Customer Persona Development in ChatGPT
Background:
With the development of generative AI in recent years, most companies are eager to hop on the AI bandwagon to take advantage of the boost it can provide in productivity. I decided to utilize GPT 4 to build a customer persona to help develop optimized content geared towards a company’s ideal customer. The goal was to target key phrases which an that ideal customer would be searching, with the idea that those visitors would have a higher potential of converting into customers.
Process:
To start, I loaded up several prompts into GPT4 to teach my chat about the company. Those prompts included everything about the company that was public, such as the value proposition, territory, product and service offering, company history, and more. I then asked about what target industries and personnel at those companies in those industries most closely aligned with the company’s offering. From there, I asked it to give me a list of pain points in day-to-day operation, and how someone could best fill any gaps needed to solve those problems. Once the chat was trained, we began utilizing it to optimize materials on the site such as technical writing and even external communication such as customer email blasts and other updates.
Using ChatGPT for Search Engine Optimization
Digging further into industries, I then asked the chat about companies of all sizes with a similar offering to the company for which I was optimizing. I had it determine which industries were best aligned with certain products and services offered by those companies and explain why. I then cross referenced and pinpointed target industries which our team thought aligned most with leading strengths for the best chance to thrive.
Using ChatGPT for Technical writing
One of the most beneficial reasons to set up a customer persona is the ability to write materials in a way that person would be most interested in receiving the information. For example, is the ideal customer someone that wants to see more visuals like charts, or would they rather see a bullet list of features and benefits? We can now use this tool to focus on certain aspects of its writing style, based on what visitor might want to see more.
How ChatGPT Can Help With Marketing Communication
Now that we have an ideal customer persona and writing style, we can send messaging that is more likely to resonate. Since our model is trained on what our ideal customer is looking for, it helps us focus on key sticking points and helps guide content creation. That means we can send content that is geared toward the people we should target and what those particular people want to know.
Challenges:
While Generative AI is an incredible tool, it comes with a new set of challenges. Those include everything from quality of content to privacy and even limitations the new capability uncovers along the way. For example, as we learn this new technology, we create problems that didn’t exist before its use.
Quality of Chat GPT Content – Why “Hybrid” Written Material is Better
As most everyone that uses Gen AI knows, you can’t just ask the chat a question and expect a copy-ready output you can drop on your site. Even with a chat that is well trained on an ideal customer persona and writing style, the company here will still need to add a human touch to the final product. Take a look at any of the many discussions about how well AI generated content ranks vs human generated content. Spoiler… fully human generated content wins every time with a hybrid model coming in next.
Chat GPT and Privacy
LLMs essentially take everything they are fed and drop it into their models. With that, something to think about is the sensitivity of the data you utilize to train your chat. With this company I had to be careful about teaching the LLM proprietary technologies. For example, I wanted the chat to understand the competitive advantages of certain products, but not give away trade secrets. With this I had to use very specific wording when training the LLM.
Limitations With Generative AI
The company here operated multiple groups with different target industries. So we had trouble utilizing a “one size fits all” customer persona. As mentioned before and in the above point, new technology creates new problems. With ChatGPT, open AI has a limitation to account creation (at least, as of this writing). We didn’t have an easy way to create a separate account for each group at this company, so I had to get creative in how I trained the model, with different chats geared toward different personas.
Results:
In the end, this will be an excellent tool for the company to use as they need to generate and optimize new content. There will definitely be advances in Gen AI technology, and with them, having a customer persona will give the company an excellent foundation for growth.
Interested in a collaboration?
Reach out and let me know! I’m always happy to look at a project and see how I can help!