You can use AI for target audience research and more. As many of us marketers know, going after a new target market requires quite a bit of work and energy. This process usually starts with research and interviews with prospects and can be lengthy and time-consuming. Fortunately, AI can help. Using strategic prompts, you can skim some time off the top and get to market faster.
Check out these three ways to use AI when getting started on your next project:
1: Have AI help create your persona
Marketing personas have many great uses in the marketing realm. From helping to generate the right content to driving positioning and channel placement, they heavily influence the buyer’s journey. Creating personas can also take time. They usually start with research, followed by interviews, often leading to more research and additional interviews.
Using an AI tool can help shorten the process. The key is using the right prompts. Before using your tool of choice, take some time to thoroughly think about who you are targeting and why. What pain point are you trying to solve, and which decision maker (title) are you trying to reach? This will help to drive your prompt.
Try including the following points in your prompt:
- Title
- Type of company
- Geolocation you are interested in
- Pain points, objectives or decisions this persona might be facing
As a start, your prompt could look something like this:
“Create a persona for a CMO at a carpet cleaning company in the Pacific Northwest that is wanting to increase business but is struggling to differentiate themselves from the competition.”
As with any AI prompting, try and refine until you get the output you need. From here, you can research and validate this new Persona, as well as hold a few interviews as needed to add to or fill in any missing pieces.
2: Learn where your audience gets their information
Now that you have an idea of who you are targeting, the next step is finding out how they are doing their research. Knowing where your audience goes to find information and answer questions tells you how to go about publishing and promoting all your great content.
In your AI tool, you can either build off your persona “chat” or “thread,” or you can start a new one:
- In your current thread, ask: “Where does this persona (or use the name the AI gave the persona) get information to do their job?”
- In a new thread, you can ask: “Where does a [fill in details about your persona here] get information to do their job?”
Remember, the results are a starting point for you to research and review, not to take verbatim. As you review the output, you may find that one or two of the points don’t make sense for your specific target audience or is not a channel that is useful for your organization. Again, you now have a great starting point to dive in and really learn about your new audience.
3: Harvest blog post topic ideas
You have a good foundation for your persona, and you know how they gather their information; now it’s time to get a bit more granular. Use your AI tool to find out what type of blog post topics (or whitepaper, eBook, etc.) topics your persona is interested in reading.
These prompts can start out pretty basic, and you can refine them more with each output. To get myself started, I use a simple prompt along the lines of: “What blog topics are [persona details] interested in?”
From there, you can review the list of topics provided to determine if you need to adjust the prompt and try again, or if you want to select a few of the ideas and research them further.
Get a little boost from AI
Whether you know a lot or hardly anything about your new target audience, there is nothing wrong with using AI to help you further your research. Regardless of the project, sometimes getting started can be the hardest part. Forging into the unknown can feel overwhelming and just plain ominous, and using AI to produce some initial information helps get my brain kick-started in the right direction.
When working with any AI tool, the best practice is to use the output you receive as a starting point, and not take it at 100% face value. You will find that sometimes the information you receive aligns with your original thoughts and ideas, and other times it is way off.
We can keep the momentum going
Now that you’ve had some help getting started on researching and working with your audience, the next challenge is to keep your project moving and not get stalled. As busy marketers, we are constantly being pulled into many different directions and on many different projects, and sometimes phoning a friend like Content Matterz (hint, hint) is just what you need to achieve your goals.
Whether you need a little or a lot of marketing assistance, our team is ready to jump right in! Reach out today to talk through your next project and learn what we can do for you.