Introduction

I keep hearing about how important “ideal client personas” are in marketing, sales, and even product or service creation. It took me a while to understand what a client persona was – and here I give credit to Lynda Dell’s fantastic article, “Why you need to revisit your personas.”

In a nutshell, Hubspot defines a buyer persona as, “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” 

When we target our audience, it’s all about connecting with them. We want them to feel seen, known, and comfortable doing business together. One of the best ways to do it is to picture your ideal client and tailor your marketing to that specific person’s needs and pain points. Once that “persona” is clear and clearly articulated, you can use it with AI to find prospects just like them.

But what do you do when you’re a small business, with limited time, even more limited resources, and a deep need to do everything possible to help improve your marketing? (i.e. what do you do if you’re ME?)

I wanted to do this thing – this pivotal component to effective marketing – but it felt overwhelming just thinking about it. Enter Ilise Benun and her excellent advice to leverage AI toward marketing our businesses during her Simplest Marketing Plan “Office Hours” meetings. Eureka!

So, now I'm diving into this adventure, feet first. And I’m inviting you on the journey with me. Ready? Let’s go!

The “AI Personas” experiment

For this exercise, imagine we've just launched a new company called, let’s say… Marleen Creates. We offer copywriting for the film industry. Since it’s a new business, we don't have any existing clients or data to work with.

The goal: Figure out a solid workflow that people like you and me can use to make useful and detailed ideal client personas so we can more effectively attract our best prospects.

The free AI tools used to create ideal client personas

When I was checking out different tools, the biggest thing on my mind was the budget. I've heard people say the cost of AI tools is pretty negligible and that anyone serious about their business should be ready to make these "small" investments. 

But… let's be real for a second. Not everyone has the same amount of cash to invest in a new venture, especially in today's economy. The upside, though, is that we’re not alone. Last year saw an 8.7% jump in new businesses cropping up in the US. So, there are plenty of us out here trying to make things work on a tight budget – and companies have taken notice.

In the race to be the best, AI giants like OpenAi and Anthropic have rolled out free versions (ChatGPT and Claude, respectively). Plus, there's Perplexity.ai, which also offers a solid free version.

These are the apps we’re using:

• Perplexity.ai
• ChatGPT
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet
• Craiyon (formerly known as DALL.E mini) for creating images 

The free versions of all of these AI models give us more than enough AI power to get the job done.

Finally, to bring everything together, I'll be using the Free Trial version of Canva. Alright, let's get this show on the road!

I found out about this great tool from Ilise.

Perplexity is like Google, but on steroids. Instead of just throwing a bunch of links at you, Perplexity understands your questions and gives you straight-up answers, along with sources where it found those answers.

For our purposes, Perplexity serves as the perfect research tool. We will be able to double-check all answers against the listed sources if we need to.

The OG, ChatGPT is, less than two years since its release, the grandaddy of all LLMs (large language models – aka AI). When we think of AI, this is probably the interface most of us are familiar with. ChatGPT will help us put together our research and examples into a workable format.

You could say Claude is ChatGPT’s direct competitor. Anthropic released Claude as a direct response to OpenAI – and the competition has been great for us! The latest release, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is said to be even better than ChatGPT. This makes it great for double check ChatGPT’s output, revise and rewrite to make it sound more natural.

Craiyon is an open-source alternative to more expensive platforms, like DALL-E/OpenAi and Midjourney. They’re a great way for us to get our AI images and graphics. Once we have a good description of our ideal client, we will get a visual representation from this image generator.

Canva is a fantastic tool for creating digital and print graphics - everything from infographics to coffee cups. Now, yes, Canva does have a free version, but if we want to take advantage of their AI tools, we should go with their 30-day trial. We will take all of the information we’ve gathered and the image we chose from Craiyon to put it into a character template – something nice and easily downloaded and printed.

 

 The Workflow

Step 1: Research

There are a few key things we need to sort out in order to create our perfect ideal client persona.

1. What kind of questions should we ask to get the best insights?

2. Where on earth can we find useful data when we don't have any clients yet?

3. What kind of prompts should we use to get the best results from AI?

4. Finally, how do we piece all this information together in a way that makes sense?

It's all about finding a good process to leverage AI to its full potential – and it’s as simple as asking AI to answer those four questions! 

But there are other things to research. Not only do we want client demographics, but we also want enough information to create a short two-three paragraph narrative about them. It should include their successes, struggles, pain points, and a basic understanding of how their jobs/businesses work.

10 prompts for client persona research on perplexity.ai

It’s time to do our research! Feel free to edit these prompts to fit your own industry and ideal client.

1. “What are the demographic statistics for film industry marketing managers? Please include age, gender, years in the industry, race, median income, family size and age range, and any other demographic details that will help me get a better idea of who my ideal client is.”
2. “Where do film industry marketing managers live?”
3. “Are there specific challenges faced by marketing managers in the film industry?”
4. “What are some successful case studies of marketing managers thriving in the film industry?”
5. “What do film marketing managers need from freelance copywriters?”
6. “What kinds of worries do film marketing managers have?”
7. “What are the three most pressing issues film marketing managers face today?”
8. “What is the best way to connect with a film marketing manager you want to do business with?”
9. “What are the most effective ways a copywriter can contribute to a film marketing manager’s workload?”
10. “What organizations do film marketing managers belong to?”

 Step 2: Feed the answers to ChatGPT .

Once we’ve placed every answer and source link on a document, we can upload the saved copy to ChatGPT.

It’s also helpful to include in your prompt a good example of an ideal client persona. For this exercise, we’re using both a YouTube video:

And a Hubspot template:

It’s important that we giveChatGPT as much information as possible. (Here are some of their prompting best practices).

Step 3: The Claude cleanup

Though it isn’t necessary, since we may be sharing this with others, we should make it as readable as possible. This is also a great time to check on our results. 

As I mentioned earlier, Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers the most natural-sounding prose. We can now take the results delivered by GPT and ask Claude to improve on it!

Prompts for Claude 3.5 Sonnet review.

1. “Please review and revise the client persona text pasted below. Make sure to check for grammar and spelling.”
2. “Is there any detail that is missing or should be expanded on? Please keep the suggestions brief.”
3. “Re-write the client persona using a conversational style.”

Step 4: Image generation

Taking the basic information from the persona’s demographic section, we can create a quick portrait of our client, using Craiyon.com. For example, our research shows that the average age of a film marketing manager is 39, and 51% of them are women and more likely to be white.

Now we can add some of our creativity – describe the woman you see when you close your eyes. For our purposes, I have chosen to give our client brown hair and eyes. All this information is used to generate an image.

Image generation prompt.

“Please create a portrait of a 39-year-old white woman, brown hair and brown eyes, in a professional setting.”

Rinse & repeat: Once we have an output, we can request more images until we find one that helps us visualize who it is we’re aiming for. 

Step 5: Put it all together!

The best thing about Canva is how user-friendly it is! There are many Character Profile templates we can use. Once we pick a template, we can add the information and image to it, and edit as necessary. And there we go! A client persona!

Result

We’ve got our persona created! Meet, Jannice…

Now what?

You have this shiny new document. What do you do with it?

How do we use our new Client Persona?

There are a lot of uses for this sheet. Here are some ways we can put this persona to work.

• Plan content marketing to speak to Jannice’s pain points.
• Create social media posts with AI, using the persona as a source for the AI to write to.
• Provide it to contracted workers. If we find ourselves suddenly too busy to take on new clients, we can consider contracting freelancers. The persona will help ensure everyone is on the same page and creating marketing directed at the same person.

 The uses are as endless as our imagination. Are there any other ways you can imagine using our new Persona?

Want to know more ways AI can help your marketing efforts?

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