Using Personas and AI to Create Personalized Content

In the quest for meaningful engagement and customer satisfaction, marketers are increasingly turning to cutting-edge technology to up their game. One of the most powerful approaches is the fusion of persona-based marketing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver highly personalized content. While I've discussed the power of AI in generating individualized content in a previous article Learn more, what happens when an organization has multiple customer personas to consider? Is it possible to scale the personalization to meet the distinct needs and preferences of each persona, all in a single swoop?

Introduction

You’ve been tasked with creating personalized content for a handful of personas. Your current focus is the home page banner which is used by your customers to start their home-buying experience. The challenge is that with five distinct personas and an ever-approaching deadline, you are concerned you will not be able to deliver the personalized content for each persona on time. Let's explore how AI can help accelerate this process.

The Personas

Before we jump into using AI, a list of personas must be defined. If you don’t have this already, this must be done first. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume we’re a digital marketer for a home builder. For our list of personas, we will use the following:

1. First-Time Homebuyer "Emily"

• Age: 28
• Occupation: Software Engineer
• Marital Status: Single
• Goal: Looking to buy her first affordable starter home in a safe neighborhood.
• Pain Points: Limited knowledge about the home-buying process and budget constraints.

2. Family-Focused "Robert and Sarah"

• Age: 35 and 33
• Occupation: Robert is a Marketing Manager, and Sarah is a stay-at-home mom.
• Marital Status: Married with two young children.
• Goal: Need a 4-bedroom house near good schools and parks.
• Pain Points: Need a quick move due to a job change and unfamiliarity with the new area.

3. Upscale Retiree "John"

• Age: 65
• Occupation: Retired Lawyer
• Marital Status: Widowed
• Goal: Looking for a luxury condo with a low-maintenance lifestyle and proximity to healthcare.
• Pain Points: Less tech-savvy, needs a simplified browsing experience on the website.

4. Investor "Vanessa"

• Age: 45
• Occupation: Entrepreneur
• Marital Status: Divorced
• Goal: Interested in buying properties to rent out or flip.
• Pain Points: Needs detailed information on property valuation and potential ROI.

5. Young Family "Alex and Jamie"

• Age: 30 and 29
• Occupation: Alex is a Graphic Designer and Jamie is a Nurse.
• Marital Status: Married with a newborn.
• Goal: Looking for a 3-bedroom home with office space and a backyard.
• Pain Points: Balancing budget with desired amenities, concern about future resale value.

Now that we have some defined personas, let's teach our AI model about these!

Teaching AI about our Personas

Before we can jump into creating personalized content, we need to ensure that the AI model first understands what are the different personas we’ll be generating content for.

For ChatGPT, it’s as simple as providing the list and telling it to remember the different personas for later use:

Done!

Generating Persona-specific Content

Now that the model is aware of our different personas, we’ll personalize the same banner component that we used in the previous article.

Original Banner Content:

• Title: Unlock the Door to Your Dream Home Today!
• Call to action: Explore New Homes

We’ll now give this content to the AI model and have it use the previous persona context to generate personalized content for each persona.

This is a great start, but it looks like the response took our personas a bit too literal and included the names of our personas in the personalized content. We could manually fix it but let's just have the AI fix its mistake.

Much better! Now we have banner content that is personalized for each of our personas.

Conclusion

Using both personas and AI can be a game-changer for creating content that speaks to your customers. Personas help you understand who your customers are and what they need. Then, AI can quickly create tailored content that hits the mark for each customer group. This not only saves time but also makes the content more effective.

As we saw with the home page banner example, even if the AI doesn't get it right the first time, we can help it get it there by providing additional information. This approach helps marketers create targeted content faster and easier, meeting the needs of various customer types.