AI: Here to stay?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is causing a stir right now – especially in marketing. While in the right hands AI offers marketers the opportunity to accelerate time consuming tasks, on the flipside we can all think of examples where a business has bypassed their marketing professionals and copied and pasted direct from Chat GPT (shudder).
When harnessed properly AI is powerful tool that can provide marketing insights and research information much faster than manual searching. Whether it’s looking for inspiration for that email subject line or social media graphic, researching the latest trends, or automating meeting notes, AI has plenty of potential that you can tap into.
Understanding your customer personas is a fundamental step for any successful marketing or sales strategy. Yet, it’s one that is all too often glossed over or missed completely, resulting in an ineffective broadbrush approach with bland catch-all marketing messaging and tactics. AI tools such as ChatGPT can take the pain out of developing these personas and help set your marketing up for success.
In case you aren’t familiar with what a customer persona is, here’s a quick run down!
What is a customer persona?
Customer personas are illustrative characters based on real data that represent the ideal customers across your product or service streams. They allow teams to build an accurate picture of who they need to reach and include details such as job title, age, location, industry, pain points, needs, preferred communication methods, and interests.
Armed with this information, marketers can identify relevant products and services and tailor messages to address their target customer’s pain points, and use language, imagery, and other content that will resonate with them.
Do customer personas work?
The short answer is yes! Take the example of Nike’s loyalty app. When the athletic wear giant turned its attention to boosting the number of loyal app users – it knew segmenting its customers would be key. Diving into its data it identified three core customer personas it wanted to target: the weekend runner, the style shopper, and the sneaker head. The company used these personas to create targeted, relevant messaging for a successful loyalty app and marketing campaign that lasted five years. Today the app boasts more than 300 million users with revenues from its digital business accounting for almost 39% of total revenue in 2021.
How do I use AI to create customer personas?
ChatGPT is a language processing model that uses AI to create written content and generate human-like responses to prompts. You can sign up for an account and use this tool for free here.
Entering suitable prompts into ChatGPT allows you to quickly create detailed customer personas and improves performance as each marketing message is crafted with a recipient and desired action in mind.
A prompt is the text you provide to guide ChatGPT and specify the type of response you want. Ensure your prompts are concise, specific and provide context.
For example if you enter “Create a customer persona for a B2B tech company” You will get a detailed response in seconds which includes a summary of the ‘client’ including age, gender, location, occupation, company size, industry they work in, professional background, challenges, goals and objectives, preferred communication channels, and how a B2B company could help.
While this provides a great starting point, if your tech company is based in Edinburgh or Aberdeen for example, much of the information will not be relevant due to geographical differences. So, let’s try another prompt “Create a customer persona for a B2B tech company in Scotland” which then generates a more relevant persona for marketing teams to align with.
Does the persona make sense? Does it seem like they really could be one of your customers? If yes, great! If not, keep experimenting by rewording your prompts slightly. And remember, ChatGPT helps accelerate the creation of customer personas but they need human input – spend time refining the AI output into a customer profile that is tailored to your business.
How do I edit and refine my customer personas?
If you look at your customer base and remove all the people who would identify closely with the “Fiona persona” what type of customers do you have left? How can you group them by similarities? e.g it’s a lot of startups or hospitality companies; you can put in the prompts “create me a customer persona for a b2b tech company targeting start-ups in Scotland” and “create me a customer persona for a b2b tech company targeting the hospitality sector in Scotland”
This gives us IT Manager Fiona, Startup Scott and Hospitality Heather customer personas. Would most of your customers realistically identify with one of these personas? Are there any other key segments not represented that need their own persona?
Once you have generated this information, it is important to review the copy and fact-check it. ChatGPT scans language for a response and doesn’t “understand” the copy you receive in response to a prompt. You will also need to add information relevant to your customers, business and products.
You can then edit and format the information to place into a template on Canva and create something like this fairly quickly:
What’s next?
Once created, your customer personas should be referenced during the development of all marketing and sales collateral to ensure activity is targeted and will resonate with your intended audiences.
Content should be crafted to address the specific pain points faced by your personas. For all marketing messages, imagine if you are speaking to Fiona, Scott or Heather, the tone of voice, look and feel should be developed to appeal directly to that persona. Look at your data to understand how each segment prefers to be communicated with and which messages they are most likely to respond to.
Doing this will ensure they have more meaningful and effective engagement with your business and are more likely to mature further through your sales and marketing funnel.
Personas can also be used for product development and strategy. You could be looking at your existing customers and thinking its all Fionas here, which products and services can we develop for them? Or you could think how do we attract more Scott’s? Or get Heather’s to leave a review? It is very easy to imagine how to do this with the information at your fingertips.
Looking to the future it seems that AI will continue to play a big part in our day-to-day business lives, so stop worrying about it replacing your job and instead learn to embrace and optimise it!
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