6 Top Persona Examples

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You must understand your customers if you want to run a successful business. How else can you fulfill their demands without knowing their needs and expectations? This is where personas come in. They’re a common practice for businesses to help them better understand their target audience, formed using real data from customers.

In this post, we’ll explore what makes user personas so important, and share six examples of personas to help guide you on your journey to creating your own. You can serve your customers effectively, and deliver the best user-oriented product or service possible, once you learn their interests and pain points.

What Is a User Persona?

A user persona is a fictional representation of your current and desired customer. They’re created to help you identify common traits and characteristics in your user base, built using factors such as age, education level, location, and occupation. Each persona should represent someone that connects with your business.

Why Are Personas Important for Your Online Business?

You might think you know your customer well, but user research and building personas can help you understand them at a greater level. It allows you to target their needs and pain points confidently.

Having audience persona examples to hand not only humanizes your users, but can guide you in your design, marketing, and product decisions. The customer becomes the heart of your business, steering you in directions that benefit them. You wouldn’t want to write or share something online that could offend or discourage your customers from shopping with you in the future!

Find Out More

Identifying and creating user personas is the first step when putting together a Customer Journey Map. For more steps, check out our full guide!

What Should I Include in Personas for My Business?

When it comes to deciding what to include in the personas examples, it all depends on your business needs and how you want to grow as a brand.

Make sure to include any information that could be useful to you, which can typically range from the basics — name, age, picture, education level, and job — to more detailed bios that include personal goals, interests, tech skills, favorite products and trusted brands.

We’ve pulled together a list of six great personas examples for inspiration.

The Influencer

Universe User Personas via Dribble

Influencers are a great example of a persona to build on — they’re very relevant in today’s market. As you can see from the template, it focuses mostly on the customer’s motivations, personality, and core needs. There’s a small section of basic information sharing their age, salary, and tech skills, but the standout factor here is the use of graphics and icons to make it more visually pleasing. It’s simple and clean, but effective.

Narrow Feet Shopper

Munro Persona Template

This template from Munro is a great audience personas example of a very specific customer. The design and layout are effective, detailing the customer’s frustrations and pain points clearly, along with all the core information. An interesting element to this template is the use of actual customer quotes from the business, which highlights how important the persona example is in relating to these real situations.

The Motivator

User Persona Template via Behance

Rather than focusing on a career, this persona example targets a certain type of customer by their personality traits and desires. The design of the template is fun and colorful, and the key information is laid out clearly without being overwhelming. There are progress bars to show the customer’s experience with technology, and we love the inclusion of favorite apps and brands to really make the persona relatable.

The Reader

Nerdy Nina Template via Dribbble

There are so many incredible features to this template, originally designed as a persona for a book app. The large image to the side with keywords about their personality really helps bring the persona example to life. There’s a lot of information included in the template, but it’s easy to read, and you can quickly see their main goals and frustrations. For its original purpose, we love that it also features the persona’s favorite books, reading habits, and target hashtags which could help with marketing strategies.

The Problem Solver

User Persona via Venngage

This example uses a lot of visual elements, from sliding personality bars, progress charts, and brand icons, to help shape the persona. All the core information is there too, and there’s even a short bio that adds more of a backstory to the targeted customer. Despite the vast amount of data on the template, the consistent color scheme and segments of text keep it from appearing too messy.

The Business Owner

Shopify Plus Persona Template via Dribbble

The great thing about these templates is the consistency across the persona examples. Though they were originally created to target Shopify Plus customers and growing businesses, you could adapt this style to fit your needs easily. Their unique visuals are not only eye-catching and colorful, but they display all the essential information in a digestible way. Needs and pain points are clear to see, and the customer’s willingness to spend is a nice additional visual.

Tips To Create Our Own Personas

If you’re creating your own user personas example from scratch you should focus on all of your key customer groups. We recommend creating three to five to get started.

You’re building representations of real customers, so it’s essential to do your research beforehand in order for the personas to be accurate. Do thorough audience research and analyze the user data to make sure you fully identify their motivations, demands, and pain points.

The key thing when building audience personas examples is to include helpful and relevant information for your business, so shape the template to fit your needs and be consistent across your examples.

Make sure you update your personas regularly as your company grows, as your audience develops, and as you receive more data. You can then use this to create targeted marketing content and offer personalized deals to your customers.

Summary

Knowing who your customers are, what they desire, and what they dislike (having a target market), is essential to running a successful business. If you’re just starting out, consider building your company website with a good quality website builder — they’ll give you the flexibility to adapt once you begin to understand your target audience.

When building a persona for your core customers, you need to consider all information that could be useful to the business.

The six persona examples we’ve included are great springboards for inspiration, and all display unique features that you could adopt when building your own. And remember, it’s important that the persona includes everything that you need to know about your customer, so pick and choose relevant details to make a suitable template for your business.

FAQ

User personas represent your target audience based on customer data and research. They can help a business effectively shape its services, products, design, and marketing to meet customer needs.

A good persona example should include any information that could be useful to your business — it’s there to give you a thorough picture of your customer base. You might only need basic data such as age, location, and education level, but a good persona tends to include a picture, personality traits, motivations, and pain points as well.

An audience tends to mean a group of people with shared interests and frustrations, whereas a persona is designed based on research and data to create a specific target customer.

Written by:
Headshot of Emma Ryan
Emma is Lead Writer at Website Builder Expert, having first joined the team in 2022. She manages the website's topical content strategy to help website owners navigate the highs and lows of being online. Emma also specializes in following the development of leading website builders Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify, through hands-on testing and research. Her work and expertise have been featured in Startups.co.uk, Digiday, TechRound, Industry Today, and Digital Information World.

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