Editorial
The Gist
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AI-powered persona research. Use AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance persona research by asking the tool about your persona’s needs to generate content ideas.
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Synthetic persona benefits. Synthetic personas, created through AI-driven tools, provide quick and cost-effective alternatives to traditional research methods.
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Efficient research strategies. Persona research can now be done faster and cheaper with synthetic samples, and they allow businesses to get actionable insights without relying on lengthy surveys.
On a recent “This Old Marketing” podcast, author Joe Pulizzi, considered by many to be the father of content marketing, shared his unconventional content marketing strategies for 2025.
Among his tips was the suggestion to use ChatGPT (or similar tools) to help understand your persona's needs during the research phase of a content marketing strategy.
He suggests starting a new thread or chat, uploading everything you know about your persona and then asking questions about what it’s learned from this data as if it were the persona. I am also assuming that at this point, the AI platform wouldn’t just be responding based on what you told it but also with similar data it has in its vast data set.
I gave this persona research method a go, and it was an excellent exercise. My chosen persona was CEOs of startup tech companies. I’ve been close to these kinds of folks, so it was a good test, and responses were credible and took me down some interesting paths in terms of content ideas based on the AI’s perception of the persona's needs, views and concerns about marketing.
The risk is that we naturally anthropomorphize these machines, and it’s easy to give them more authority and credibility than we should. Like working with generative AI on any project, you need to have some subject matter expertise to ask the right questions, refine and clarify those questions and filter out what you know is not true.
Table of Contents
- AI Tools Enhance Persona Research
- Testing Synthetic Data for Persona Accuracy
- Redefining Persona Insights Through AI
- Core Questions Around Persona Research
AI Tools Enhance Persona Research
Risks aside, this exercise is a much more interactive way of exploring a persona than you would have staring at a blank screen or whiteboard. And, of course, regardless of how you develop your personas, you need to test them with real people, find them in your CRM and speak to them.
I found this exercise an excellent suggestion from Joe and something I’d recommend as part of a content marketing campaign's research and discovery phase, as we effectively create synthesized examples of our personas that we can quiz.
In the same week of doing this, I discovered Evidenza via an interview on the Gasp! Agency podcast with its founder, Peter Weinberg. As a B2B marketer, you will undoubtedly be familiar with Peter’s work, as he co-founded The B2B Institute at LinkedIn.
Evidenza has taken this idea of synthesized research to another level, claiming to “generate hundreds of synthetic customers based on your product category, all with unique personal and professional details” and then using this data set to do consumer research.
They create synthetic AI consumers that they call “synthetic samples,” which allow personas to answer questions, complete surveys and be interviewed, like I did in my experiment. This may be preferable to traditional persona research methods, which is the type of work that is notoriously expensive, time-consuming and inaccessible to smaller brands and their marketing teams.
Related Article: The Rise of Synthetic Data in Marketing: The Future of Market Research and Strategic Decisions
Testing Synthetic Data for Persona Accuracy
Like my little experiment of choosing to model a persona I know well, Evidenza has been tested in a similar way. In the podcast conversation, Peter referred to work they’d done with EY and their CMO, Toni Clayton-Hine.
They created a synthetic audience of the kinds of senior decision-makers that are EY’s audience and then did a head-to-head test, running a survey against this synthetic group and comparing the responses with their Global Brand Survey.
The results from the synthetic audience and the human one were very close, with responses being within 95% of each other for many of the questions asked. And, of course, this was all achieved in a fraction of the time and cost of doing an actual survey and talking to real humans. This is especially useful to get insights on EY’s audience of senior professionals, who are highly inaccessible and busy people.
Redefining Persona Insights Through AI
You are probably familiar with the term “desktop research.” It’s when an agency or consultant does the necessary research for a project that does not include interviewing actual people and is often uncharitably described as “Googling”.
While I haven’t tried the Evidenza service, these two examples show how AI is changing the game for desktop research, moving it from search to a service where we can build these synthetic data sets that we can interact with in a very natural way.
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It also underlines our evolution of using these tools. Initially, we applied them to our existing marketing workflow and processes by having them write blog posts and create images. Now, we’re pushing them to explore deeper and new applications.
Every marketer has a potent persona research tool in ChatGPT and similar tools that deliver audience insight. While it’s not the perfect substitute for traditional research, it can be close enough, especially for companies without the big budget or bandwidth. Of course, there is the caveat that this isn’t real, so results should be used cautiously and tested before drawing any conclusions.
There’s also the argument that soon enough, LLMs will be consuming so much AI-generated content that the real human data will get rinsed out. But that’s a post for another day.
Core Questions Around Persona Research
Editor's note: Here are two important questions to ask around persona research.
How can AI tools improve persona research in content marketing?
AI tools can generate detailed insights based on vast datasets, including historical trends and customer behavior. By interacting with AI, marketers can simulate persona responses, uncover emotional drivers and identify gaps in traditional research. These insights provide a more dynamic, data-driven approach to understanding customer needs and preferences.
What are the benefits of using synthetic personas in marketing research?
Synthetic personas offer a cost-effective and faster alternative to traditional market research. They allow businesses to generate realistic consumer profiles based on specific product categories, which can be surveyed and tested for insights. This method is especially useful for reaching hard-to-access audiences and testing ideas without the time and expense of real-world surveys.
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