The Persona is Dead; Long Live the PersonaAI

Marketing teams rely on personas as foundational tools to understand their target audiences. These archetypal customer profiles - complete with demographics, job roles, and pain points – often inform everything from branding to campaign messaging and inbound content creation. Sadly, these persona documents all too often became static artefacts: meticulously crafted, beautifully designed, and promptly forgotten, collecting rust on rarely used archival hard drives.

The emergence of advanced AI tools has revolutionised persona creation and application, breathing new life into what was once a laborious process. It’s not that personas are obsolete - it’s that their potential has been reborn and reinvigorated, and marketers now have access to tools that make personas actionable, dynamic, and impactful.

Personas vs. Ideal Customer Profiles

Before diving into the AI revolution, it’s crucial to distinguish between two concepts that are often wrongly conflated:

1. Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): These operate at the organisational level, identifying the types of companies best suited for your product or service.
2. Personas: These focus on individual buyers within those ICPs, detailing their roles, motivations, and behaviours.

According to HubSpot:

"A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer that you create from audience and market research. Personas include essential information about your target customer (like demographics, behavior, interests, challenges, etc.) and help you better reach them and meet their needs." 

Traditionally, personas were created through a mix of workshops, customer interviews, desk research, and educated guesses. This process was often slow, labour-intensive, and prone to irrelevance as market conditions and strategies evolved. Enter AI.

Building Personas in the AI New Era

AI-powered tools, particularly large language models, have transformed persona creation. Here’s how:

1. Accelerated Research: AI can analyse LinkedIn profiles, job descriptions, and online behaviour in seconds, offering a robust starting point for personas. What once took days can now be accomplished in minutes.
2. Richer Insights: By integrating personality AI (like those provided by Humantic AI), marketers can add psychological dimensions to their personas. Beyond demographics, they can uncover personality traits, communication styles, and motivational drivers - creating profiles that resonate on a human level.
3. Queryable Personas: Custom AI assistants can act as living, breathing representations of your personas. Instead of digging through outdated documents, teams can "talk" with their personas in real-time, and ask questions such as:

• "What messaging would resonate with a VP of Marketing in a life science startup?"
• "How might the CEO of a life science conglomerate respond to a value proposition centered on cost efficiency?"

These tools make personas not just reference points but sparring partners for testing ideas.

From Static Documents to Dynamic Feedback Loops

Perhaps the most exciting evolution is the integration of feedback loops. AI personas can:

• Incorporate real-world data: Profiles can be continuously refined based on marketing campaign results, website interactions, and customer feedback.
• Suggest optimizations: Identify which messaging strategies perform best for specific personas.
• Stay evergreen: Automatically update as industries, roles, and priorities evolve.

This dynamism ensures that personas remain relevant and actionable, rather than becoming relics of a past workshop.

Real-World Application: A Case Study

In a recent project for an exciting  startup, Strivenn harnessed AI to:

1. Extract LinkedIn and job description data to build foundational persona profiles that were enriched based on real-life human-to-human interactions to add colour and depth.
2. Enrich the persona using personality AI to provide communication-style preferences and hone the messaging priorities for each persona.
3. Create AI Assistants (CustomGPTs in this case) to enable the marketing team to query the persona and engage as if these representations were responding via an instant messaging service.

The enriched personas not only guide the marketing team’s efforts but serve as a sounding board to test strategy, ideas and help co-create new ideas.

Why This Matters for Marketers

The AI-powered persona isn’t just a tool - it’s a game-changer. By combining human creativity with AI’s analytical power, marketers can:

• Build deeper connections: Tailor messaging to the unique desires and needs of their audience.
• Increase efficiency: Spend less time guessing and more time executing.
• Stay agile: Adapt to changing markets with real-time insights.

As we move forward, the integration of AI into persona development and refinement is likely to become standard practice, offering a competitive edge to those who embrace it.

Flat file personas are dead - they're being replaced by PersonaAI - AI agents that marketers can chat with as a representation of their key audiences. They can help develop strategies and tactics, generate targeted content and even argue amongst themselves.