How to Build Personas for Marketing

Let’s face it. In marketing, personas are critical to a well-built marketing strategy. If you don’t understand your target audience, then it will be difficult to break through to them that your product or service is superior to your competitors.

It’s also easy to just say “Good marketing requires well built personas,” but how do you build them? In this blog, we’ll show you how!

What is a persona?

A persona is a defined, perfect consumer for your product or service. Depending on what you’re selling, personas can be broad or highly specific. Personas allow a brand to better understand who to target and even sometimes how they can improve their product for this particular target customer. This definition is a multitude of factors, but should always be data-based. Often, this includes demographics/firmographics plus motivations, goals, and beliefs within this group. Here at Infegy, we believe that social data provides a treasure trove of this information that can be used for persona building.

How does a persona help your marketing strategy?

Personas can guide marketing strategy. Instead of building campaigns, packaging, and products around vibes, a marketer can ask whether the data-backed persona would react to that particular message, package, or new product. It creates structure around the persona. These personas can have names like “Toby” or Toy-Obsessed Adult. A marketer can then ask whether the choices in the product, price, place, and promotion would affect “Toby.” A CPG considers personas deeply in their work. For example, they have different personas for each of their different offerings. Ever wonder why there are so many types of toothpaste? Each one is intended to resonate with a distinct persona. Ultra whitening with tooth sensitivity answers the Middle-Aged Image Conscious Adult. Mint tarter protection answers the needs of a different persona.

How do you build a persona?

Now to build a good persona will show you two data-derived methods, and one tolerable one.

1. Use Infegy’s Personas AI Widget, available with Infegy Starscape.
2. Use social listening data to build out a fully developed non-Gen AI version of personas.
3. ChatGPT or other LLM

For all of our personas we’ll be using the retail store Target, which has gone through a lot in the last year.

Method 1: Infegy Starscape’s Personas AI Widget

Infegy’s Personas AI widget looks for connections in people’s source bios. What’s a source bio? It’s the bits of information that a person places on their bio in a social media profile. Infegy collects its data on a user basis so this information is available on every post. The AI widget reviews these profiles and finds groups that have similar features.

The widget returns multiple personas, but here were the most interesting 3:

Figure 1: Target personas via Infegy Starscape’s Personas AI widget (July 2024 through July 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Now, that was easy and took maybe 30 seconds.

What about a longer, more traditional (and predictable) method?

Method 2: Building Personas Using Traditional Social Listening

For this method, having a broad social listening tool like Infegy Starscape is critical to the build. Interestingly, this is the same process our AI personas use to create personas.

To start, it’s important to review how people who discuss Target online define themselves. Using our same Target query that was used for the previous quick method, we review what the most common terms Target conversation participants used in their social profile biographies.

Figure 2: Target User Bio Descriptions (July 2024 through July 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

We can pull these clusters out to develop personas. Let’s look at the following cluster of moms:

Figure 3: Target Source Bios Motherhood cluster (January 2025 through June 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Pulling these out, we reviewed this cluster and dug into who these people are and what else they talk about.

The Target Mom is predominantly under 40 and concerned with affordability. They are also politically engaged with various political topics, but these are not all conservative or liberal. They discuss pop culture frequently on social media and express love, trust, and quality when relating to their relationship with Target. They also discuss holidays frequently and get excited about the seasonal merchandise.

Figure 4: Target Moms Age, Geography, Sentiment of Target, Emotions, Author Interests, and Topics (July 2024 through July 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

See the dashboard: https://starscape.infegy.com/dashboard/d_flH27rOKFW9

A second cluster is the DIY persona. Let’s see what they talk about.

Figure 5: Target User Bio Descriptions cluster zoom-in (July 2024 through July 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

These people are more women than men, but they are very balanced. They appear to be in their 20s and 30s and discuss not only various preferences for internal and external spaces, but also a wide range of topics such as politics and video games. This persona is driven by price and quality, making fast, easy changes to the spaces they decorate. They are also crafters and create their own decor for spaces.

Figure 6: Target DIY/Designer (July 2024 through July 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Why You Should Not Depend on Only LLMs for Personas

Lastly, we wanted to show you the limitations of using only an LLM for persona development. These are the three ChatGPT gave us; however, these aren’t proven out through data, plus there is quite a bit of overlap within these personas. They may have similar motivations and affinities. These don’t truly cover what personas should be.

ChatGPT Output:

Target Corporation has a broad customer base, but its core marketing focuses on a few key consumer personas. Based on market research, public data, and Target’s own advertising and product assortment, the top three personas are:

1. Millennial Moms ("Budget-Conscious Style Seekers")

• Age: 28–42
• Gender: Predominantly female
• Life Stage: Young families, often with toddlers or elementary-aged kids
• Key Traits:
  • Value convenience, affordability, and style
  • Strong users of digital tools (Target app, drive-up, same-day delivery)
  • Loyal to Target's owned brands like Cat & Jack, Up & Up, and Good & Gather
• Behavior:
  • Shop both in-store and online
  • Frequently use the Target Circle loyalty program
  • Responsive to seasonal promotions and family-oriented product lines

2. Gen Z Trendsetters ("Social-Driven Shoppers")

• Age: 18–26
• Gender: Mixed, slightly female-leaning
• Life Stage: College students, first jobs, early independence
• Key Traits:
  • Style- and trend-conscious; seek affordable fashion and home décor
  • Influenced by social media (especially TikTok, Instagram)
  • Prefer brands with purpose (eco-conscious, inclusive)
• Behavior:
  • Impulse buyers; enjoy “Target runs”
  • High mobile usage for browsing and shopping
  • Like limited-time collabs (e.g., with designers or influencers)

3. Suburban Professionals ("Convenience-Oriented Multitaskers")

• Age: 35–55
• Gender: Mixed
• Life Stage: Working professionals, dual-income households
• Key Traits:
  • Seek efficiency and a one-stop-shop experience
  • Value quality over price, but still budget-conscious
  • Use Target for everything from groceries to home goods
• Behavior:
  • Weekly or bi-weekly shopping trips, often with curbside pickup
  • Heavily uses Target’s digital infrastructure (app, online orders, subscriptions)
  • Loyalty to brands like Threshold, Archer Farms, and Market Pantry

Figure 7: ChatGPT personas pulled on July 11, 2025.

Personas can greatly improve campaign results, but beware

For advertising and brand strategists, the quality of your personas directly impacts campaign performance and brand positioning success. Generic, assumption-based personas lead to misaligned messaging, wasted media spend, missed opportunities to connect with your core audiences, with possibly offended consumers. As demonstrated through our Target analysis, social listening data reveals the authentic voice of your customers: their genuine concerns, motivations, and language patterns that should inform your creative strategy and media planning. When you understand that Target Moms are driven by affordability and seasonal excitement, or that the DIY persona balances price with quality, you can craft campaigns that resonate authentically rather than relying on broad demographic assumptions. Investing in data-driven personas pays dividends through improved targeting accuracy, more effective creative executions, and stronger brand-consumer connections that drive measurable business results.

Key Takeaways

• Data-driven personas outperform assumptions: Social listening data provides authentic insights into customer motivations, demographics, and behaviors that generic AI-generated personas simply cannot match. Real consumer conversations reveal nuanced details like the Target Mom's focus on affordability and seasonal excitement, or the DIY persona's balance of price and quality concerns.
• Speed versus depth offers strategic choices: While AI tools like Infegy's Personas AI widget can generate personas in 30 seconds, traditional social listening methods provide deeper, more actionable insights. The choice depends on your timeline, budget, and the level of precision your marketing strategy requires.
• Effective personas guide all marketing decisions: Well-built personas should influence every aspect of your marketing mix, from product development and pricing to messaging and channel selection. They transform marketing from "vibe-based" decisions to strategic choices that can be tested against specific customer profiles and their documented preferences.