Top 8 Free Buyer Persona Templates for Any Customer

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Buyer persona templates are documents that help businesses create customer avatars to guide their sales and marketing efforts. The templates usually include sections like goals, hobbies, and any others that sellers and marketers use to personalize their efforts to their ideal customers’ needs and identify high-quality customers. Businesses often also use templates to create negative buyer personas so salespeople can easily recognize and disqualify bad-fit leads.

Best Free General Buyer Persona Template

We’ve created a free general buyer persona template that any salesperson can use to build their buyer persona, regardless of their industry or business type. The template contains sections for a name and image, demographics, goals and motivations, challenges or pain points, fears, hobbies and interests, and communication channels. Feel free to tailor the template to fit your business’s specific needs, then fill in the blanks by interviewing customers, sending surveys, reviewing CRM data, and similar methods.

Components of a Buyer Persona Template

There are certain components that are often included in buyer persona templates — these sections are represented in our free general template. Within each section, the finished buyer persona will have anywhere from 3–8 bullet points. But some buyer personas might use a table or paragraph format instead. Let’s dive into each of the components to learn more about why they’re important and what intel they reveal:

Name & Image

Most marketers will give their persona a name that relates to their buying behavior or key trait. Names could be Technology Tristian for an IT professional or Runner Rebecca for a running hobbyist. They’ll also include a stock image, either animated or of a real person, to give life to the persona. The name and image help make your persona seem more human and realistic.

Demographics

Demographics tell you the age, location, gender, occupation, income, and marital status of the fictional ideal buyer you’re creating. Unlike the demographics in a customer profile, where you’d find age ranges and multiple locations, the buyer persona specifically describes one person, so you’ll write an exact age and a single location. This section helps you know the buyer as an individual rather than a set of data points.

Hobbies & Interests

Hobbies and interests explain what a person likes to do or learn about in their free time. Hobbies could be surfing or going out to expensive dinners with colleagues. An interest might be improving as a content marketer or a home cook. The more marketers know about their lifestyle, the better marketing content they can create. Sales reps can also freshen up on their hobbies for small talk purposes.

Motivations & Goals

Motivations represent the deep desires driving a person to take action, either in their personal life (B2C) or professional life (B2B). For example, a marketing manager's motivation may be to excel in her career. Her goal would then serve that motivation, such as doubling sales revenue from her social marketing efforts. Once you know a person’s motivations and goals, you can craft messaging that grabs their attention.

Challenges or Pain Points

This section describes the common issues your ideal buyer is suffering. It could be challenges blocking them from reaching their goals or just nagging pains they want gone. Knowing the problems on top of mind for your ideal buyer will help you focus your pitch on how you’ll eliminate these struggles.

Fears

Fears represent the worries weighing on your ideal buyer.. Think of the specific outcomes that they dread. In the B2B space, this could be losing their job, failing to hit quota, or missing out on their promotion. For B2C, an ideal buyer might fear getting old or losing their house. If you know the buyer’s fears, you can position your product or service as something that precludes these frightening and undesirable outcomes.

Communication Channels

This describes which social media and communication channels the person usually uses and how they get their information. Knowing where your buyer is active online will enable you to meet them with your marketing content, ads, and other sales material. And, knowing how and when they like to be contacted will give reps the best chance of connecting with them.

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Think about how you’d describe a good lead and a bad one using the above components. That way you can create positive and negative buyer personas. For example, a negative buyer persona might list a challenge that many leads incorrectly think your company solves. Having the sketches of the profiles of both an ideal buyer and an unfavorable one will help you better qualify leads.

Top 7 Buyer Persona Templates for Any Situation

Different types of companies will find different categories of data helpful to them. While a B2C financial services rep would want the specifics of an individual’s financial situation, a B2B SaaS brand would not. So it’s important to use an industry-specific buyer persona template alongside your generic one. You could also take the best parts of two and mix them together. Below are seven templates you can use to create your positive and negative buyer personas.

Simplified B2B Buyer Persona Template

Who Should Use It: B2B product or service companies that want an easy-to-read buyer persona that helps salespeople see the basic challenges, goals, and attributes of an ideal buyer.

Why It Works: This brief and simple template is designed for easy reference. It includes a bulleted background section that lists the buyer’s age, gender, occupation, marital status, education, and location, and a paragraph explaining the person’s professional goals and challenges. Though surface level, this information enables the salesperson to form a solid understanding of how to best position their product or service to an ideal buyer.

Comprehensive B2B Buyer Persona Template

Who Should Use It: B2B businesses that want to take a deep dive into a professional’s job responsibilities and capture their motivations and objections to purchasing your product or service.

Why It Works: This buyer persona template allows you to create an exhaustive profile of a potential buyer with its many sections: demographics, job responsibilities, professional goals, challenges, lifestyle, fears, and common objections. Knowing the job responsibilities of an ideal buyer helps salespeople and marketers create more relatable content. And understanding potential concerns helps sellers prepare effective rebuttals to overcome the common objections.