends to genuinely connect with no one.
This guide covers what a useful persona actually contains, how to research one in about a week without a research budget, a filled-in example you can copy, and how to turn each part of the persona into specific lines of copy.
A persona is not a demographic
"Women, 25-40, interested in fitness" is a targeting filter, not a persona. A real persona answers: what is this person actually frustrated by right now? What have they already tried that didn't work? What would make them trust a new solution enough to click? Age and interests help you find the audience; pain points and triggers help you write copy that actually speaks to them.
Pain points beat features, every time
People don't buy products, they buy relief from a specific frustration or progress toward a specific goal. If your persona work stops at "busy professionals," your copy will default to listing features, because you don't know what pain to speak to. If your persona work gets to "managers who are tired of chasing status updates across four different tools," the ad copy almost writes itself.
How to research a persona
You don't need a survey panel or an agency. You need real evidence from real people, gathered from a few places, and a willingness to write down what they say rather than what you hoped they'd say.
Talk to five to ten people
Current customers, recent signups, or people who fit your target but haven't bought yet. Keep calls short and ask about their situation, not your product. Useful questions:
- Walk me through the last time this problem came up. What were you doing?
- What are you using to handle it today, and what's annoying about it?
- What else have you tried? Why did you stop?
- What would have to be true for you to switch to something new?
- Where do you usually go to find tools or advice for this?
Read what people write when you're not in the room
Reviews of competing products, community forums, subreddits, and comment threads are full of unprompted complaints in the customer's own words. Pay special attention to one- and three-star reviews of alternatives. They tell you what the current options get wrong.
Check the data you already have
Support tickets, sales call notes, and cancellation reasons all show what people struggle with. If you've connected Google Search Console, the queries people use to find your site show the exact language they use for the problem.
Look for patterns, not quotes
One person's opinion is an anecdote. When the same frustration shows up in three interviews and a handful of reviews, that's a pain point you can build a persona around. Group what you collect by theme before you write anything.
A filled-in persona template
Here's a complete example for a fictional product: an online booking tool for independent fitness studios. Use the same fields for your own product and replace every line with what your research actually found.
- Name and role: "Studio Owner Sam" — runs a single yoga and pilates studio with a handful of part-time instructors.
- Situation today: takes bookings through a mix of direct messages, a shared spreadsheet, and a basic calendar app.
- Main pain point: last-minute cancellations leave classes half-empty, and there's no easy way to fill the spots.
- Secondary pains: double-bookings when two instructors edit the spreadsheet at once; hours each week spent answering "is there space in Thursday's class?" messages.
- What they've tried: a big all-in-one gym platform that felt too complex and expensive for a small studio.
- Goal: fuller classes and evenings free from admin.
- Buying triggers: a new instructor joining, opening a second room, or a month where cancellations noticeably hurt revenue.
- Objections: "My regulars won't want to download an app," and "I don't have time to set up something new."
- Words they use: "no-shows," "waitlist," "my regulars," "admin." Words they don't use: "scheduling optimization."
- Where they spend time: Instagram, local business groups, and a couple of studio-owner communities.
- What earns trust: seeing it work for a studio their size, and being able to try it without a long setup.
Notice what's missing: age, income, and hobbies barely appear. They're useful for targeting settings, but none of them would change a single line of the copy.
Turning the persona into copy
A persona only earns its keep when it changes what you write. Each field maps to a specific part of an ad or page:
- Main pain point becomes the headline: "Half-empty class after a last-minute cancellation?"
- What they've tried becomes a contrast line: "Without the complexity of big gym software."
- Goal becomes the promise: "Automatic waitlists that fill open spots for you."
- Objections become FAQ answers and reassurance near the button: "Clients book from a link, no app download needed."
- Buying triggers shape timing and targeting, such as running ads around the start of a new term or season.
- Their words replace your jargon everywhere. If they say "no-shows," so do you.
- Where they spend time decides which platforms get your budget first.
If you use AI to draft copy, paste the persona into the prompt. A detailed persona is the single biggest improvement you can make to AI-generated marketing, because it gives the model something specific to write toward.
One product can have more than one persona — but not in the same ad
It's common for a product to serve more than one real audience. The mistake is writing one ad that tries to speak to all of them at once — it ends up speaking clearly to none. It's usually better to run a few campaigns, each tightly written for one persona, than one campaign that hedges across several.
For the booking tool, a studio owner and a solo personal trainer have different pains: the owner worries about filling classes, the trainer about juggling one-to-one sessions. Same product, two campaigns, two landing page headlines.
How to sanity-check a persona
A useful test: could you write a full sentence of ad copy using this persona's pain point, in their own likely words? If the persona is specific enough, that sentence comes easily. If you're stuck, the persona is still too generic to write from.
A few more checks before you use it:
- Is every pain point backed by something a real person said or wrote?
- Could a competitor's persona be identical? If so, it isn't specific enough to your product.
- Does it say what they use today and why it falls short?
- Would someone on your team recognize this person from a sales or support conversation?
Keep it current
A persona is a working document, not a one-off exercise. Revisit it when your product changes meaningfully, when you move into a new market, or when ads that used to work stop working. A light review every quarter is a reasonable default for most small teams: reread recent support tickets and reviews, and update anything that no longer matches.
Frequently asked questions
What should a buyer persona include?
At minimum: the person's role and situation, what they use today, their main pain point, what they've already tried, their goal, what triggers them to look for a solution, their likely objections, and the words they use for the problem. Demographics can help with ad targeting, but the pain points and triggers are what actually shape your copy.
How long should a buyer persona be?
Long enough to write from, short enough to read in two minutes. For most small teams that means a single page or a short list of ten to twelve fields. If a persona runs to several pages, the important details get lost; if it fits in one line, it's probably a demographic rather than a persona.
How many buyer personas does a startup need?
Usually one or two to start. Early on, it's better to understand one audience deeply and write sharp copy for it than to spread effort across five thin personas. Add another persona when you have clear evidence of a distinct group with different pains, not just a different job title.
Can AI create a buyer persona?
AI can draft a useful first version from a product description, which saves time and gives you a structure to test. Treat it as a hypothesis, though. Check the pain points and language against real interviews, reviews and support tickets, and edit anything that doesn't match what actual customers say.
The takeaway
Before optimizing copy or budget, check whether the persona behind the ad is specific enough to write from. Growiom generates a full buyer persona — pain points, goals, buying triggers, and preferred platforms — as part of the same strategy that generates your ad copy, so the copy is built against a real audience from the start.
Related tool
AI Buyer Persona Generator