We’re seeing mass amounts of content being created with AI. Just look at your LinkedIn feed. As you’ve noticed, most of it feels impersonal, disjointed, or strange, since it is written by a robot. The reason why is because most of this content is being generated without a specific audience in mind. Let's share some thought and experience on how to use generative AI as a better starting point for your content. I think you’ll be surprised to see the results.
Why Buyer Personas Matter More Than Ever
The explosion of AI-generated content created a new problem: an overwhelming flood of generic, technically correct, but fundamentally disconnected, content. Anyone can now produce 10 blog posts before lunch. But producing content that actually resonates? That requires understanding who you're talking to.
Buyer personas help provide the relevant context to your audience that you’re probably lacking. They transform content creation from a general broad microphone into a strategic conversation with a specific person who has specific challenges, goals, and objections. This helps you as a digital marketer, or professional communicator, dial in your messaging, and open the door as a resource for your potential customers.
Developing Personas That Actually Guide Decisions
Great buyer personas go beyond demographics. Here's a great way to develop them:
Start with real conversations. Interview your best customers, your sales team, and even lost opportunities. What keeps them up at night? What metrics do they report to their boss? What words do they actually use to describe their problems? Why did they decide to work with you?
Focus on the decision-making context. Don't just document that your persona is a "Marketing Director, 35-50 years old, manages a team of 5." Capture why they make decisions. What's their boss pressuring them about? What failed initiative are they trying to avoid repeating? What would make them a hero in their organization?
Document the journey, not just the destination. Map out how they realize they have a problem, how they research solutions, what creates urgency, and what almost stops them from buying. These details become your content roadmap.
All of this helps you summarize your audience and get a true picture of not only their job duties, but what challenges they face, and how your company, services, or products can help. In my opinion, the more information you can build for these profiles, the better your prompt.
Capture all of these, and review them with your team to decide on the best profile of your buyers based on your experience. Remember, sometimes you may have multiple personas, or profiles, depending upon your audience. That’s ok, just note that you’ll want to account for each type of messaging and medium in your marketing efforts.
How Personas Transform Content
When you feed AI tools detailed buyer personas, something powerful happens. Instead of generating "5 Tips for Better Marketing," you create "How Marketing Directors at Mid-Market Manufacturers Can Prove ROI Without Adding Headcount,” content that makes your specific audience think and feel that you understand and connect with them. Their problems have crossed your mind and you’ve decided to help them solve them. This is a critical factor for success in inbound marketing.
Personas guide everything:
- Topic selection: What keeps your persona awake at 2 am becomes your content calendar
- Language and tone: A CFO persona and a Creative Director persona need completely different vocabularies
- Content depth: Junior buyers need education; senior buyers need validation and strategic frameworks
- Call-to-action: What feels like the natural next step depends entirely on where your persona is in their journey
Why AI Needs Personas More Than Human Writers Do
Experienced human writers develop an intuitive sense of audience. They've talked to enough customers that they naturally write with empathy and specificity.
AI doesn't have that intuition. It needs explicit direction. Without a detailed persona, AI defaults to the "average" voice in its training data, which means bland, safe, forgettable content that could have been written for anyone, and chances are, everyone else is still using it.
Giving AI a rich persona as context, their goals, fears, vocabulary, objections, and decision-making environment, and it becomes remarkably good at crafting content that sounds like it was written specifically for that reader.
Think of personas as the difference between telling AI "write about marketing automation" versus "write for Sarah, a marketing director at a 200-person manufacturing company who just got burned by a CRM implementation that her team won't use, and who needs to show her CEO that the next tool investment will actually drive pipeline within 90 days."
See for yourself the difference in outcomes. It's never great to simply prompt AI and use its output. You’ll need to use these personas along with strong specific prompts, and review and edit each before using them as finished pieces.
Beyond Blog Posts: Other Ways Personas Drive Results
Buyer personas aren't just for content creation, the use cases are nearly endless:
Sales enablement: Arm your team with persona-specific talk tracks, objection handlers, and case studies that match each buyer's concerns
Product positioning: Adjust your messaging for different personas visiting the same service pages
Email campaigns: Segment your audience and craft campaigns that speak directly to each persona's priorities
Paid advertising: Create ad copy and landing pages tailored to different personas searching for similar solutions
Content distribution: Share content where your personas actually spend time, not just where you prefer to post
AI has democratized content production. But quality content, the kind that drives actual business results, still requires human insight about who you're serving. Buyer personas are that insight, codified in a format that guides both human and AI efforts to ensure your content is targeted and resonates with the intended reader.
Without personas, you're just adding to the noise. With them, you're creating content that makes your ideal customers stop scrolling and start paying attention. If you’re interested in learning more about inbound marketing strategies, let us know and we’d be happy to meet.
