12 Best Tools to Build Customer Personas

A customer persona is a fictitious depiction of your ideal clients that is made utilizing information from a variety of sources, including competitors, previous clients, and current clients.

Creating accurate and detailed customer personas is essential for businesses looking to tailor their marketing strategies, improve customer experiences, and drive more conversions.

Personas provide useful customer insights for your sales, marketing, operations, product development, and customer service teams. A well-informed team makes better decisions, generating qualified leads and increasing conversion rates and business ROI.

When you understand your customer’s preferences and wants, you can consistently deliver what they want and create a successful customer retention plan. However, creating customer personas from scratch takes a lot of work.

You can pay a market research team to draw them up for you, but this would be expensive, time-consuming, and unrealistic for your company in the long run.

Fortunately, there are many tools and services available online. Let’s look at the top twelve tools to help you build your persona.

Why You Need to Build Customer Personas?

Creating these personas brings a range of benefits that can significantly improve marketing, product development, and customer experience strategies. Here’s why building customer personas is so important:

1. Improved Targeted Marketing

One of the primary reasons for building customer personas is to create highly targeted marketing campaigns. By understanding who your ideal customers are, what they care about, their pain points, and their motivation you can tailor your marketing messages to resonate with them. This leads to higher engagement, more conversions, and a better return on investment (ROI) for your marketing efforts.

For example:

• Personalized Content: Knowing your audience allows you to craft content that speaks directly to their needs and preferences.
• Effective Ad Targeting: Customer personas help you optimize paid ads by targeting specific demographics, interests, and online behaviors.

2. Better Product Development

Customer personas guide product development by ensuring that the products or services you create align with the actual needs and desires of your target audience. By incorporating feedback from your personas into the development process, you reduce the risk of creating products that fail to meet customer expectations.

• Prioritize Features: Personas help you focus on features that will be most beneficial for your target audience.
• Refine User Experience (UX): Understanding personas leads to better UX design that caters to user preferences and behaviors.

3. Enhanced Customer Experience

Personas provide insight into how customers think and feel, allowing you to improve the overall customer experience (CX). When you understand what drives your customers, you can craft experiences that are more aligned with their expectations, whether online or offline.

• Customer Journey Mapping: Personas help visualize the customer journey, identifying potential pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Tailored Support: Customer service teams can better anticipate common issues and provide solutions that align with specific customer needs.

4. Alignment Across Teams

Building customer personas helps create alignment across various departments within a company. When marketing, sales, customer support, and product teams all share the same understanding of the target audience, it results in a more cohesive strategy and consistent messaging.

• Unified Goals: With a clear persona, all teams work towards the same customer-centric goals.
• Consistent Voice: Personas ensure the brand’s tone and messaging remain consistent across different channels.

5. More Efficient Resource Allocation

When you have well-defined customer personas, you can allocate resources more effectively by focusing your time, budget, and efforts on the segments of the market most likely to convert. This reduces wasted effort on broad, ineffective strategies.

• Targeted Outreach: Instead of spreading resources thin across a wide audience, you can concentrate efforts where they’ll have the most impact.
• Reduced Churn: By focusing on the right personas, you attract customers who are more likely to remain loyal, reducing churn rates.

6. Competitive Advantage

Customer personas give you a competitive edge by helping you better understand your customers than your competitors do. By developing a deeper relationship with your audience, you can create more compelling offers and provide solutions that competitors may overlook.

• Tailored Solutions: Personas enable you to identify niche needs and provide solutions that are unique to your customer base.
• Strategic Positioning: Understanding your customer personas helps you position your brand more effectively in the market.

7. Informed Content Strategy

Content marketing becomes more effective when it is based on specific customer personas. Personas guide the creation of content that addresses the specific interests, questions, and challenges of your audience, leading to higher engagement and trust.

• Relevant Topics: Knowing your audience’s pain points allows you to create content that addresses their most pressing issues.
• Improved SEO: Personas can inform keyword research, helping you produce content that aligns with your audience’s search habits.

8. Personalization at Scale

Personalization has become a key factor in customer satisfaction, and personas allow businesses to personalize experiences at scale. By segmenting your audience into distinct personas, you can create personalized marketing, sales, and support strategies that make customers feel more valued.

• Targeted Offers: Personas help you deliver personalized offers that are more likely to resonate with specific customer groups.
• Segmented Communication: You can tailor communication strategies (e.g., email campaigns) to match the unique preferences of different personas.

The 12 Best Tools to Build Customer Personas

The process of building customer personas can be complex, but the right tools can make it easier. Here are 12 of the best tools for building customer personas.

1. HubSpot Make My Persona

HubSpot offers a free tool called “Make My Persona” that guides users through the process of creating detailed personas in just a few steps.

The tool prompts users to input key information, such as demographics, goals, and challenges and generates a personalized persona that can be downloaded and used immediately. It is also best for beginners in customer persona creation.

Make My Persona is part of HubSpot’s broader suite of free marketing tools, making it accessible to startups, small businesses, and marketing professionals without the need for expensive software. It is particularly beneficial for teams that may not have much experience or resources to conduct in-depth customer research but still want to create useful customer profiles.

Once you input all the necessary information, Make My Persona generates a well-structured, easy-to-read persona profile that can be downloaded in a professional format and shared with team members.

This allows marketers and product developers to quickly align their strategies around a unified understanding of their target audience. The persona can also be updated or refined over time as new customer insights are gathered.

For example, here are some of the questions asked:

• What are your buyers’ goals or objectives?
• What are their biggest challenges?
• What industry do they work in?
• How is their job measured?
• Who do they report to?
• What are their job responsibilities?
• How do they communicate with others?
• What tools do they use or need to do their job?
• How do they gain information?
• What social networks do they belong to?

Once you have answered these questions, you’ll be directed to the persona document editor. You can add or delete sections and personalize the document to meet your specific company needs.

Key Features:

• Step-by-step guide: It walks you through persona creation, asking key questions.
• Customizable persona templates: You can generate and download personalized persona profiles.
• Integration with HubSpot CRM: Easily align personas with your marketing and sales efforts.

Pros:

• Easy-to-use interface.
• Completely free.
• Useful for beginners or teams with no previous experience building personas.

Cons:

• Limited customization options compared to paid tools.
• More suited to basic personas rather than detailed or complex audience segmentations.

Pricing:

• Free

2. Xtensio

Xtensio is a web-based platform for creating beautiful and shareable customer personas. It offers templates that allow you to create customized, branded persona documents that can be edited by multiple team members in real-time and it is also ideal for businesses that want visually engaging personas.

Multiple team members can edit and work on personas simultaneously, no matter where they are located.

This real-time collaboration feature is particularly useful for remote teams or larger organizations where input from different departments such as marketing, product development, and sales is essential to building a well-rounded customer persona.

Changes are instantly reflected, enabling efficient communication and coordination without the need for constant back-and-forth emails.

Key Features:

• Collaborative platform: Allows team members to work together on persona creation in real-time.
• Custom templates: Includes a variety of templates for creating visually appealing and detailed personas.
• Drag-and-drop editor: Simple and flexible interface for building personalized customer profiles.
• Shareable personas: Easily share and export personas in PDF format.

Pros:

• Highly customizable.
• Real-time collaboration is ideal for remote teams.
• Professional and visually attractive persona documents.

Cons:

• The free version has limited features.
• Paid plans can be expensive for smaller businesses.

Pricing:

• Free Forever Plan
• Solo Lite Plan: $9.99/month
• Plus Plan: $19.99/month
• Business Plan: $79.99/month

3. SEMrush Persona

SEMrush Persona is particularly effective for businesses looking to create data-driven customer personas based on detailed insights.

As a well-known tool for digital marketing and SEO, SEMrush offers you a comprehensive set of features to analyze audience behavior, track competitors, and identify key demographic data. This makes it ideal for companies that require advanced, in-depth persona-building to align their marketing strategies with actual audience data.

One of the standout features of SEMrush Persona is its ability to conduct competitive analysis. This allows you to identify which audiences your competitors are targeting, and how successful those efforts are.

By benchmarking your persona-building efforts against those of competitors, you can identify gaps in your marketing strategies and find new opportunities to engage untapped customer segments.

Additionally, SEMrush’s integration with various SEO, content, and advertising tools means that the personas created are not only detailed but also actionable ensuring they can be applied directly to optimize campaigns and strategies across different platforms.

Key Features:

• Ready-to-use templates.
• Customizable persona fields.
• Integration with audience research tools.
• Downloadable and shareable profiles.

Pros:

• Easy to use with templates.
• Deep data integration for accuracy.
• Supports multiple personas.

Cons:

• Limited advanced customization.
• More useful for SEMrush subscribers

Pricing:

• Free and unlimited

4. UserForge

UserForge offers a more detailed approach to creating customer personas, allowing you to define custom fields based on your business needs. This flexibility makes it great for businesses that want to focus on specific aspects of their audience, such as psychographics or purchasing behavior.

It provides a platform for managing many areas of the UX design process and includes tools such as empathy maps, customer journey maps, user stories, and flow maps.

They recently introduced the Create with AI function, which generates personas using textual cues.

Key Features:

• Customizable persona fields: Tailor personas to your specific business needs by adding or removing fields.
• Collaboration: Teams can work together on persona creation.
• Visual representation: Creates visually appealing, detailed personas.

Pros:

• Flexible and customizable.
• Ideal for businesses that need more detailed personas.
• Real-time team collaboration.

Cons:

• Learning curve for new users.
• The free version offers limited features.

Pricing:

• Free (basic)
• Lite Plan: $4/month
• Pro Plan: $8/month

5. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a leading tool for collecting and analyzing customer feedback through surveys.

By using Qualtrics, you can gather detailed information directly from your audience, making it easier to build personas based on firsthand data. You can customize surveys to target specific demographics and behavior traits. It is best for persona-building based on customer surveys.

The true strength of Qualtrics lies in its powerful analytics tools. Qualtrics helps businesses interpret survey data, identify trends, and extract actionable insights. Through its real-time reporting capabilities, Qualtrics makes it easy to spot shifts in customer preferences, allowing businesses to build personas that evolve alongside their audience.

The depth of data collected and analyzed enables teams to understand not just who their customers are, but what drives their behaviors and decision-making processes.

Key Features:

• Survey platform: Collects feedback from customers and prospects through customizable surveys.
• Data analytics: Analyzes the responses to provide insights that can be used for persona development.
• Wide range of survey templates: Tailor questions to gather persona-specific data.

Pros:

• Provides detailed, first-hand data from customers.
• Customizable surveys allow businesses to gather specific information.
• Strong analytics tools.

Cons:

• Costly for smaller businesses.
• Requires time and effort to gather responses.

Pricing:

• Based on the request from the site

6. Survicate

Survicate is a survey platform designed to help you collect customer feedback at key touchpoints throughout the customer journey. It offers a variety of customizable survey templates that can be embedded into websites, emails, mobile apps, and more.

Survicate also integrates with various CRM and marketing tools, providing actionable insights from collected data. Survicate is ideal for building customer personas, gathering feedback, and understanding user behavior to improve products, services, and customer experiences.

Key features:

• Customizable surveys: Create surveys tailored to your specific needs to gather valuable customer insights.
• Real-time analytics: Get instant feedback and insights into your survey results, allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
• Integrations: Survicate seamlessly integrates with popular tools like HubSpot, Intercom, and Zapier, streamlining your workflow.

Pros:

• Comprehensive feature set: Survicate offers a wide range of features, including surveys, feedback forms, and customer journey mapping, making it a versatile tool for understanding your customers.
• Customizable surveys: Create surveys tailored to your specific needs to gather valuable customer insights.
• Real-time analytics: Get instant feedback and insights into your survey results, allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
• Integrations: Survicate seamlessly integrates with popular tools like HubSpot, Intercom, and Zapier, streamlining your workflow.
• Customer segmentation: Segment your customers based on their responses to surveys and other data points, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts.

Cons:

• Complexity: Survicate can be complex to set up for beginners, especially if you’re new to survey tools.
• Pricing: The pricing plans might be higher compared to some other survey tools, especially for small businesses.

Pricing:

• Good Plan: €99/month
• Better Plan: €149/month
• Best Plan: €249/month
• Better Than The Rest: €299/month

7. Hotjar

Hotjar is a popular behavior analytics tool that offers useful information about how people interact with your websites. Hotjar provides enterprises with a better knowledge of user behavior by recording clicks, scrolls, and other interactions.

Heatmaps, session records, and feedback questionnaires allow you to visualize user behavior, identify trouble points, and adapt your websites accordingly. Its user-friendly interface makes it suitable for both small and large organizations, allowing you to improve user experience (UX) and increase conversions.

Hotjar’s heatmaps visually represent the most and least engaging parts of a webpage, while session recordings allow businesses to see user journeys in action. This combination helps pinpoint specific areas where users may face challenges or become disengaged.

The surveys and feedback options allow you to directly ask visitors about their experiences, offering a blend of qualitative and quantitative data that makes it easier to identify actionable insights.

Key Features:

• Heatmaps: Visualize where users click, scroll, and focus.
• Session Recordings: Replay user interactions.
• Surveys: Collect direct feedback.
• Funnels: Track where users drop off in the conversion process.

Pros:

• User-friendly interface.
• Comprehensive insights for UX improvements.
• Combines quantitative and qualitative data.

Cons:

• Limited customization on lower-tier plans.
• Session recordings can require significant storage.

Pricing:

• Free Forever
• Plus Plan:$32/month
• Business Plan:$80/month
• Scale Plan: $171/month

8.  SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is an online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute, and analyze surveys for a variety of purposes, including customer feedback, employee engagement, and market research.

It offers a range of customizable templates and question types, making it easy for you to gather valuable insights from its target audience. Its user-friendly interface and analytics tools enable both individuals and businesses to collect and interpret data efficiently.

SurveyMonkey integrates seamlessly with other platforms, offering extensive collaboration features that allow teams to share, edit, and analyze surveys in real-time. With options for automated reports, data visualization, and targeted survey distribution, SurveyMonkey is ideal for improving decision-making, enhancing customer experience, and conducting large-scale research.

Key Features:

• Survey creation: Collect data from your target audience through customizable surveys.
• Analytics: Analyze responses to create personas based on real customer feedback.
• Templates: Access a range of pre-designed surveys for different business needs.

Pros:

• Easy to create and distribute surveys.
• Allows for gathering detailed customer insights directly from the source.
• Affordable pricing for small businesses.

Cons:

• Limited survey respondents in the free version.
• Response rates can be inconsistent without incentives.

Pricing:

• Free (basic)
• Standard: $25/month.
• Premium: $75/month.

9. Crazy Egg 

Crazy Egg is a website optimization tool designed to help businesses understand user behavior and enhance their website’s performance. By using heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings, Crazy Egg provides visual representations of how visitors interact with a website showing where they click, how far they scroll, and which areas are most engaging.

These visual insights let you make informed decisions about site layout, usability, and conversion optimization. CrazyEgg is particularly valued for its easy-to-use interface and powerful visual reports, making it accessible to non-technical users.

Key Features:

• Heatmaps: Visualize where users are clicking and engaging with the site.
• Scroll Maps: Show how far down visitors scroll on a page.
• Session Recordings: Replay real user interactions.
• Confetti Reports: Break down clicks by traffic source, location, and device.
• A/B Testing: Test different versions of pages to optimize performance.

Pros:

• User-friendly interface: Simple, intuitive design.
• Comprehensive visual reports: Easy-to-understand insights for improving user experience.
• A/B testing: Integrated, helping businesses optimize website performance.

Cons:

• Limited advanced analytics: Lacks in-depth data analysis compared to other platforms like Google Analytics.
• Higher pricing tiers: More advanced features, such as session recordings and detailed reports, are available only in premium plans.

Pricing:

• Free Plan
• Pro Plan: $249/month
• Enterprise Plan: $499/month

10. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that enables businesses to track and measure various aspects of website performance.

By providing detailed insights into user behavior, Google Analytics allows you to understand how visitors interact with their site, what content they engage with most, and what factors lead to conversions or exits. This data is crucial for identifying strengths and weaknesses in the website’s design and content, helping businesses optimize for a better user experience and higher conversion rates.

Moreover, Google Analytics helps you monitor the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns by analyzing traffic sources, such as organic search, paid search, direct visits, and social media.

By understanding where traffic is coming from and how different marketing channels perform, you can refine your marketing strategies to focus on the most effective channels. It also allows for the tracking of custom goals and conversions, making it easier to measure the success of campaigns, whether it’s lead generation, e-commerce transactions, or content engagement.

With its ability to integrate with other Google tools like Google Ads and Search Console, Google Analytics provides a comprehensive view of both user behavior and marketing efforts, enabling businesses to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Key Features:

• Real-Time Data Tracking: Google Analytics allows businesses to monitor visitor activity in real-time, including user locations, traffic sources, and engagement with content.
• Audience Segmentation: It enables the segmentation of audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and devices, helping businesses tailor their strategies to specific user groups.
• Traffic Sources: The tool provides a detailed breakdown of traffic sources (organic, paid, social, direct), giving insights into which channels drive the most traffic.
• Conversion Tracking: It tracks conversions and goal completions, helping businesses measure the success of marketing campaigns and optimize for better performance.
• E-commerce Reporting: For online stores, Google Analytics offers detailed reports on product performance, transaction data, and revenue tracking.
• Integration: Google Analytics integrates with other Google products like Google Ads, Search Console, and Data Studio, creating a holistic marketing ecosystem.

Pros:

• Free to Use: The basic version of Google Analytics is free, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
• Comprehensive Insights: Provides detailed data on traffic, user behavior, and conversions, enabling data-driven decisions.
• Customizable Reports: Users can create custom dashboards and reports to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to their business.
• Extensive Integrations: Seamless integration with other Google services like Ads, allowing for more refined marketing campaigns.
• Advanced Segmentation: Allows businesses to deeply segment their audience and measure different aspects of performance for each group.

Cons:

• Complex Interface: Google Analytics can be overwhelming for beginners, with its extensive features and data points requiring time to fully understand.
• Data Sampling: For websites with high traffic, Google Analytics may sample data, leading to less accurate reporting unless using the paid Google Analytics 360 version.
• Privacy Concerns: Since Google collects large amounts of user data, there are ongoing concerns about user privacy and compliance with data regulations like GDPR.

Pricing:

• Free Plan

11. Akoonu

Akoonu is a B2B sales tool that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, designed to help the sales teams streamline pipeline reviews and forecasting processes. It offers an intuitive platform that provides a clear view of sales pipelines at all levels, from individual reps to the entire organization. You can track deal progression, assess pipeline health, and monitor buyer engagement in real time.

Akoonu’s visual and numerical data make it easier to spot risks and opportunities within the sales pipeline, reducing time spent on preparation and improving decision-making during sales meetings.

Key Features:

• Pipeline Reviews: Visual insights into current pipeline status, changes, and trends, allowing managers and reps to stay on top of the deal movement.
• Forecasting: Tools for tracking sales progress, comparing data over time, and supporting accurate quota management.
• Real-Time Data: All data is updated in real-time within Salesforce, ensuring that decisions are based on the most current information.
• Customizable Views: Reps and managers can easily filter, sort, and group data to focus on the most critical aspects of the sales process.
• Integration with Salesforce: Native Salesforce app that works within your existing Salesforce environment, enhancing usability.

Pros:

• Easy to Use: The platform’s intuitive interface makes it accessible to users at all levels of the sales organization.
• Time-Saving: Reduces the need for custom reporting and data preparation, allowing users to focus on actionable insights.
• Visual Reports: Color-coded and visual tools such as deal health indicators help to quickly identify risks and opportunities.

Cons:

• Salesforce-Dependent: It’s only available to Salesforce users, limiting its utility for organizations using other CRMs.
• Limited Outside Sales Forecasting: While Akoonu excels at pipeline reviews within Salesforce, it may not offer the same depth of forecasting insights compared to standalone forecasting tools.

Pricing:

• For Pipeline Reviews: $25/month
• Forecasting: $25/month
• Pipeline+Forcasting:$40/month

12. Delve.AI

Delve.AI is an AI-powered platform for persona-based marketing that allows businesses to generate customer personas based on real-time data from websites and social channels. By automating the persona-building process, it helps you gain deeper insights into your target audiences, facilitating more personalized marketing strategies.

Delve.ai leverages both first-party and publicly available data, making it ideal for B2B and B2C businesses alike. Its core strength lies in its ability to blend machine learning with marketing insights, which helps to quickly create detailed and data-backed personas.

Key Features

• Live Personas: Automatically generate personas based on website visitor data.
• Social Personas: Create personas from social media followers and interactions.
• Competitor Personas: Gather insights on competitors’ audiences to inform your strategy.
• Automated Persona Updates: Personas are updated monthly or quarterly based on new data.
• Export Capabilities: Download personas in various formats such as PDF, JPEG, and CSV.
• Detailed Audience Insights: Gain data-driven insights on demographics, behaviors, and motivations.

Pros:

• No Coding Required: It is user-friendly, even for those without technical expertise.
• Fast Persona Generation: It generates personas in minutes using real-time data.
• Data-Driven Accuracy: Personas are backed by real website and social interaction data, ensuring a high level of precision.
• Versatile Use Cases: Suited for businesses across industries including e-commerce, SaaS, and marketing agencies.
• Ongoing Updates: Personas are updated regularly to keep them relevant.

Cons:

• Limited Customization: Compared to other persona-building tools, the customization of personas may be somewhat limited.
• Additional Costs: Some advanced features, like additional competitor persona insights, require an extra fee.
• Learning Curve for Advanced Features: While easy to use at the basic level, mastering more advanced insights and reports may take time.

Pricing:

• The Free Lite Plan
• Standard Plan: $89/month
• Growth Plan: $119/month
• Pro Plan: $549/month

Bottom Line

When selecting the best tool for building customer personas, you must consider your unique needs, resources, and expertise. For those just starting, tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona offer a simple and free way to create detailed personas with minimal effort, making them ideal for beginners.

Xtensio, on the other hand, is perfect for teams looking to collaborate and create visually compelling, customizable persona documents in real-time. For companies seeking data-driven insights, platforms like Delve.AI and SEMrush Persona offer more advanced features, such as real-time persona generation and competitor analysis, particularly useful for businesses focused on targeted marketing efforts.

In short, the best tool depends on your goals: whether you’re after quick persona creation, deep data analysis, or collaborative design. Each tool offers distinct advantages, making them highly effective in guiding marketing strategies, improving customer targeting, and enhancing the overall customer experience. Selecting the right one ensures your marketing efforts are data-driven, strategic, and personalized to your target audience.