Creating buyer personas with ChatGPT

One of the most important things you can do when starting an SEO campaign, yet most SEOs never do it, is creating a few buyer personas to help to better understand who you are trying to reach, how to reach them, and relevant trigger points you may want to hit.

This is something that should be done with any type of marketing campaign, not just SEO.

Before we dive into how you can quickly create them with the help of ChatGPT, what exactly is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona, also known as a customer persona or audience persona, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

The goal of creating a buyer persona is to better understand your target audience so that you can tailor your product development, sales strategy, marketing efforts, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

A well-defined buyer persona can include:

1. Demographics: Information such as age, gender, location, income level, education level, and occupation.
2. Psychographics: This includes the buyer’s interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle.
3. Behavioral traits: Buying behavior, brand interactions, and purchasing habits.
4. Motivations and Goals: The buyer’s needs, pain points, challenges, aspirations, and what they value in a product or service.
5. Customer Journey: The process that the persona goes through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, decide to purchase, use, and maintain loyalty to your product or service.

Creating accurate buyer personas helps a business better understand their customers and potential customers, and makes it easier for them to tailor their content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs of these different segments.

This can lead to increased customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.

Buyer persona vs customer persona?

“Customer persona” and “buyer persona” are two terms often used interchangeably in marketing and sales, and both refer to semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. They are created using market research and real data about your existing customers.

Both types of personas can include information like demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

There can be a slight difference in focus between the two, although this isn’t universally recognized:

1. Customer Persona: This might focus more on current customers, taking into account their experience with your product or service after the purchase. This can be more valuable in industries where repeat business, upselling, cross-selling, or customer lifetime value is important. It helps with customer satisfaction, retention, and referral programs.
2. Buyer Persona: This could place a stronger emphasis on people who aren’t yet customers, but are potential buyers. They’re designed to understand the buying decision process and influence it favorably before the sale. This persona is especially useful for shaping the product development, marketing strategy, and sales messaging to attract new customers.

Again, the distinction is minor and isn’t consistently made. Most importantly, both buyer personas and customer personas aim to help businesses understand their audience and serve them better.

What does a buyer persona look like?

Here is an example of a buyer persona for a company that offers an online collaborative project management tool:

Persona Name: Project Manager Pete

Demographics:

• Age: 35-45
• Gender: Male
• Location: Major metropolitan areas across the U.S.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration or related field. Likely holds a PMP certification.
• Income: $75,000 – $95,000

Job Title/Role:

• Senior Project Manager or Team Lead in mid-to-large size tech companies or businesses with a strong focus on digital processes.

Psychographics:

• Values efficiency, organization, and clear communication.
• Interested in tools and strategies that boost team productivity and streamline workflows.
• Motivated by meeting project deadlines and keeping team members aligned and on task.

Behavioral Traits:

• Researches new project management tools and methodologies online.
• Regularly reads industry blogs and forums, and attends webinars or conferences for continued professional growth.
• Actively uses LinkedIn for professional networking and industry insights.

Motivations and Goals:

• Pete’s main goal is to ensure that all projects are completed on time, within budget, and meet the defined scope and quality.
• He’s motivated by eliminating inefficiencies, enhancing team collaboration, and having visibility of all aspects of a project.
• He values tools that integrate well with other systems, are user-friendly, and offer robust features such as task tracking, resource management, and real-time collaboration.

Pain Points:

• Struggles with coordinating team members who are often working remotely or are spread across different time zones.
• Frustrated by tools that have a steep learning curve or don’t integrate well with existing systems.
• Needs a way to quickly and easily monitor project progress and individual team member’s tasks.

Customer Journey:

• Discovers the tool through online research, recommendations on industry blogs, or word-of-mouth from other project managers.
• Visits the website to learn more about the tool’s features, pricing, and to view demos or testimonials.
• Participates in a free trial and tests the tool’s functionalities with his team.
• Reviews feedback from team members, considers the cost-value ratio, and then decides whether to purchase a full subscription.

Preferred Channels of Communication:

• Email for detailed communication and updates.
• LinkedIn and industry blogs for discovering new tools and trends.
• Webinars or in-person events for deeper learning.

This buyer persona can be used to tailor the business’s product development, marketing, sales, and customer service strategies to attract and retain customers like Project Manager Pete.

Creating your own buyer personas

A lot of research typically goes into creating personas like this, including using analytics data, surveying existing customers, conducting market research, speaking to the company’s sales and customer service teams, and segmenting your audience into multiple personas.

For the past 2 months, I’ve been using ChatGPT to create buyer personas for me.

Obviously, everything gets verified and double checked, but they have been surprisingly accurate and have really helped to speed up the process of building these.

Here is the prompt I have been using:

I would like you to create 3 detailed buyer personas for a specific industry. Here are the details:

Industry: (Specify the industry. For example, 'Healthcare', 'Automotive', 'Fashion', 'EdTech', 'Fintech', 'Real Estate', etc.)
Product/Service: (Specify the product or service. For example, 'Telehealth App', 'Electric Cars', 'Sustainable Clothing', 'Online Learning Platform', 'Mobile Payment Solution', 'Real Estate Brokerage Services', etc.)
Based on this information, please provide the following details for the buyer persona:

Persona Name: (A representative name for the persona)
Demographics: (Including age, gender, location, education, income level)
Job Title/Role: (If applicable)
Psychographics: (Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle)
Behavioral Traits: (Buying behavior, brand interactions, purchasing habits)
Motivations and Goals: (Needs, pain points, challenges, aspirations, what they value in the product/service)
Pain Points: (Specific problems or issues the buyer is looking to solve)
Customer Journey: (The process this persona goes through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, decide to purchase, use, and maintain loyalty to your product/service)
Preferred Channels of Communication: (How and where they like to receive information)