AI in Marketing Part 2: Buyer Persona Research

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

There’s been no shortage of bold claims about how AI will revolutionize (or ruin) marketing. I’ve spent the last six months experimenting with AI tools to understand how they could actually help my team. In this article series, I’ll walk you through the use cases that I’ve found most promising.

Companies don’t buy products, people do. 

I’ve done B2B sales and marketing for my whole career, and I’ve seen how often my colleagues forget this very basic principle. All the talk these days seems to be about the ideal customer profile (ICP), defined by Gartner as “the firmographic, environmental and behavioral attributes of accounts that are expected to become a company’s most valuable customers.” CEOs and CROs want to hire CMOs who understand account-based marketing (ABM). 

All of which misses the fact that once you get a meeting with an ICP account, you need to convince a group of people that your product is what they need. Sure, you need a list of target accounts, but you also need a list of target buyers – personas. Who are they and what do they care about? This is a crucial step in good B2B marketing, and AI can make it a whole lot easier.

What is a Buyer Persona?

First, a little nomenclature to clear up: buyer titles, buyer profiles, and buyer personas. Titles are the most straightforward. Most marketers build target lists for their campaigns based on the titles they want to reach. Buyer profiles describe the role and responsibilities of a given job title. We can all understand what a CFO or VP of Sales does. Buyer profiles are useful in orienting a sales or SDR team to the group of people that will be involved in a buying decision.

Buyer personas take things a step further. The goal is to create a description that captures motivations. For example, the job of a VP of Sales is to oversee a team of salespeople and hit the company’s revenue targets. That’s the profile. The persona would talk about things like the quarterly pressure to hit revenue targets, the desire to forecast accurately to preserve credibility with the CEO and board, the fear of losing top sales talent, etc. A sales tool like Clari, which automates revenue forecasting, taps into the desire of the VP of Sales persona to provide accurate forecasts.

Buyer personas reveal the personal motivations of prospective buyers to help the marketing team create targeted value propositions that cut through the noise. Creating buyer personas can be a lot of work, but it’s worth it. I’ve found that AI can save marketers time and tedium in researching buyers. It can also surface information that can lead to important insights.

How to Use ChatGPT for Persona Research: Step by Step

ChatGPT can be very helpful in fleshing out buyer titles and buyer profiles. It can also help in the early phases of buyer persona development. Let’s step through an example to illustrate how it could be used for each.

Let’s say that my early-stage company has made a few sales where a cloud architect was the key buyer. I want to build out my database to target this buyer title, but not all of my ICP accounts have someone with that title. Are there other titles with similar responsibilities that my team could target?

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ChatGPT gives me a list of similar titles. The job focus helps me check to see if they all make sense to target. I may decide, for example, that including DevOps Engineer doesn’t make sense because my product doesn’t add anything to the development process. ChatGPT can save a team lots of manual effort and guesswork.

I strongly recommend checking the answers you get from ChatGPT. Hallucination is still a big problem. I asked ChatGPT where it got the information, and I liked the answer it gave me: job boards, skills frameworks, certifications, and the cloud service providers themselves. 

Now, let’s assume that we have successfully sold into accounts that also use Wiz, a widely-used cloud security product. I ask ChatGPT to tell me the titles of people who use Wiz. Pulling from similar sources, including job boards, I see one that wasn’t provided in response to my previous prompt: Cloud Security Engineer. I add that one to my list. If I wanted to, I could spend a little more time rounding out my title list by including prompts that ask about other software companies or tools, professional organizations, industry conferences – there are lots of possibilities.

My next task is to think of what type of content my team could produce that might be useful or attractive to these people. I haven’t gotten to persona research interviews yet (those take time), but let’s suppose I’m feeling some urgency to start engaging my targets. I like to produce educational content when engaging a new audience. So I’m thinking of professional certifications that my target buyers need to get a job or a promotion. I ask ChatGPT.

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Maybe my product marketing team could produce a prep guide to getting one or more of these certifications, compiled from existing sources on the web. ChatGPT can create a study guide, complete with links to resources. I could interview with my CTO and solicit advice on which certifications matter most. There are lots of possibilities. What I like about ChatGPT is that it can give me very specific information very quickly. The links to sources make it easy to investigate further.

Now, we have titles and some content ideas, but we really don’t have motivations, which are critical in buyer personas. What can ChatGPT do for us? I ask it to tell me the main concerns of cloud architects, and what I get back is a long list that will help me in my buyer profile, but not with my buyer persona.

It offers me a list of interview questions to help better understand cloud architects. They are not bad, if somewhat generic. 

I finally ask it how I can develop a buyer persona for a cloud architect.

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That’s pretty solid advice. I also produced a basic template and some sample questions. Again, a time saver. But this last bit of advice proved the best – you need to talk to humans.

Overall, I think ChatGPT is great for helping marketing teams target the right buyers. It provides fresh ideas and saves a lot of time. You can leverage competitors, commonly used tools, organizations and all kinds of other things as proxies to build out your list of buyer titles and profiles, and it prepares you to do proper buyer persona research. I do expect that some of these capabilities will get built into database and marketing automation tools in the future, but ChatGPT is easy enough to use for the product marketers likely doing the research.

Have you used ChatGPT in buyer persona development? Have an other Ideas to share?

Read AI in Marketing Part 1: Optimizing for the New World of Search

Image Credit: ChatGPT

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