Let’s say you’re the CMO of a hospital network and you’ve just overseen a campaign you’re really excited about: sharp new creative promoting women’s health services. The strategy is detailed, the budget is healthy, the media buy is solid—and the work looks fantastic.
You launch the campaign and the results are…underwhelming. What went wrong?
You’re probably not reaching the right people. Or maybe you are, but you don’t understand what catches their attention.
In 2025, you can’t afford to make assumptions about your audience. Audience personas (aka buyer personas) take the guesswork out of who to target and how to meaningfully connect with them—which can be the difference between a winning campaign and a dud.
What are audience personas?
Audience personas are detailed profiles representing the people you’re trying to reach. In many cases, they’re based on your ideal customer—or, they could be based on someone who’s less than ideal, but has worthwhile potential. They contain everything from basic demographics to highly nuanced information about decision-making, motivations, barriers to using your product/service, and other behavior. There’s no one right template for creating audience personas, but you must carefully consider the information you’re including since it will inform your customer journey maps and help drive your marketing strategy.

What are the core components of an effective audience persona?
Demographics: This includes basic information about things like age, marital status, location, gender, education level, children, income, etc.
Habits/Lifestyle: What does this person value? What are their hobbies? Where do they work? What are their TV-watching habits? What keeps them up at night? What do they eat? Do they exercise? These kinds of questions help us understand what motivates someone—and where to reach them.
Goals: An audience persona should include information about what drives the person. It might be seeing their children succeed. It might be work related. Maybe it’s buying a high-powered jet ski. When thinking about goals, you want to try and relate them to the product/service you’re selling. In health care, a potential goal of your persona might be finding a doctor who actually listens.
Barriers/Pain points: What issues are this person facing? What’s keeping them from using your product or service? Most important: How can you help them solve their problem? From a healthcare perspective, the problem might be an inability to quickly see a specialist. Or transportation to appointments. How can you fix that?
Purchasing Choices: Whose opinion does your persona value? Do they read Google reviews? Do they listen to other parents at PTO meetings? You also have to understand the content your persona is consuming—and where that’s happening. (I.e., Are they on Instagram? What about Reddit? Do they trust social media? Where do they stream movies—and do they pay extra to avoid ads?) These factors all influence buying decisions.
Where does information about audience personas come from?
One of two places:
Unsolicited Data
This is information gathered from customers indirectly and aggregated into broad channel metrics. Website analytics are a big part of it (e.g., page views, bounce rate, click-through rates, time on site, etc.). So are measurements of social media engagement. Unsolicited data also includes relevant search information about your product/service. In health care, this means info on what kinds of healthcare-related searches are happening most frequently in your area.
Direct Customer Interaction
While this data is often anecdotal, it can also be quite valuable. Direct customer interactions include things like customer surveys, focus groups, and documentation of face-to-face interactions.
How do you make audience personas memorable and authentic?
Your personas don’t just need to be memorable, they also have to be relatable. This helps them stick in your mind when creating a strategy and interacting with customers that fit within your personas, which gives useful cues about how to best serve them. Here are a few things you can do to help your personas stand out:
- Use a memorable visual style. Bring your personas to life with eye-catching visuals. Your marketing team will be more likely to look at and remember them. You can use either illustrations or stock photos.
- Create a narrative. Tell the story of your persona. This could be a broader narrative about history, family, and life path, or it could be more of a day-in-the-life narrative. Both are helpful for understanding why your persona (and therefore, your audience), makes certain decisions.
- Give names that provide context. For healthcare patient personas, names might be something like “Expecting Emma” or “Mark the Middle-Aged Caretaker.” (You don’t have to use alliteration, but find ways to make the names stick.)
- Include highly personal (but relevant) information. This should relate to whatever product/service you’re selling. For health care, you’d want to include detailed info about current health conditions, insurance situation, personal health history, family history of illness, health-related goals/fears, etc.
What are some pitfalls to look out for when creating audience personas?
It can be easy to create personas based on uninformed assumptions—in other words, just filling in the blanks. Resist the temptation; rely on the data. And while anecdotes can be helpful for context, don’t put too much weight on one person’s opinion or experience.
Don’t create too many audience personas. This will convolute your messaging and objectives. While there’s no magic number of personas to make, chances are good that if you’re creating dozens of them, you’re doing too much.
Finally, don’t be content with your personas for too long. Adapt them as necessary. They must change over time to realistically keep up with evolving needs/wants/habits—because that’s what happens with real people.
I have strong audience personas. How do I put them to use?
Now it’s time to think about creating patient journey maps. Learning how to use them the right way—and how they work together with buyer personas—is paramount for giving your target audience the solutions they want. And for making sure your next marketing campaign is saying the right things to the right people, driving action, engagement, and measurable success.
If you need help creating patient personas and patient journey maps, we’ve got you. Reach out to us today and let’s get the conversation started.