When building buyer personas, all that glitters is not AI gold. At least not yet.
"A buyer persona is a composite sketch of a target market segment based on validated commonalities," explained B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee in her recent presentation, Using AI + B2B Personas to Engage Buyers, Drive Growth, and Do More With Less.
"Personas should actually inform how you help pull people through their buying process and help them move toward making a purchase. That's the whole reason for building them in the first place."
To do so, you need to know your buyers. It's a qualitative exercise requiring empathy, not just data. And that's where the problem with using AI shortcuts to build personas comes in.
"We need to get more of that human experience into the content and experiences we deliver to our buyers. And I don't want us to lose sight of that."
"I love AI. I use it all the time. I just want you to be skeptical and not take it at face value to your own detriment," insists Ardath.
Check out this clip from her presentation where she discusses the reality of AI in today's personas process:
After testing several dedicated AI persona generators, she's found that the details they provide are often either too high-level or too in the weeds to be meaningful as real, workable personas.
"It's not giving you anything that is differentiated or out of the ordinary," she says. "It's a great overview education," but they're just not serving up the necessary customer insights you can uncover in personal interviews.
What does work?
"ChatGPT makes me the most comfortable," she says, "because I can have more control over the input and influence what it's building the persona on." And the free version is a fine starting point (in her tests, that means GPT 3.5).
"The first thing I do when I'm trying to build a persona using ChatGPT is ask it a series of questions to prime its short-term memory. I want to know what it knows." Ardath continues, "What role does that person play in this company? What concerns do they have? What obstacles do they face? What options do they have if sales reps don't follow guidance and training?"
"Then, once I have accumulated all this stuff, I say, write a buyer persona for me." But you need to go into the process knowing enough basic information about your personas to be able to validate what AI is telling you. You can't just blindly trust the results.
Once you have that ChatGPT-generated persona, "then start asking it [questions] in relation to what you sell," she says. "I find that that tends to give me better information back."
And that's perhaps where AI really shines in the persona-building process. Expanding on your MVPs—minimum viable personas—and helping you enhance "day in the life" scenarios for each, making them quicker and easier to create and apply across the buyer journey.
Watch Ardath's complete AI for Demand Gen Marketers presentation for more information about the good, the bad, and the not quite ready for prime time on using AI for buyer personas.
More Resources From the AI for Demand Gen Marketers Series
Can AI Save You From Marketing Inferno?
AI Use Across the Customer Journey Means Aligning Across Teams
Using AI to Build Your Personas: Don't Lose Sight of Your Real-World Buyers
AI Can't Write Thought Leadership (But It Can Do Something Else)
