Picture this: your company has just launched a cutting-edge technology aimed at scientists, your first demos get amazing feedback, and every potential customer you meet is super excited about your product. Fast forward a few weeks and no one has ordered your product, not even a request for a quote...
Sound familiar? It could be because you haven't built your marketing personas. Marketing the best technology doesn't necessarily mean people will buy it. Sometimes, selling a piece of lab equipment isn't about efficiency or even price. Some scientists prefer flexibility and the ability to tailor experiments to their needs.
That’s where science-focused marketing personas come in. By going beyond surface-level demographics and digging deep into your customers’ priorities, work environments, and daily challenges, you can build personas to guide your marketing and communication.
In this article, we’ll explore what it takes to create personas that reveal the exact insights you need to tailor your message to the right audience.
If you'd like to skip this article and start working on your personas right away, I've also developed a free toolbox that you can download here 👇
DownloadWhat are marketing personas?
A marketing persona is a “composite character” representing a segment of your customer base. It’s basically a rough sketch or a fictional representation reflecting the typical characteristics, motivations, and behaviors of a specific group without focusing on any single individual.
The goal of a persona is to guide your marketing strategies in a targeted way. By identifying the unique needs, pain points, and preferences of each audience group, personas help marketers and sales teams better understand who they’re reaching, what resonates with them, and how best to engage them.
Most companies develop several personas to represent their diverse audience segments. In scientific fields, for instance, personas could include roles like the Primary Investigator (PI), lab manager, PhD students or Postdocs, and procurement teams.
Personas can also get quite detailed, especially in science-based sectors. For instance, you may create separate personas for a PI in Microbiology and another for a PI in Biochemistry if their needs and challenges differ significantly.
Building personas can also extend to groups outside the direct buyers, such as:
- Influencer: Those who impact the buying decision without making the purchase themselves, like PhD students and postdocs in labs.
- Detractors: A person who’s likely to derail the sale of your product. It could be linked to hierarchy, strong opinions, or buying cycle processes. Understanding them will help you develop strategies to overcome these roadblocks.
- Anti-personas: Basically, these are the people you don't want to focus on, not because they aren't potential customers, but because they can't buy your product (due to pricing or lack of decision-making power). The anti-persona is a group you have identified as "time wasters”. They are not influencers or even detractors; they are simply a group that takes up your sales team's time without ever resulting in a closed deal. Knowing them is a great way to improve your marketing and sales focus.
Now that you have a clearer idea of what a persona is, let's look at how to build one.
3 steps for creating marketing personas in science
While there are countless methods out there for building marketing personas, I've found it boils down to three major stages:
- Identify your key stakeholders
- Conduct in-depth interviews
- Draft your personas
Let’s explore them one by one.
1. Identify your key stakeholders
This step is basically a quantitative analysis that doesn’t require much “on-the-ground” research. Here, the goal is to map out the different types of people involved in purchasing or using your product or services.
Begin by creating a spreadsheet and listing all your existing customers. Include as much detail as possible, such as:
- Demographic information: Name, industry, field of research, location, number of employees, revenue level, etc.
- Sales metrics: Annual revenue generated, lifetime value, average spend per deal, etc.
- Product usage data: Number of users for the same product, usage frequency, experiments run with your equipment so far, etc.
Once your big spreadsheet is filled in (a user survey could help if you’re missing some of the details), start analyzing it and looking for patterns. To make it easier, consider using visualization tools, like charts and graphs, to make the pattern more recognizable. For example, comparing customer specialties to the revenue generated per year could reveal that certain research fields are more profitable—a promising lead to explore further.
Also make sure to dig into individual-level data for each customer. For instance, identifying the buyer within each of your segments could already lead to valuable insights. The goal here is really to get as much information on paper as you can before moving on to the next step.
2. Conduct in-depth interviews
This is where the fun begins. Now that you have a better idea of who your target customers are, it’s time to get to know them personally.
Some people may think that an online survey will do the trick, but in my opinion, there is nothing better than a face-to-face interview when it comes to building your personas. In an interview, you can adjust questions on the fly and get much more detailed answers than in a survey. Yes, it's time-consuming, but it's worth it in the long run because the result will likely influence every single marketing decision you make for years to come.
Interviews are typically conducted in three steps:
- Outreach: Send a series of emails to your customers to book an interview with them. Using a scheduling tool like Calendly can make it easy for them to pick a convenient time—saving you both from back-and-forth messages.
- Conduct the interview: Prepare your list of questions, join the call with your customer, and dive in! Don't forget to ask your client to record the call; this will be very important for the next step.
- Compile the answers: Return to your original spreadsheet where you compiled all of your customer data and begin adding responses from your interviews. Create a column for each question and record each customer's responses accordingly. Having all the data in one place will help you identify trends and patterns within your customer base. If you recorded the interview, you can use an automated transcription tool if you need to review some answers.
One question you may ask yourself in the process is how many interviews are enough? There’s no hard rule here; it depends on the size of your user base and the segments you’ve identified. Interview at least three people per segment you believe could represent a persona to ensure you’re getting a broad enough sample to confirm your assumptions.
A great tip I learned from my conversation with Marina Hop on creativity is that you should stop interviewing your customers once you start hearing the same responses from a particular group. This is a good sign that your persona is starting to take shape.
3. Draft your personas
Now that you have all your answers in one place, start looking for similar patterns and group those answers together. This analysis should create a few groups with similar characteristics and behavior—those are your different personas.
The final step is to write the narrative for each of those personas persona. As explained in the introduction, a persona is a composite character of your customer segment, which means that you'll take the answers from the interviews, compile them, and write a summary that represents how this particular group of people thinks and behaves.
The final form of your persona is a document that presents this information in a simple but effective way. Here’s a structure you might use to create each persona profile:
- Nickname: Use a role-based nickname like “Lab Manager Jack” or “PI Nelly” to make it relatable and easy to reference.
- About them: Describe their role, organization type, specialty, and any objectives that are specific to this persona.
- Benefits: List the key benefits they gain from using your product or service.
- Use case: Detail exactly how they interact with your product, including any specific adaptations or workarounds they use.
- Previous solution & pain points: Describe what they used before switching to your product and outline their past and current pain points.
- Buying trigger: What drives this persona to make a purchase decision? This could be budget availability, research needs, or workflow improvements.
- Buying process: Note who is involved, how long each step takes, and any required paperwork or approval steps.
- Choice factors: Describe how they evaluate new products, what kind of credibility they require, and any expectations around support, training, and success metrics.
- Other details: Include any additional info that adds depth to their profile—anything that helps build a clearer picture.
Extra tip: Add an illustration on their profile, or create an AI-generated image, to make the persona more relatable and human. This visual touch can help your team connect better with each persona.
How to use your personas?
Creating marketing personas isn’t just a box to tick off—it’s a building block you can use in everything related to your marketing, communications, sales, and even product development. Here’s how you can put those personas to work:
Present them to your team: Don't keep your personas to yourself! Introducing personas to your team creates a shared understanding of your audience's needs, motivations, and challenges. By putting a "face" on your customers, personas make customer information accessible and relatable, encouraging each department to focus its efforts on meeting those specific needs. Presenting personas also builds empathy for the real people behind your metrics, helping everyone in the organization connect with the people they're serving.
Develop tailored messaging: Personas enable your marketing team to speak directly to each audience segment’s priorities and challenges. Use what you’ve learned to craft ad copy, website text, and content that feel both personal and relevant, building trust and demonstrating that you genuinely understand each customer’s unique needs.
Guide sales training and enablement: Personas are invaluable for sales training because they provide sales teams with a deep understanding of customer needs, objections, and priorities. This allows your salespeople to tailor their pitches to address specific concerns. Providing sales teams with persona-based enablement materials, such as objection-handling strategies or targeted use cases, increases their effectiveness and ability to close deals by making every pitch feel relevant and customer-focused.
Inform product development and positioning: With well-defined personas, product teams gain insight into the features, functionality, and positioning that will truly meet customer needs. Instead of flying in the dark, personas are a perfect way to get actionable insights from the ground up and share them with your development team. Personas also guide positioning, helping teams frame new features in terms of the customer value they deliver.
Refine your content strategy: A content strategy based on personas is more likely to produce resources that customers will find helpful. Personas reveal the types of content that will answer customers' questions, solve their problems, or enhance their professional growth. This allows you to create content that educates, engages, and adds value at every stage of the customer journey, increasing engagement and brand loyalty.
Enhance customer experience and retention: By understanding user motivations, preferences, and pain points, customer success and support teams can develop proactive strategies that anticipate common problems. A targeted experience builds loyalty and drives retention because customers feel that the company truly understands and supports their goals.
Finally, I want to say a few words about the long-term use of your personas. Most companies create their personas once and never revisit them, but I think this is a mistake.
Like your product or service, your marketing persona will evolve over time, and it's important to keep an eye on critical changes that could impact your sales. In science, this is even more important because a new technology or a new competitor could drastically change the way scientists conduct their experiments or the focus of their research.
My advice is to conduct an online survey of your customer base every year to keep an eye on these signals. Conducting a few interviews each year to complete and adjust your existing personas is also a very good practice that will always help you.
To help you get started, download my templates for email outreach, interview questions, and persona profile here. 👇
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