Benefits of a customer persona

According to a recent article from Digital Marketing Institute, 24% of companies generated more leads and 36% reported shorter sales cycles due to using buyer personas. They are a largely beneficial and valuable part of your marketing strategy that you shouldn’t underestimate. Here are a few ways they can boost your start-up:

1. Tailored messaging

Customer personas help you determine your audience and tailor your messaging to them. By personalising your message to better reach and engage your customers —which also results in higher conversion rates—you gain the ability to target your audience with precision and purpose in a way that resonates with them. When you don’t define your customer persona, your marketing is essentially guesswork—casting a wide net and hoping it lands on the right people.

For a climate-tech start-up, where solutions often address complex and technical issues, this approach just doesn’t cut it. A clear persona changes the game, allowing you to craft messages that directly address the real challenges and priorities of your ideal customer. Instead of wasting resources on generic outreach, you can create communication that truly resonates, allocating your marketing resources more efficiently and connecting with your audience in a way that feels personal, relevant, and purposeful.

2. Identifying your customer base

As a climate-tech start-up, you’re most likely targeting specific groups, like environmentally conscious businesses aiming to meet sustainability goals, governments seeking green innovations, or individuals. Buyer personas help pinpoint these groups' unique characteristics, motivations, and challenges, allowing you to prioritise the most valuable leads.‍

3. Better-informed product development

Thinking about the pain points of your customer, who they are, and why they would buy your product requires you to view your product from their perspective. This helps you gain extra insight during product development letting you clearly focus on features that meet your target audience’s needs and makes your product more valuable. 

4. Effectively allocated marketing resources

As an early-stage start-up, it's not uncommon to have limited resources. Personas help prioritise marketing and sales efforts by focusing on high-potential customer segments, ensuring time and money aren’t wasted on irrelevant audiences.

 5. Successful stakeholder buy-in

When seeking investors or partnerships, showing a deep understanding of the target audience demonstrates market knowledge and strategic thinking—a critical part of securing investment, and winning investors’ trust. By showcasing a well-researched audience profile, your customer persona builds confidence in the start-up’s vision and plays a pivotal role in securing stakeholder confidence. It demonstrates a clear, data-driven understanding of your market and highlights scalable revenue opportunities, showing investors that your product solves real, validated problems. It lays the groundwork for a targeted go-to-market strategy, ensuring your efforts are focused on acquiring and retaining the right customers..

Buyer personas also help you tell a compelling story about your start-up’s potential. By illustrating your audience’s needs and their willingness to invest in sustainable solutions, you can showcase scalable revenue opportunities and long-term market viability. ‍

For investors, this level of clarity reduces risk and strengthens confidence in your ability to execute, create lasting value and grow—significantly boosting your fundraising efforts.

What goes into a customer persona?

Like a writer develops a main character for their story and creates a character profile — imagining the character’s background, habits, values, and places they frequent —consider your customer persona the main character of your start-up. It’s a profile of your imagined ideal customer. Just as a writer may conduct research when building their character, your customer persona’s profile is backed by research as well.

‍ Using tools such as competitor analysis, social listening, and brand monitoring as well as surveys, interviews, and your analytic tools, the data-backed characteristics of your customer can be collected and grouped into 3 categories:

• Demographics
• Lifestyle
• Psychographics

Demographics

When developing a customer persona, demographics provide the foundation for understanding your ideal customer. Start by identifying these basic key details such as age, gender identity, location, education, and profession. 

Knowing this information will help you set the tone of your messaging to better resonate with your target audience. For example, are you speaking to a CEO or Sustainability Director? Depending on the demographic of your ideal customer, the tones in your messaging may be drastically different.

Lifestyle 

Going beyond demographics you will want to understand what the ideal customer’s lifestyle insights are. What does a typical day in your customer’s life look like? Where do they spend their time? What channels and platforms do they use? What are their day-to-day struggles?  Other things to determine are their media preferences, do they prefer industry publications, business news websites, podcasts as well as their likes, and dislikes. 

For example, in the context of a climate-tech start-up, knowing whether a prospective company actively pursues sustainable practices, invests in renewable technologies, or is driven by environmental compliance can shape how you present your solutions. Pinpointing their specific pain points—such as difficulty tracking emissions, managing rising energy costs, or meeting stakeholder demands for sustainability—allows you to provide tailored support. This targeted approach builds credibility and shows you’re a partner who understands their sustainability journey.

Psychographics

For an even deeper understanding of your ideal customers, beyond their basic demographics and lifestyle habits, you will want to delve into their mentality and why they have certain behaviours. What motivates them? What are their challenges? Their beliefs & values?

This part of a customer persona helps reveal what truly matters to your audience—whether it’s their commitment to the environment and sustainability, the product aligns with their business brand, or they simply have targets to hit within their role.

According to a report by  Sprout Social “—53% of people say they feel connected when that brand’s values align with their own. And more than half (51%) say their relationship with a brand starts when they feel the brand understands them and their desires.” By aligning with these deeper insights, businesses can create authentic connections and offer solutions that resonate on a more personal level.

Putting it all together

Together these 3 pillars of a customer persona provide a full picture of your audience, from their core beliefs to their everyday choices, helping you create a message that aligns with both their values and their practical realities. Here’s an example of what a customer persona may look like:

Let's say you launch a product similar to EarthShot prize winner Advanced Thermovoltaic Systems (ATS), a climate-tech start-up that has developed technology to convert industrial waste heat into circular electricity. Your customer persona may look something like this—

Name: David Benson‍

Role: Operations Manager
Industry: Manufacturing (e.g., steel production, chemical processing, or heavy industry)
Company Size: Enterprise-level, 1,000+ employees, multiple facilities

‍Demographics

Gender - Male

Age - 38

Education - MBA in Mechanical Engineering or Industrial Technology; 

Location - Texas, US.

‍Needs and Goals

Operational Efficiency:

• Reduce operational costs by repurposing waste heat that would otherwise be lost.
• Improve energy efficiency without disrupting existing workflows or requiring excessive downtime for implementation.

Compliance & Sustainability:

• Meet tightening environmental regulations and align with corporate ESG goals to maintain market competitiveness.
• Reduce carbon footprint through sustainable energy solutions to satisfy stakeholders and regulators.

Reliability & Performance:

• Deploy solutions that are low-maintenance and provide predictable, reliable electricity generation.
• Ensure seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

Challenges and Pain Points

• Waste Management: Large amounts of industrial waste heat going unused, representing both inefficiency and lost opportunity.
• High Energy Costs: Rising electricity costs strain budgets, prompting the need for alternative energy sources.
• Technology Hesitancy: Concerns about the upfront cost and risk of adopting advanced thermovoltaic systems, as well as skepticism about long-term ROI.
• Stakeholder Pressure: Balancing cost-saving goals with the demands of corporate boards and investors for more sustainable practices.

Motivation

• New or increased environmental regulations (e.g., carbon taxes, waste heat reduction mandates).
• Corporate pressure to achieve specific ESG benchmarks.
• A significant increase in energy costs or budget cuts requiring innovative solutions.
• Positive case studies or testimonials from industry peers demonstrating the effectiveness of thermovoltaic systems.

Persona Truth

David Benson, the operations manager of a manufacturing facility, is focused on optimising efficiency while meeting environmental regulations. He values solutions that are practical, cost-effective, and aligned with corporate sustainability goals. With ATS’s thermovoltaic systems, he sees an opportunity to turn waste heat into electricity, cutting costs and reducing emissions in a way that is both innovative and reliable.

A customer persona is a carefully envisioned representation of an ideal customer, created using detailed data and insights to reflect who might be interested in your brand. 

Your brand may have more than 1 customer persona to reflect the diversity of your audience based on your research.This is a great way to address the unique concerns and pain points of each group. 

When it comes to your own start-up, if you find you don’t have the time or resources to research and develop your customer personas we can help!

Closing

For climate-tech start-ups, buyer personas are more than just a marketing tool—they’re a key to making a bigger difference. By digging deep into the lives, challenges, and values of your audience, you can design products and campaigns that feel personal and purposeful. Personas allow you to speak directly to the right people, avoid guesswork, maximise your impact and convince your investors your solution addresses the pain point of a real customer.

Do you need help defining your audience and communicating to your them? Book a 60-minute strategy call with us—it’s free for climate-tech founders. We’re excited to help you define your personas and get started on a solid foundation.