How to Create an AI Marketing Persona: 8 Prompts For Deep Insights

Imagine. Someone from your target audience is sitting next to you right now. They are the perfect representative of your ideal client profile and they’re happy to chat. They’re ready to answer any question, on any topic, anytime.

No need to schedule a call. No need to even be polite. Just ask away.

What do you search for? What do you click on? What are you worried about? What are you hoping for? Who do you trust? Why wouldn’t you contact me? What do you hate about looking for our services? Who else is involved in the buying process? What are your cost and timing expectations?

I have good news for you! You can create a version of this person using AI. And it is so helpful it would be a mistake to not use it. If you don’t train the AI on your target audience, results are not good. All of the responses are less targeted and more boring. Lower quality and higher risk.

In this article, we show how to create an AI marketing persona. We also show how to make that persona easy to save and use every time. You’ll find all of the prompts below.

AI = Average Information

The LLM was trained on the Common Crawl. It ingested 80% of the public web, and when prompted, it summarizes what it found. That’s why responses are often bland. Tastes like water. It is the average of the internet.

So if you don’t start with a persona, the responses from AI won’t be specific to your audience. Responses will be generic. The insights won’t be as relevant, and the content won’t connect.

But if you generate a persona first, and they make all of your prompts within that conversation, the responses are all much better. They are specific to your target audience.

Let’s start with the template persona prompt:

Build me a persona of a [job title] with [roles/skills/responsibility] at [industry/company size/geography]. This person is looking for help with [challenge/problem/task] and is considering [product/service].

List their hopes/dreams, fears/concerns, emotional triggers and decision criteria for hiring/contacting a [industry/category/service/product].

The best prompts are detailed and tell the AI a lot about what you’re looking for. This prompt includes the following elements of a persona:

• Job title: What is their role in the business?
• Business category and mission: What does this business do?
• Company size and geography: Small business? Enterprise? How much revenue? Where are they?
• Challenge, problem, task: What is this persona trying to accomplish?
• Product, service: Which of your offers are they considering?

For a B2B marketing persona, forget about age, gender, marital status and hobbies, because these are unrelated to how this person makes business decisions. The Marketing Director likes long walks on the beach? So what. That’s useless information.

The prompts also includes detail about what you want in the response:

• Hopes and dreams
• Fears and concerns
• Emotional triggers
• Decision criteria for selecting a company in your category

Replace everything in brackets with detailed information about your buyer, and see what the AI comes back with. If you use ChatGPT, it will probably be named Alex.

Don’t overthink it. It won’t be perfect on the first try anyway. In fact, it will almost certainly need to be adjusted. It will probably be inaccurate or have missing information.

AI = Assume Incorrect

While working on this AI method, I reached out to the leading expert on B2B marketing personas, my old friend, Ardath Albee. Ardath is honest, direct and an absolute expert on the topic of B2B persona development. It’s been the focus of her career for 30+ years.

So I called her and asked her to watch me use that prompt. I asked her to challenge my approach. Here’s what she said:

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Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions “Andy, do you really know this is accurate? If you incorporate this perspective into your content, what’s the likelihood that this is correct? Do these apply to your market? Your competitors’ market? You didn’t validate this. Check these with your customers before using this. I don’t trust this.“

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She is skeptical and she’s right. It probably isn’t 100% accurate. Don’t trust the AI. Assume everything you get from AI is incorrect until you’ve reviewed it carefully.

The stakes are high. If it’s off, everything we do with it will be off. The quality of every subsequent response depends on the accuracy of this persona.

Validate the persona by checking it against the conversations you’ve had with your clients, your sales reps, your customer service team or anyone else on the front line. So if something is wrong or missing, tell the AI to fix it. These next prompts are critical.

Add the following to the persona…

Remove the following from the persona…

It’s called “Chat” GPT because you’re supposed to have a conversation with it. Go back and forth a few times telling it more about your buyer, what they care about, how they think and feel.

An AI marketing persona is a composite sketch of a target audience or audience segment, describing your ideal customer. It guides your marketing strategy by accurately identifying the general traits, concerns and behavior patterns of your potential buyer. It’s a synthetic member of your target audience.

Like any good marketing persona. It has this information:

• What are their primary goals and objectives ?
• What problems do they have? How do they manifest? (drivers of the objectives)
• What triggers them to take action and reach out for help?
• What questions do they ask at what stage in the decision process? What do they need to know and when?
• Where do they get their information? What and whom do they read, listen to and watch?

Keep the conversation with the AI going until it has all of this basic information. When it feels right, you can turn the conversation around. Instead of telling it things, start asking it things.

What kinds of things happened in the personas life that triggered the need for a solution? Why did Alex start looking for [product/service]?

What words does this persona use to describe their challenges and the possible solutions?

What information does this persona need before contacting a company that provides [product/service]?

Who else on this persona’s team has strong influence over this decision making process?

Which of this persona’s top concerns are not addressed on this webpage?

[copy and paste in a webpage]

That last one is especially effective. If you haven’t tried AI persona-powered gap analysis on your key pages, give it a try. It can be very insightful.

Of course, some of the responses will be obvious or useless. That’s perfectly normal. We don’t have super high expectations here. Afterall, we’ve only invested a few minutes.

AI = Another Input

Some marketers drank the AI Kool-Aid and over-rely on it, trusting it too much. Other marketers are too quick to dismiss the responses. These are both mistakes.

AI is just another research tool. The responses are just another input. It’s up to you, as the expert and strategist, to filter through and find the good stuff. Even if 80% of the responses are unhelpful, the 20% may be gold.

Three ways to save your new AI marketing persona

Once you’ve got your new synthetic prospect in shape, make sure that you hold onto it. Here are three ways to hold on to your new AI-powered persona using ChatGPT.

1. Name it and save that conversation

You can name the chat and keep that conversation. All of your subsequent prompting about this target audience will take place in that specific conversation.

• Pros: Easy and fast
• Cons: Impossible to share with others on your team. And the conversation get cumbersome and long. If the AI gets off on the wrong track, you can’t easily retrain it.

2. Use ChatGPTs memory

You can tell the AI to store your persona in its memory for you. Give it a word or a hashtag that will invoke the persona and use that persona for all the subsequent responses in that chat.

Remember:
When I type #persona at the beginning of a prompt, use the following persona for all responses in that conversion:
[paste in the persona]

You could use any hashtag, special character or perhaps a hedgehog emoji 🦔.

You can see everything that ChatGPT has committed to memory for you by clicking on your profile in the top right, then go to Settings > Personalization. From there you can see everything ChatGPT has in memory.

If you ever improve your persona and want to retrain ChatGPT, you can delete the old memory and make a new one.

• Pros: Easy and fast. Easy to change. Not as messy.
• Cons: Impossible to share with others on your team.

3. Create a Custom GPT for your marketing persona

When I show this to marketers, the most common question (after the question about accuracy) is about Custom GPTs. Yes, you can make a Custom GPT that will represent your target audience. It’s easy. Here’s the process.

1. Click on “Explore GPTs” at the top of the menu on the left
2. Click on the + Create button in the top right corner
3. Follow the prompts. Here the roles have reversed and AI will be prompting you. You’re having a conversation about the persona and how the AI will respond within this GPT. Give it plenty of detail. It will ask you to confirm the name and create a little picture for you.
4. Click on the “Configure” tab and review the training.
5. Change the “conversation starters” which are suggestions for initial prompts. Use questions you are likely to ask your AI persona
6. Upload files that may add detail (interview guides, sales playbooks, sample RFPs, typical LinkedIn profiles, etc.)
7. Click the Create button in the top right
8. For the share options, select “Anyone with the link”

It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can edit it anytime. Your configure tab will look something like this:

Start asking it those tough questions and see how it does. Share the link with people on your team and ask them for feedback.

• Pros: You can share it with your team by sharing the link. You can add/upload lots of training data.
• Cons: It can only be edited by the person who created it.

Very similar to a Custom GPT, you can put your persona into a PDF and upload it with your first prompt. This is basically the same thing as a Custom GPT. But you do need a ChatGPT Plus account to upload files. You can keep the persona PDF in a shared directory where anyone on your team can grab it.

Let’s look at an example showing how to make an AI marketing persona and how to use it effectively.

Example: Persona for a Marketing Director

Let’s try an example. For the next few minutes, we’ll pretend we’re a social media marketing agency focused on helping nonprofits with fundraising. Our buyer is in a marketing leadership role and has fundraising and event promotion goals.

Here it is with the draft AI marketing persona. We’re including the prompts in their original form. Some of the responses have been edited for brevity.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #1:

Build a persona for a Marketing Director of a $10M non-profit in the midwest US with a mission to provide better access to healthcare resources in under-served communities. The goal of this person is to create more effective fundraising campaigns through digital marketing and also to promote their events.

List their hopes/dreams, fears/concerns, emotional triggers and decision criteria for hiring/contacting a social media marketing company.

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

Name: Alex Rodriguez

Background: Alex Rodriguez is a compassionate and dedicated Marketing Director of a non-profit organization, Midwest Health Initiative, which holds a mission to enhance access to healthcare resources in under-served communities. Their passion for public health started in college, where they majored in Public Health and minored in Marketing. Alex later obtained an MBA to gain a stronger business foundation to effectively manage marketing campaigns for non-profits. Alex has been working in the non-profit sector for 15 years, holding different roles ranging from outreach coordinator to marketing manager. Their lifelong commitment to healthcare access stems from personal experiences growing up in a marginalized community.

Goals:

1. Fundraising: Alex’s main goal is to optimize digital marketing efforts to drive more effective fundraising campaigns. They aim to increase donations by 20% over the next fiscal year and engage more monthly recurring donors.
2. Awareness and Outreach: Another important goal is to spread awareness about the healthcare resource issues faced by under-served communities and the organization’s role in addressing them. Alex also hopes to gain broader publicity for their events, driving a 30% increase in attendance within a year.
3. Volunteer Engagement: As part of their community-focused efforts, Alex aims to boost volunteer numbers by using effective social media marketing campaigns that target and inspire potential volunteers.

Pain Points:

1. Budget Constraints: Working in a non-profit means being careful with how resources are allocated. Alex is always under pressure to maximize output with limited resources, which often leads to creative, but challenging, problem-solving.
2. Audience Segmentation: Alex recognizes the power of digital marketing but struggles to effectively segment and target their audience for fundraising, awareness, and volunteer recruitment campaigns.
3. Measuring Success: Non-profits often struggle to measure the impact of their marketing efforts quantitatively. Alex is often challenged to translate their digital marketing efforts into concrete KPIs.

Decision Criteria for Selecting a Social Media Marketing Company:

1. Experience in Non-Profit: The chosen company should have demonstrated experience working with non-profit organizations, particularly in the healthcare sector. They should understand the unique challenges and opportunities in this space.
2. Cost-Effective Solutions: Given the budget constraints, the company must be able to offer cost-effective solutions, delivering maximum results for every dollar spent.
3. Audience Understanding: The company should have a deep understanding of the target demographics, their online behavior, and the most effective ways to engage them.
4. Measurement and Reporting: The marketing company must provide robust reporting and analytics tools to track campaign performance and tie it back to Alex’s specific KPIs.
5. Creative Collaboration: The company should be open to collaborating on creative approaches to marketing problems and flexible enough to adapt to the unique brand voice of Midwest Health Initiative.
6. Cultural Fit: Lastly, Alex is very particular about the company’s values. They must align with their organization’s mission and values to build a successful, long-term relationship.

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It looks like a good start, but we’ll assume that it is inaccurate. Everything that comes out of AI must be verified. Look closely, tell it what to fix. Tell it what to add.

What words does this person use?

Using the language (as in, jargon) of the target audience creates alignment both for SEO and conversion. Marketers must always seek to use the words their audiences use.

I’ll show the prompt and response for that insight here:

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #2:

What words does Alex use to describe his marketing challenges and solutions?

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

Alex, with their background in both public health and business, uses a unique mix of health sector-specific and general marketing terminology to articulate their challenges and solutions.

Challenges:

• Resource Optimization: Alex’s constant struggle with budget limitations drives his need for resource optimization.
• Audience Engagement: One of the key issues Alex faces is in engaging their diverse audience, especially considering the sensitive nature of healthcare topics.
• Digital Footprint Expansion: Alex views his aim of growing the organization’s presence online as a challenge of expanding their digital footprint.
• Donor Conversion: Alex talks about the difficulty in not just attracting but also converting online visitors into consistent donors.
• Performance Tracking: Alex often discusses the struggle to quantify the impact of their campaigns as a challenge in performance tracking and measuring success.

Solutions:

• Strategic Partnerships: Alex believes in creating alliances with like-minded organizations and influencers for cost-effective promotions and wider reach.
• Targeted Messaging: They emphasize the need for highly targeted messaging to cater to the specific needs and interests of their varied audience segments.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Alex underscores the importance of making decisions based on data and insights rather than assumptions.
• Storytelling: To boost donor conversion, Alex often talks about harnessing the power of storytelling to create emotional connections with potential donors.
• Impact Metrics: To address performance tracking, Alex advocates for the use of specific impact metrics that align with their organization’s goals and mission.
• Multi-Channel Approach: To improve the digital footprint, Alex sees value in a multi-channel approach, strategically leveraging various social media platforms to reach a wider audience.

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Those are some fancy words! Probably, I would have avoided that level of jargon, but if I can confirm that these are in fact, the words that my audience uses, I’ve struck gold. I’ll use them throughout our website, our campaigns and even our proposals.

What was the trigger that sent them looking for help?

There’s a true story in the life of every lead. If you know where that story begins, you have a better shot at writing the ending.

Ask your AI buyer persona to tell you what was happening that made it realize that it needed your services.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #3:

What kinds of things might happen that make you realize that you need help from a marketing agency?

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

Several signals would alert me to the fact that the our non-profit needs assistance from a marketing agency:

1. Overwhelmed Team: If the current team is struggling to keep up with their tasks, or if their workload is hindering their creativity or performance, it may be time to seek external help.
2. Limited Expertise: If there are areas of marketing that are beyond the expertise of the in-house team, such as SEO, paid social, or advanced analytics, it may be beneficial to bring in an agency that specializes in those areas.
3. Lack of Results: If the current marketing efforts are not yielding the expected results in terms of fundraising, community engagement, or awareness, an agency might be able to bring fresh perspectives and strategies.
4. Limited Reach: If the organization’s digital presence and reach are not expanding as desired, a marketing agency with expertise in digital marketing and audience targeting could be beneficial.
5. Major Campaigns or Events: If the organization is planning a significant fundraising campaign or event, they may require additional support or specialized expertise to effectively promote it and engage their audience.
6. Need for Strategic Direction: If the organization lacks a comprehensive marketing strategy, or if the existing strategy is not aligned with their goals, an agency could help refine their approach.
7. Need for Objective Insights: Sometimes, having an external, objective perspective can reveal blind spots or provide new ideas that wouldn’t have been recognized internally.

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Because these are the initial drivers, then hitting these specifically will help win the business. All of the marketing materials (plus the pitch and proposal) should all tie back to the original ‘why.’

Again, let’s show this to Ardath for some expert insights from a human.

“This is too high level. AI is great at making lists of stuff, but the problem is specificity. If you’ve actually done the work and have personas, then you can ask it to expand on them and you may get something value. The question is what do you do with it.” – Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions

What information do they need to make a decision?

With another prompt or two, we can get ideas for what basic information we need to include in our marketing materials and sales conversations. Anything stories or examples that align with these should improve both our conversion rates and closing rates.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #4:

What information about the possible marketing agency would you need before contacting that marketing agency about a potential project?

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

Before contacting a marketing agency about a potential project, I would need to gather specific information to ensure the agency is a good fit for our needs. Here are the key points I would consider:

• Agency’s Expertise: The area of expertise of the agency should align with the needs of the project.
• Experience with Non-Profits: It would be beneficial if the agency has prior experience working in the non-profit sector.
• Industry Knowledge: Understanding of the healthcare sector can be a significant advantage as the agency would have a better grasp of the context in which we operate.
• Previous Work: Reviewing the agency’s portfolio can provide insights into their creative abilities, attention to detail, and whether their style aligns with our brand identity.
• Client Testimonials or Case Studies: These help me understand the results the agency has been able to deliver for other clients. It’s particularly beneficial if these testimonials come from clients in similar sectors.
• Values and Culture: It’s important that the agency’s values and culture align with ours, for a harmonious and productive working relationship.

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Although most of that information may seem general, it’s at least a checklist for topics and formats. It suggests that all messages should be reinforced with highly-relevant examples throughout the marketing and sales processes. And alignment on values, although not the most important thing, needs to be there.

What do they buy and how do they buy it?

The answers to these questions can help align your offers with their needs. What do they need and how do they buy it? Who is involved in the process? Repeated prompting about the buying process and the decision criteria can guide the sales strategy.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #5:

Which marketing functions are you most likely to outsource?

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

We may decide to outsource certain marketing functions that require specialized skills, are time-intensive, or are not needed on a continuous basis. Here are some functions that non-profits are most likely to outsource:

• Website Development and Maintenance: Building and maintaining a professional website often requires technical skills. It’s also not a continuous task, so it can be more cost-effective to outsource.
• SEO Optimization: SEO is a specialized skill that requires staying up-to-date with constantly changing algorithms and techniques. It often makes sense to outsource this function to professionals.
• Social Media Management: While day-to-day posting might be handled in-house, strategizing, planning, and creating content for social media can be outsourced to professionals who understand the nuances of different platforms and how best to engage audiences.
• Public Relations: Hiring a PR agency can help the organization gain media coverage and manage communications with various stakeholders.
• Graphic Design: Design work for specific campaigns or materials is often project-based, making it a common function to outsource.
• Market Research and Analytics: Understanding the target audience and analyzing the success of marketing campaigns requires time and expertise.
• Content Creation: Writing blogs, articles, press releases, and other content can be outsourced to professional writers who can craft compelling stories about the organization’s work and impact.

🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #6:

Who are the two people on your team that have the strongest influence over the decision of which marketing agency to hire?

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

In the context of making a strategic decision like hiring a marketing agency, the two individuals who would likely have the strongest influence on the decision-making process, apart from me as the Marketing Director, would probably be:

• Marketing Manager: I work closely with the Marketing Manager to develop and execute the overall marketing strategy. Their intimate understanding of the marketing goals, current initiatives, and challenges would make their input highly influential in this decision.
• Finance Director: As the individual overseeing the organization’s budget, the Finance Director’s perspective would be crucial. They can provide a clear understanding of what the organization can afford, ensuring the decision aligns with financial constraints and goals.

These individuals would likely have the strongest influence due to their strategic roles within the organization and their direct involvement with the financial and marketing aspects, respectively, of the decision to hire a marketing agency.

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Now that you know the influencers of the decision, you can confirm that you’ve addressed (or at least acknowledged) their concerns. Or create content marketing assets specifically for them.

In this case, it could be a guide that explains how the ROI of social media fundraising campaigns is measured. The sales reps could send this to the finance director after a call or meeting.

How to generate marketing copy using your AI buyer persona

Ardath is right. What do we do with all this stuff?

“A persona is simply a format that makes your customer insights useful.” – Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions

You found some insights, you’ve taken the time to validate them by talking to actual humans in your actual audience, and then you edited the AI persona to improve the accuracy. Now what? How do we make this useful?

Without discussing the societal and labor market impacts of AI generated content, I’ll briefly give a few use cases for applying the buyer persona.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #7:

Using the words that Alex would use to describe his challenges and solutions, write a webpage promoting the social media marketing services for healthcare focused nonprofits working on planned giving campaigns. Highlight the specific information that Alex needs to know about an agency before hiring one.

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I will not show the response. If I did, we may get distracted by this specific example and miss the point, which is that AI can indeed produce a workable first draft if given detailed prompts.

In this case, the generated text was 100% aligned with the persona. It basically wrote a section for each of the decision criteria we named above. It felt prescriptive because that’s exactly what it was.

This is an issue with prompting a generative AI. It’s a goldilocks problem.

• Prompts that are too general give responses that feel too general and broad.
  The AI is writing for a very broad audience and the content tastes like water.
• Prompts that are too specific give responses that feel too narrow and specific.
  The AI is hitting every single note and the content is very constrained.

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Mark O’Brien, Newfangled “We’ve noticed something strange and surprising during our content experimentations and R&D efforts that seem to be part of the ‘nature’ of the ChatGPT models: it needs space to breathe. The more detailed and voluminous the instruction, the worse the output. The better and more succinct the prompt, the more creative, interesting, and natural the resulting language was.”

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Also, the draft it generated lacked most of our 13 best practices for service pages, including these big ones:

• Quick visual credibility
• Testimonials
• Supportive data
• Keyword focus
• The faces of our team
• Supportive visuals
• A call to action

I could have kept prompting it, training it to write a better first draft of a prospect-focused service page.

But the process of constructing that page will probably always be a mostly manual process. I don’t expect an AI to do an amazing job of gathering the right testimonials, curating the most relevant examples and results, creating the branded visuals, etc.

It’s easy to imagine how this could be used to create ideas for content marketing or to validate advertising campaigns. We’ve focused on a B2B buyer persona, but AI could also help you understand B2C potential customers.

Performing gap analysis on your existing copy using your new AI persona

If the idea of AI generated web copy leaves a bad taste in your mouth, here’s an idea that should cleanse your palette. Use generative AI to do gap analysis on an existing page, checking the copywriting against the AI marketing persona we worked so hard on these last 10 minutes.

The prompt is simple. Just ask which of the personas top concerns were not addressed in a given piece of web copy. You can simply copy and paste that copy into the prompt.

For this example, I found a random service page from a social media marketing company that works with non-profits.

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🧑🏻 Andy’s prompt #8:

Which of Alex’s top concerns are not addressed on this webpage?

[copy and paste in a webpage]

🤖 ChatGPT’s output:

While the webpage addresses a number of general concerns related to non-profit marketing, there are some specific areas related to Alex’s top concerns that are not explicitly addressed:

1. Healthcare Focus: Alex’s non-profit is specifically in the healthcare sector. While this agency states they work with non-profits, they do not make any specific reference expertise in healthcare.
2. Planned Giving Campaigns: One of Alex’s key initiatives is planned giving campaigns. The webpage does not mention any experience or specialized services related to planned giving campaigns.
3. Values Alignment: The page does not provide information about the agency’s values and whether they align with Alex’s organization’s mission to provide better access to healthcare resources in under-served communities.
4. Data-Driven Insights: The page mentions tracking and measuring donor engagement but does not elaborate on the kind of data-driven insights they provide to their clients. This lack of clarity might leave Alex unsure of their approach to analytics and measurement of campaign success.
5. Cost-Effective Solutions: As a non-profit with a tight budget, Alex is keen on cost-effective solutions. Although the webpage refers to working with organizations large and small, it doesn’t speak directly to their approach to budgeting and ensuring their clients get the most out of their investment.
6. Specific Pain Points: Although this agency has a broad range of services, they do not explicitly address Alex’s specific pain points such as increasing donor dollars, building a strong digital presence that aligns with their mission, and creating compelling narratives to inspire donors.

In essence, Alex would likely appreciate more specificity related to his healthcare focus, his planned giving campaigns, cost-effectiveness, and value alignment from an agency.

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You can see that again, it takes the task very literally and basically checks the page against the decision criteria we set in the earlier prompts and responses.

In this example, the page had a lot of misalignment because it wasn’t written for our persona. It was a random page. But you can see how AI is very useful at identifying gaps. A copywriter could use it as a quick double-check to confirm that nothing big was missed.

Even a single question left unanswered, or a single objection left unaddressed, can hurt conversion rates, as measured in GA4.

Data-Driven Empathy

You used a prompt to generate a persona. Or you uploaded your battle-tested Ideal Client Profile (ICP). You can now talk to it on a moment’s notice, day or night, for quick ideas or a long conversation about drivers, goals and motivations.

• Ask it about price expectations and what would convince it to pay more
• Ask it about results expectations and how soon it expects them
• Ask it who it would ask for referrals
• Ask it what it doesn’t like about buying these services
• Ask it what questions it’s likely to ask on a sales call

Try everything.
Never trust it completely.
Once you find an insight, focus on execution.