Customer Persona
A customer persona is a fictional profile created by marketers that represents the ideal customer for a business. In this post, we will understand how we can use Artificial Intelligence such as ChatGPT to create a customer persona for Black Hills Energy (BHE).
Information needed:
First I will ask ChatGPT what information it needs to create a customer persona. I will use the following prompt:
“I want to create a customer persona. What information do you need to create it?”
ChatGPT responds with:
Now, I will offer the information I think would be the best answers to these questions. I will identify the business as Black Hills Energy (BHE) and narrow down the ideal customer to an energy-conscious homeowner in a single-family home. After giving some answers I will enter the following prompt:
“Based on the information I have provided, try to infer all the information you need to create a customer persona. Then, also list the information you think is still needed.”
ChatGPT comes up with this:
Awesome! ChatGPT has provided me with a foundation for my customer persona and identified things it still needs to make a successful one. However, there is still some more information we need.
Non-providable information:
Since it might not be possible to answer every question, we can give ChatGPT some prompts and questions for them to further the information in the customer persona. The following questions/prompts are given:
“Regarding the following items, we don’t have detailed information. Based on all the general information available to you, guess what they might be like:
Specific Interests & Hobbies: Details about what Sarah enjoys doing outside of work?
Personality Traits: What are important things to know about Sarah? Are they more socially active or career-focused?
Detailed Online Behavior: Which social media platforms do they prefer? How do they search for and interact with energy providers, etc.?
Family Background: Information about the decision-making process.
Financial Background: More granular details about income levels and financial concerns.
Career/Future Aspirations: What does Sarah want her future to look like?”
ChatGPT will take these prompts and provide some more detailed information:
Generating customer persona:
Wow! We now have quite a bit of information for ChatGPT to create a full customer persona. Since we have kept this discussion and all of these prompts in one chat, we will have ChatGPT create the final customer persona based on everything said using this prompt:
“Now, you seem to have all the information to create a customer persona. Using the information in our conversation, create a customer persona (i.e energy conscious homeowner). Start with demographic information and end with possible visual representation description.”
Then, ChatGPT will give you the final version of the customer persona (Pictured below is not the entire customer persona, but the details we have talked about thus far.):
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps websites increase their traffic, visibility, and how much they are searched organically. Now we are going to see how a free tool like ChatGPT can help with SEO through things like keywords.
Keyword research:
Let’s say I want to find out what people search the most when trying to find information on Black Hills Energy. I will ask ChatGPT the following prompt:
“Make a list of the top 5 keywords people use to find information about Black Hills Energy on Google.”
ChatGPT will respond with this:
ChatGPT can be a great tool to easily find common keywords and searches related to Black Hills Energy.
Content Creation
Since ChatGPT helped create a full customer persona, we can now have it create types of content that the customer would enjoy.
Blog Post idea:
Here we will ask ChatGPT some ideas of blog posts that Sarah from our customer persona earlier could possibly be interested in reading. We will use the following prompt:
“Write 5 blog post ideas about Black Hills Energy that the customer persona created earlier is searching for.”
Here we go! 5 great ideas for a possible blog post:
Here is a few ideas that ChatGPT came up with!
Writing a blog post:
Now that ChatGPT has given us lots of ideas for a blog post and can choose one we think is interesting. Let’s say we choose: “7 Simple Ways to Lower Your Energy Bill in Rapid City, SD.” Since we are understanding content creation with artificial intelligence, lets have ChatGPT write the blog post for us.
We will enter the following prompt:
“I want you to act as a blogger with expertise of Black Hills Energy. You are writing a blog post for “7 Simple Ways to Lower Your Energy Bill in Rapid City, SD“. This post should be helpful for people learning about BHE.
There should be a call to action at the end of each section. The length of the blog post will be 500 words. The tone will be informal.
You should write as an individual blogger with a personal approach so do not use plural first-person to refer to yourself. Eg. “our”, or “we”. Only use singular first-person. Do not use passive voice.”
Now this is where we can see how far AI has really come. This post is a great way to teach Sarah from our customer persona about Black Hills Energy and address some of her questions and concerns.
Social media posts:
Great! ChatGPT has created us a customer persona and a blog post! We can also create a social media post on sites like LinkedIn to reach our customer Sarah in a different way.
I will ask ChatGPT to do the following:
“Create a LinkedIn post regarding “7 Simple Ways to Lower Your Energy Bill in Rapid City, SD” for this customer persona.”
ChatGPT gives a great and fun blog post that is designed to engage people like Sarah looking to learn about BHE and how to manage her energy usage.
Image Creation
Throughout this post, we have seen how helpful ChatGPT can be in generating things like customer personas, social media, and blog post content. With that being said, ChatGPT’s image generation is not always reliable. We will now look at AI image generation through a different tool such as Leonardo.AI. However, we will combine the two tools and have ChatGPT generate a prompt to put into Leonardo.AI to generate a certain image.
Here is what I will ask ChatGPT:
“I am going to draw a picture regarding the text below using an AI image generator. Write a proper prompt – Black Hills Energy constantly strives to develop new services and works hard to provide the best value to its customers. Additionally, it always does its utmost to serve the community.”
Here is the prompt ChatGPT has provided me that I will put into Leonardo.AI.:
Now, I will enter the prompt ChatGPT provided me above into Leonardo.AI.
And this is the result:
One Last Thing
Today’s work highlighted how AI can be a useful tool in modern marketing. From building detailed customer personas to generating targeted content and strengthening SEO strategies, tools like ChatGPT can help make marketing efforts more efficient and personalized. However, AI is most effective when it complements human creativity and decision-making rather than replacing them. As digital marketing continues to grow and change, combining human insight with AI technology will create more opportunities to understand customers, improve marketing strategies, and develop engaging content. Knowing how to use these tools effectively will become an increasingly valuable skill for marketers in the future.
