What’s something we all have but always want more of? Time. Yep, we’re all busy, and because of that, we expect businesses to make our buying journeys easy. Specifically, we want to feel understood without needing to explain ourselves.

That’s where buyer personas come into play. According to Startups Magazine, marketers who use them see 73% higher conversion rates than those who don’t. It's a simple yet powerful way to make your content strategy more impactful.

This guide will walk you through how to build buyer personas based on customer pain points so that you can create content that not only resonates with your readers but drives results.

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points are the annoyances, frustrations and roadblocks that prevent your audience from achieving their goals with ease. Understanding these pain points allows businesses to create content that:

Addresses their audience's core needs and frustrations
Increases relatability
Builds trust and authority
Boosts engagement and drives conversions.

By completing this exercise, businesses avoid the risk of spending significant time and money in creating content that fails to resonate with potential buyers.

Step 1: Understand your audience

To truly understand your audience, your first step is creating a buyer persona — a profile representing your ideal customer.

8 tried-and-tested methods for creating buyer personas

The good news is that there are multiple ways to gather audience insights, catering to all budgets. Here are eight proven methods:

Internal workshops

Gather colleagues who directly interact with customers, such as sales or customer service teams, to share their insights and learnings.

Budget: Little to none.
Time required: 4-8 hours per workshop.
Benefits: Provides first-hand knowledge of customer needs at minimal cost.
Challenges: It requires effective facilitation and relies on team availability. Team biases can potentially impact the accuracy of insights.

2. Primary research

Hear straight from the horse's mouth by conducting surveys, focus groups or interviews with your target audience and customers.

Budget: Medium to high (depending on sample size, tools, participant incentives, and whether the research is outsourced).
Time required: Several weeks, including planning, execution and analysis.
Benefits: Provides highly valuable and precise insights about your target audience.
Challenges: Project coordination, analysis, and reporting are time-intensive and may be difficult for existing employees to manage on top of their existing responsibilities.

Secondary research

Explore existing market research reports and data to gather broader insights about your target audiences.

Budget: Free to medium (some reports or database platforms may require a one-off payment or subscription fee)
Time required: 2-8 hours to analyse, extract and present relevant data.
Benefits: Gain a broad understanding of your target market at little or no cost.
Challenges: Lacks specificity for your exact audience.

Previous secondary research

Use data gathered by other teams for previous projects, such as product marketing or customer success.

Budget: Free or no additional cost from previously purchased reports.
Time required: 2-6 hours to analyse, extract and report relevant data.
Benefits: Extremely cost and time-efficient if previous research is suitable.
Challenges: Previous research may no longer be relevant, and some data may not align with buyer persona project needs.

Sales log analysis

Sales enablement platforms allow businesses to record customer calls, empowering marketing teams to translate conversations into actionable insights. For example, marketers can discover recurring customer challenges, objections and non-negotiables from their solutions provider.

Budget: Little to none (platforms may require businesses to buy another seat).
Time required: 3-8 hours to review and analyse data, depending on the platform's usability.
Benefits: Provides powerful insights that directly relate to purchasing decisions.
Challenges: This relies on the platform having up-to-date data and may require additional exploration to establish meaningful trends.

Previous customer research

If they exist, revisit historic customer surveys, studies or feedback sessions to identify relevant trends.

Budget: Free
Time required: 2-5 hours to review, analyse and extract relevant data.
Benefits: If previous research is suitable, it will be cost and time-efficient. It may also highlight shifts in customer behaviour over time compared to newer research.
Challenges: Data may be outdated or less relevant.

Competitor analysis

Analyse feedback from your competitors' customers through case studies, stories, testimonials, and reviews to identify trends, cross-overs and potential opportunities.

Budget: Free
Time required: 5-10 hours for thorough analysis and to identify and present trends.
Benefits: Can uncover customer challenges and needs while identifying where competitors fail to meet them.
Challenges: Data may lack context or relevancy.

Social listening

Monitor and analyse social media noise, forums and online reviews to understand what your audience is discussing.

Budget: Free with tools like Google Alerts, small to medium costs for tools like Hootsuite or BrandWatch.
Time required: Ongoing or 5-10 hours for a one-off analysis.
Benefits: Stay in the loop with highly relevant and unfiltered conversations, including emotional responses driven by frustrations or celebrations. Ongoing monitoring can also identify shifting behaviours and opinions.
Challenges: Requires ongoing effort and a level of filtering to identify relevant trends.

Step 2: Categorise your customers

Once you've gathered the relevant data, your next step is to translate them into meaningful insights for your organisation to understand. Instead of limiting profiles to surface-level demographics like job titles, dig deeper into what drives or triggers their buying decisions. For example:

Financial: Concerns relate to cost or budget limitations and the ability to demonstrate a strong return on investment (ROI).
Operational: They’ll use the product/service themselves, requiring high efficiency, compatibility and reliability.
Personal performance: They’re driven by achieving measurable outcomes to demonstrate professional capabilities.

Limit categories to 2-3 profiles.

Step 3: Create detailed buyer personas for content mapping

By now, you should have all the information you need to build your buyer personas. You’ll want to make a separate persona for each category you chose in step two. As a minimum, you should include these essential elements:

Persona overview: Typical job titles, size and location of their employer, and responsibilities.
Work goals: From general business goals to individual performance objectives.
Challenges: Obstacles that prevent them from reaching goals quickly, if at all.
Needs: The solution(s) they require to achieve their goals.
Buying triggers: A list of characteristics in a service or product that spurs a purchase, such as execution speed.
Decision-making criteria: Factors they need to purchase, such as specific functionality.
Relevant solutions: List which of your product or service offerings address your personas' particular challenges.

Finally, assess their knowledge levels by identifying what they already know and what they want to learn. This will help you avoid the risk of either overexplaining (telling them what they already know) or overestimating their understanding of a particular topic.

Step 4: Map content to pain points

Armed with your buyer personas, you're ready to map content to your customer pain points via another workshop (if you’ve already run one during step one), focused on brainstorming. Consider inviting representatives from marketing, operations, product development, sales, and, if possible, the business's founding members. Not only does this gather multiple perspectives from the business, but it also creates alignment between departments and contributes to marketing buy-in.

Content brainstorming considerations

During the workshop, you should aim to:

Map out what each persona already knows
Identify what they need to learn to overcome their existing problems (outlined in the buyer personas)
Identify common themes and group them into content clusters for SEO benefits.

You’ll need a facilitator to run the workshop and someone to take notes. If you’re short on bodies, this can be you!

Workshops work well in person, but remote teams can use mind-mapping tools. Washija Kazim at G2 tested multiple platforms on the market and found Miro to be the best.

She discussed her findings and said, “One thing that sets Miro apart for me is its focus on collaboration. Teams can work together in real-time, leaving comments, voting on ideas, or chatting directly within the platform. This makes it an excellent choice for remote brainstorming sessions or workshops."

Audit existing content

You may feel excited and inspired by all the content ideas developed during the brainstorming session and want to spring into action! But before creating new content, you'll want to review what already exists. If you don't already have one, now is a good time to create a content inventory and ask:

Does existing content address these key pain points?
Is the format suitable for our target audience?
Could existing content be updated to align with customer pain points?

This critical step will ensure you genuinely identify gaps and opportunities for new content.

Step 5: Don’t forget about their personal buying triggers

Print this off and keep it as a reminder when you write: B2B content should feel personal. Too often, copywriters forget they’re speaking to humans, not robots. Whatever type of content you’re crafting, start by building a connection. Be relatable, genuinely helpful, and most importantly, human.

A handy trick I've learned over the years to ensure my writing emphasises with the reader on a personal level is to finish these sentences from the perspective of each buyer persona:

“I’m so tired of dealing with…”
“I feel stuck because…”
“If only I had a solution for…”
“It would be a game changer if I could…”
“I want to achieve {insert goal} but feel held back by…”
“If I could solve {insert problem}, it would save me so much…”
“My day would be much smoother if I didn’t have to…”
“I’d buy {insert product/service} as long as it includes…”
“I’d invest in {insert product/service} if it solved {specific issue} for me.”
“I’ve achieved {insert milestone}, and now I’m ready to…”
“Right now, I’m {insert current state}, but I want to get to {desired state}.”

As a freelance B2B copywriter, I use these prompts to get into the mindset of my target audience before I start writing. It keeps me focused and ensures my content is empathetic while truly addressing their challenges.

Bonus idea! Why not print them out and share them with colleagues at the start of your workshops to help your team put themselves in your customers’ shoes?

Step 6: Monitor and adapt

Congratulations if this was your first time building buyer personas and mapping content to customer paint points! The process is lengthy but valuable, and you’ll now have a set of personas to maintain rather than build from scratch.

Since customer pain points will likely evolve, update your buyer personas and content strategy at least once a year. Then, you can adjust your messaging to reflect new challenges and opportunities.

Final step: Bring your content ideas to life!

If you’ve got lots of ideas but feel overwhelmed at the prospect of writing, I can handle that.

Let me help you craft content that resonates with your audience and delivers results. With over a decade of experience, I’ll work with you to develop a strategy that engages and converts. Get in touch today to kickstart your content journey!

About the author

Anna is Senior Freelance Copywriter, focusing on B2B content marketing for technology, cybersecurity, SaaS, and beyond. With over a decade of experience in content writing and strategy, she’s worked with renowned companies such as Gartner Digital Markets, Capterra, GetApp, Atlassian, Intigriti, and more.

The 5-minute guide to mapping content to customer pain points