How to Build an ICP and Persona (Faster with AI)

A FOUNDER ASKED:

Do we really need to build personas for marketing? What’s the best way to create them?

WHY PERSONAS MATTER IN B2B MARKETING

Many founders ask whether they actually need to build personas before crafting messaging and marketing collateral. The short answer: Yes!

Why? The right personas serve as a filter and guide for most marketing decisions.

Without them, your messaging becomes a guessing game, leading to wasted time, misaligned touchpoints, and missed revenue opportunities. A well-defined persona helps you speak directly to your ideal customers. They’ll feel like your product was built just for them.

Personas provide:

An empathy shortcut: They consolidate your team’s understanding of your ideal customer so you can address their specific needs in your content.
A team north star: Personas align your team on the must-know insights about your ideal customer. They help everyone think like your prospects and customers.
A filter for marketing decisions: When testing channels or crafting campaigns, personas help you understand what will resonate with potential buyers.

Without an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and personas, your messaging will likely miss the mark. Your ideal customers will feel confused, misunderstood, or apathetic—like your product is not for them.

You need to understand your audience to create a convincing homepage, sales deck, and content.

THE THREE LAYERS OF B2B PERSONAS

Building personas for B2B marketing involves understanding three layers:

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Defines the types of companies that benefit most from your product.
Buying Committee: Identifies the key people involved in evaluating solutions and purchasing your product.
Persona: Highlights the needs of a specific person involved in the buying process, starting with the primary buyer.

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR ICP

An ICP helps you focus on the types of businesses that are the best fit for your product. They help you determine what companies are (and are not) the right prospects.

Answer these questions:

What companies benefit most from our product?
Which customers show the highest retention and engagement?
Which segments have the most urgent pain points that our product solves?

Characteristics to include in your ICP:

Firmographics: Industry, company size, revenue, locations.
Technographics: Software stack, budget, team structure.
Pain Points: What challenges does the company face (that your product solves)?
Desired Gains: What outcomes do they seek (that your product delivers)?
Shifts: What events trigger their need for a new solution?

Example: ICP in Action

A startup offering cybersecurity solutions for e-commerce companies might define its ICP as:

Firmographics: Mid-sized e-commerce businesses ($10M-$100M revenue).
Technographics: Uses Shopify Plus, AWS, and has a small in-house security team.
Pain Points: Frequent security threats but lacks proactive detection or quick fixes.
Desired Gains: Automated threat detection and reduced downtime.
Shifts: Recently experienced a security breach or received a compliance mandate.

STEP 2: MAP YOUR BUYING COMMITTEE

In B2B sales, multiple people influence purchasing decisions. The key roles include:

Primary Buyer: Leads the evaluation process and is often your internal champion.
Decision Maker: Has final approval power (e.g., CFO, CEO).
Influencers: Provide input (e.g., function heads, IT, and procurement teams).
End Users: Use your product in their work once it’s purchased.

Your team will certainly need messaging that resonates with the primary buyer. Create that persona first since your homepage, sales deck, and content strategy will likely focus on this persona.

Then, consider who else you’ll need to engage in the buying process. You’ll need messaging to appeal to these other roles through dedicated landing pages, content, and events. Plus, you’ll create content that helps your primary buyer advocate for your solution internally.

Defining your buying committee and tailoring messaging for each role helps you avoid one-size-fits-all messaging (which rarely works).

STEP 3: BUILD A PERSONA FOR YOUR PRIMARY BUYER

Now, it’s time to develop your first persona. Start with your primary buyer, who will be the focus of many of your marketing efforts.

A strong persona includes five elements:

Pains: What challenges and frustrations does this person experience?
Gains: What results and outcomes do they need to achieve?
Shifts: What events trigger their interest in a new solution?
Blockers: What objections do they have?
Motivators: What proof or information helps them say yes?

Strong personas capture more than just functional pain points and desired outcomes. Be sure to include these three dimensions in the pains and gains:

Functional: Their tasks and “to-dos.”
Emotional: Their internal feelings and stressors.
Social: Relationships and external perceptions.

This will help you explain not only how your product addresses your prospects’ “jobs to be done” but also how it resolves their emotional and social pain points.

USE AI TO SPEED UP PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

Now that you know the elements, it’s time to get started. Creating personas manually can be time-consuming. AI can both speed up the process and help you incorporate more sources.

Use AI to analyze these customer data sources:

Interview notes re: the ICP, buying committee, and persona questions above
Sales call transcripts
Customer support logs
CRM data on customer engagement
Survey results and verbati comments

Skip endless hours of synthesizing this data and use AI to:

Aggregate insights from different team members and sources
Identify recurring themes from interviews and feedback
Generate persona drafts for the team to refine

Use AI to help with:

Segmenting Companies:
- Cluster customers into different ICP groups based on behavior and needs
- Analyze how pain points and desired results differ across segments
- Surface objections and motivations from large data sets
Identifying Roles and Building Personas:
- Draft detailed personas, capturing the five key elements
- Surface buying criteria and objections that matter to each persona
- Identify messaging themes that resonate with each
Suggesting Content Personalization:
- Generate persona-specific messaging
- Suggest personalized content strategies
- Optimize outreach sequences for different personas

USE PERSONA INSIGHTS IN YOUR MARKETING

Once you’ve developed personas, you’ll use them to inform many marketing decisions. If you’re developing updated messaging, you’ll move into the next step: positioning.

Personas will shape:

Website Messaging: Ensure your homepage, landing pages, and product descriptions speak directly to your personas’ pain points and desired outcomes.
Sales Enablement: Equip your sales team with persona-driven pitch decks and objection-handling guides.
Content Strategy: Create blog posts, case studies, and comparison guides that directly address each persona’s concerns.
Paid Ads & SEO: Target personas with precise messaging and keyword strategies.
Email Sequences: Personalize email campaigns based on personas’ motivators and blockers.

Identifying your ICP, buying committee, and personas enable you to deliver a high-impact marketing strategy. While this process could be manual and time-intensive, AI can speed up the process and improve accuracy.

Teams can now develop more precise, data-driven personas—leading to stronger messaging, better customer engagement, and faster growth.

Here’s your quick-start checklist:

✅ Define your ICP (firmographics, technographics, pains, gains, shifts).
✅ Identify your buying committee and their unique concerns.
✅ Create a persona that includes pains, gains, shifts, blockers, and motivators.
✅ Use AI to analyze data, segment customers, and refine messaging
✅ Apply personas in your messaging development process.
✅ Use these insights across your website, sales content, and marketing campaigns.