There’s an old saying that if you try to straddle two chairs, you’ll fall right between them.
The same trap shows up in marketing. If you try to speak to everyone, your message gets so watered down that you end up speaking to no one.
Writing to a specific audience does the opposite. It helps your content stand out, earn engagement, turn readers into subscribers and customers, and it even increases your chances of being cited in AI search results. Audience personas unlock these benefits by giving you a clear picture of the specific type of reader you’re writing for.
I have a few audience personas for Really Good Business Ideas and tailor each piece to the right one, and it’s easily one of the most useful things I’ve done for the publication. When I’m helping a client build or scale their content marketing operation, audience personas and a content style guide are the very first things we set up (if they don’t already have them). Today, I’ll share how I create audience personas, why they work, and how to make your own.
What Is an Audience Persona?
An audience persona (sometimes called a buyer persona or user persona) is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal readers or customers, built from real data and research. It captures the kind of person you're trying to reach, covering things like their goals and frustrations. Instead of marketing to a vague, nameless crowd, you write with a clear, specific reader in mind.
Most personas fail because they stop at demographics like age, income, job title, a stock photo, and a clever alliterative name. Those details tell you who someone is on paper, but absolutely nothing about why they’d open your email on a Tuesday morning. A good persona is mostly about what's going on in someone's head.
In an ideal world, you'd build your personas with a market researcher, after real interviews with your actual users. Many companies or independent creators can't resource a project like that. But that’s ok, because a research budget isn't a prerequisite. Just going through the exercise, studying who you're actually reaching and forcing yourself to get specific, is valuable on its own. A persona is an average, and individuals always vary, but even a rough one makes your communication far more focused and effective.
Audience Persona vs. Buyer Persona vs. Target Audience
Audience persona, buyer persona, and target audience are often used interchangeably, but there are slight differences in meaning. Your target audience is the whole group you’re trying to reach, like “people starting an online business.” A buyer persona is the marketing term for a detailed profile of one type of person in that group, usually built around a purchase decision. An audience persona applies the same idea to readers rather than buyers, which is why it fits newsletters and content so naturally. Use whichever word you like. What matters is getting specific about who you’re reaching.
Why Audience Personas Are Important
Writing for one specific reader changes what you publish in a few concrete ways.
The more specific you get, the more you stand out. Most content is written for “anyone,” so it blends into a feed of identical advice. Writing to one specific persona (or type of person) lets you take a bolder stance and use real-world examples that broad, generic advice usually leaves out. This is what will make a reader stop and think, “This is for me.”
Readers respond better when you use their own words. A persona tells you what your reader is stuck on and the exact phrases they use for it. Write using their language about a real problem, and they’ll feel like you read their mind. This is what turns a post people skim and forget into one they actually engage with.
Offers convert when they solve a real problem. A persona shows you the real need behind a decision and the objection that holds someone back. When you speak to their needs and address their objections, your offer suddenly starts feeling like an obvious next step rather than a sales pitch.
Focus your effort on where your reader already is. A persona maps where your reader spends time and who they already trust, so you can stop spreading yourself thin across every channel. Instead of shouting into the void, you can show up in the few places that matter, with the content that earns attention there.
AI tools cite the content that matches the person who wrote the prompt. AI agents build their answers around who’s asking the questions, not just the keywords they entered. A prompt like “I’m a solo traveler on a tight budget” tells the model who they are and what they’re working with. When your persona captures those questions and provides the answer your reader needs, your content becomes a prime target for generative engine optimization, ensuring your brand is the source these tools pull from.
How to Build Audience Personas
I highly recommend working with a professional market researcher to develop your personas if you are able to. They'll run in-depth interviews with your real customers to figure out what people want and what holds them back, and then they’ll turn those insights into personas. They may even conduct a quantitative survey and use statistical analysis to estimate each segment's size.
But if working with a professional market researcher isn’t accessible to you or your company right now, you can still develop strong personas on your own. Here's how I do it.
Start with a proto-persona and treat it as a hypothesis. Write down who you think your content is for. Think about a few different profiles of readers and what is unique about each one. Don’t worry about getting these perfect. They’re just a starting point, and you can iterate as you go.
Mine the data you can already access. Some of this data is your own, like your subscriber notes, comments, DMs, reviews and testimonials (yours and your competitors’), support tickets, and analytics. You’ll need to look for others, like SparkToro, to learn where your audience spends their time, and Reddit or niche forums to learn how they talk and who they trust.
Talk to five or ten real readers. Use the approach Rob Fitzpatrick outlines in The Mom Test: Ask about their past, not your idea. Instead of asking, "Would you use this?" ask what they did the last time they ran into the problem you solve and how it went. Hypothetical questions will get you polite, useless answers. Focus on learning from real stories and listen more than you talk. Once you stop learning anything new from new conversations, you’ve spoken to enough readers, and you’re ready to move on to the next step.
Look for patterns. Tag the goals, frustrations, triggers, and exact phrases that keep coming up across your research, then group the people who overlap on most of them. You’re looking for broad patterns, not perfect matches.
Write a one-pager on each persona. Capture their identity, why they’re here, their trigger, their frustrations, what they want, where they spend time, what earns their trust, and their voice in verbatim quotes, plus one anti-voice line they’d never say. Most brands only need 3–5 personas to be effective.
Choose one primary persona. Pick the reader you write for by default, and consider defining an anti-persona you’re explicitly not writing for.
Review your personas every quarter. Personas drift as your audience and the platform change, so check yours against fresh replies and data every 90 days, and swap in new quotes when the old ones stop sounding right.
Audience Persona Template
Here’s the audience persona template I use and recommend. Fill it in for your readers and keep it somewhere you’ll actually use it.
Persona Name
Identity: Who they are and where they are right now, in a couple of sentences, with demographics kept light.
Why They're Here: The progress they want your content to help them make, in one line. This is the persona's job-to-be-done.
Trigger: The moment that sent them looking for help now, rather than someday in the future.
Frustrations: What's concretely not working, and what the usual advice gets wrong for them.
What They Want: Both the surface goal, and the deeper driver underneath it.
Discovery Channels: Where they spend time and how they come across people like you.
Trust Pathways: What makes them believe you, including the proof and the sources they trust.
Voice: A few real lines in their own words, plus one anti-voice line they'd never say.
What It Means for Your Content: The few rules this persona sets for how you write.
Real People Who Fit: Two or three actual readers or customers who match, for your private reference.
This process can take several hours, but Really Good Business Ideas Premium members get access to a custom Claude persona creator skill that can take you through the whole process in 30 minutes or less.
Claude Content Persona Creator Skill
Creating audience personas can feel overwhelming, especially if you’ve never done it before.
That’s why I built a Claude skill for Really Good Business Ideas Premium members. Claude will use the skill to build your personas with you, by interviewing you and mining your audience data.
I’ve spent hours testing and refining the skill with different brands to make sure it produces actionable personas that reflect your real audience, with as little effort on your part as possible.
When it’s ready, you’ll get two versions of your personas.
A document for you, your team, and other contributors to reference.
A .md skill file that Claude can reference when helping you with marketing tasks, like building a content plan or auditing your messaging.
To use the skill, all you need to do is add the Really Good Business Ideas Connector to Claude, then type “Can you help me create personas using the Really Good Business Ideas Connector?”
Audience Persona Examples
While every persona should be tailored to the brand it serves and what that brand needs from it, here are some practical examples for reference.
B2B Example
Here’s one of the personas I built for Really Good Business Ideas.
The Expert-Turned-Operator
Identity: They’re a practitioner with real domain expertise like a physical therapist or a longtime consultant, who’s using Substack and content as the growth engine for an actual business, not a writing hobby. They're working solo and do every part of their business themselves. They tend to be mid-to-later career.
Why They’re Here: “Hand me the tools and system so I can run the content side of my business without it swallowing my week.”
Trigger: They experienced a bit of early traction but quickly hit a ceiling. The moment “I’ll figure it out as I go” stops working is the moment they start looking for help. One reader, a holistic vet, was getting more from Substack than from Facebook or Instagram and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, but needed help figuring out how it all fit together.
Frustrations: They’re an expert at their craft but an amateur at the marketing operations. They’re overwhelmed by all the different channels and they don’t really have a strategy. They also don’t have the time to learn by trial and error. As one reader put it, he knew he needed to think about search engine optimization, but he didn’t know where to start.
What They Want: They want the business to match the quality of their expertise, without having to become a full-time marketer to get there. They crave success, but they don’t want to lose the craft that made them start in the first place.
Discovery Channels: They spend their time on business-focused websites: Small business blogs, LinkedIn, Google, and recommendations from other practitioners in their field. They rarely use Substack Notes.
Trust Pathways: They trust done-for-you blueprints and templates that visibly save time, and they trust other practitioners in their niche who have already cracked the content problem. Recommendations and systems that obviously work beat personalities for this reader.
What It Means for Content: They’ve run businesses for years, so they have zero patience for people pretending to be experts. The content that earns their attention is rigorous enough to respect their experience and practical enough to apply right away.
Voice: They say things like “I’m doing all of this on my own, and this answers so many questions about how to put the working pieces together” and “I’ve been a business owner for nearly three decades, but I still love learning new things.” What they’d never say is “I just want to write for fun and see where it goes.”
A shallow version of this persona would read “small-business owner, 50s, busy,” and guess what? It would tell me pretty much nothing. This deeper picture helps me figure out exactly what to write for them.
Fashion Blog Example
Personas aren’t just for business or educational brands. Here’s an example for a hypothetical lifestyle brand, a fashion blog.
The Stranger in Her Closet
Identity: She’s a late-thirties-to-early-forties professional with a steady job in HR or marketing, married with kids in elementary school. She stopped dressing for herself five years ago and didn’t notice until recently. She wants to look like herself again.
Why She’s Here: “Help me dress like myself again without it becoming a big project.”
Trigger: The moment “I’ll deal with it later” stops working is the moment she comes looking. One reader emailed after wearing a stained sweatshirt to a parent meeting; the next day she signed up for three fashion Substacks she’d been saving for months.
Frustrations: She’s competent in every other part of her life but feels like an amateur at clothes. Most fashion content assumes she’s either 23 in Brooklyn or a Real Housewife, and she is neither. Online shopping is a return cycle because sizing varies wildly brand to brand. The styling content she does find is built for women who have time to put on heels at school pickup. As one reader put it, “I keep buying the same black v-neck and pretending it’s an intentional style decision.”
What She Wants: She wants her clothes to feel like her choice again, not the result of three years of fatigue and other people’s calendars. She wants to look like she’s still in the room without becoming a different person to get there.
Discovery Channels: She lives in Instagram’s saves folder and Pinterest, even though Pinterest makes her feel mildly guilty. Substack is the newer channel; she subscribed to one fashion newsletter on a whim two years ago and a few more recently. Real discoveries also come through friend group texts, “Where did you get that.” She’s rarely on TikTok. It feels too young for her.
Trust Pathways: Her real authority is one specific friend whose taste she’s always envied. That friend’s recommendations carry more weight than any influencer with 200K followers. She goes to r/femalefashionadvice for honest sizing notes and always reads comment sections. She’s skeptical of paid sponsorships and checks for FTC disclosure.
What It Means for Content: She’s been dressing herself for forty years. She has no patience for content that treats her like a beginner or styles her for a life she doesn’t have. The content that earns her attention shows real measurements in reviews and treats her changed body honestly. Don’t lean on “treat yourself” framing. She’s heard it her whole life and it lands condescending. Avoid heels and structured blazers, or anything with that office return-to-power energy.
Voice: She says things like “I’m not trying to dress like I’m 25, I just want to look like I have a life again” or “Every time I open my closet I think, who is this for.” What she’d never say is “I’m so excited to share my fall capsule wardrobe!”
How to Use Audience Personas in Content Planning
There are two ways to use a persona, and I do both.
Person First: Sometimes the persona comes first. I think about one of my readers, what they want and what they’re struggling with, and the content ideas flow naturally from there. For example, the Expert-Turned-Operator has scattered brand assets and no system in place, which turns into a piece on getting your content operation into one place.
Topic First: Other times, the topic comes first. I’ll have an idea for something I want to write about, then I’ll decide which persona it’s best suited to, and thinking about that persona will help me figure out which angle to take and how deep to go. For example, writing about the same topic for a nervous beginner is a completely different post from one for a seasoned operator.
The point is to do this every time you create. That’s why I built personas into the Substack Creator OS, so you can assign a persona to every article and never publish without knowing exactly who it’s for.
Personas also tell you how to aim Substack’s personalization features, from sections to segments.
You can't sit on two chairs, and you can't write for everyone. Personas are how you choose a chair. They turn a faceless crowd into specific readers you can picture, so you always know who you're writing for and what they need to hear. Build your first audience persona before your next piece, and write for them.
To endless possibilities,
Casandra
PS. Don’t forget, Premium members can access my custom Claude persona creator skill through the Really Good Business Ideas connector!
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Very intrigued by this. Thanks for sharing 👍
This is great. Wish I could swing a full study. This feels like an especially core element of building something meaningful and worthwhile. Thanks for the post!