Effortless Customer Persona Creation with AI

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys, Derby here, J University, and in this video I’m going to be talking about a big mistake I tend to see people getting started with AI running into, even if it’s just ChatGPT: how to get AI to actually work for you and help you accomplish what you’re looking to do.

Now this example I’m going to be sharing is someone who is in a small business and they’re putting on their marketing hat, and they need to create a campaign to target their ideal audience. Now, what do you do? You need to do a lot of research about who your audience is, what their pain points are, what’s driving them to make purchase decisions, things like their psychosocial, psychographics, all of those sort of things that go into the mix of us, the things that make us human. Even our biases are all part of our purchase decisions. And if I’m a business owner, I want to figure out what my audience is thinking, what’s going on in their heads that I can use in my own marketing and messaging to speak their language, where they’re at, and how it relates to the product or the service that I’m providing.

And so when you go to ChatGPT right now, it’s pretty much an open blank slate. You can do a whole lot of things with it, and that can be very overwhelming. The first place that I would start, if you’re in this position, a small business owner or someone putting together a marketing campaign, is starting by understanding your ideal customer persona first. You can do this very simply by starting to prime ChatGPT with a series of questions. You could start with, “Act like a world-class researcher understanding human psychology and the motivations of buying behavior,” and you’re doing this to set the context for AI to focus in the right direction and tap into the right level of expertise. So you can add your own spin or your own flare to the introduction to this prompt.

But what you want to do is tell it to assume this persona and act like this role right now, and to provide you with the information you’re looking for: their needs, their pains, their wants, their fears, their desires, the things that keep them up at night, where they get their information, where they hang out online, and what are some competitors they may be considering inside of their purchasing decisions. What is driving their purchasing decisions related to the pain points, what’s the value they’re looking to get and create from your product or service. And then you’re going to have to provide it with information on your product or service, so that’s where you can take information from a sales page or a website or a brand brief that you might have on hand and attach that to the files.

So that ChatGPT does two things: one, it understands that it’s going to be acting as a role for this market research purpose, and two, it’s going to have the right context about your business. So what it’ll do is help you connect the dots from that point and put two and two together to reverse engineer, really, based on what you’re telling it that you’re selling and what your product is, here’s the potential segments or market personas that you could be reaching with this product. Maybe you’ve considered all of them, maybe you’ve only considered a few of them, but one way or the other, each one of these market segments is going to have different drivers that are going into making their purchasing decisions.

And so now it’s your job, back in the role of the operator behind AI, to say, “Hey, okay, now that you’re doing this sort of performance, ChatGPT, this is the role you’re set in, this is the context that my company has related to the people we’re trying to reach, can you help me with providing blog posts that would speak to demographic one, or this persona, who wants to do this as their number one goal?” And then ChatGPT will respond by giving you blog posts related to that person’s number one goal, maybe the pain points that you’ve already identified. And then here it’s a very conversational back and forth where you’re going to get the responses back, you tell it to either regenerate it or to continue on giving you maybe more newsletter ideas or Twitter thread post structures or things that are going to be able to expand on the content that you’re creating, and again, tying it all back to the pain points, the things that are driving their decisions, their goals, their desires, and creating content that is going to be valuable for that segment of the audience.

You might have a number of different audiences you can target, so here it’s really important to stay focused and go narrow and go deep on one segment, if you haven’t already committed to that already. If you’re a much larger organization, you’ve got a lot of campaigns and products and service lines that you’re already creating, you’re probably going to have multiple of these types of personas already built so that you can engage and interact with them depending on where they’re at inside of the customer journey. And so again, you could have multiple ChatGPT threads that are doing this. It’s important to make sure that as you’re creating all these different threads with these different personas, that you’re saving those links somewhere, depending on whether it’s a project that you’re managing these campaigns for, and just a simple spreadsheet, I find that’s helpful for me.

If I know that I’m going to be going in and building out a blueprint for a new marketing campaign that’s targeting a persona that I’ve already created, instead of going into ChatGPT and just scrolling through a bunch of the chat threads to try and find the right one, I’ve already got those links stored in a separate campaign, because I’m using ChatGPT for a number of other things inside of the organization.

And so I hope you find those tips helpful in getting started with creating customer personas for your business, and one way that you can tap into AI to help you with streamlining the market research process that leads back into what you’re probably doing on a daily or a weekly basis, at least to get more customers in your business through the awareness and the content creation efforts that you are putting your time and energy into. So I hope you found this useful. If you did, let me know in the comments, and I would love to hear another useful, helpful way that you are finding AI to be working for you, not against you, in your business. All right, keep crushing AI. See you in the next video.