Your Audience Personas Aren’t Good Enough – Not Anymore

Audience personas have been part of marketing for years. We use them to describe who our customers are, what they do and where they sit in the market.

But demographics only tell you who someone is. Even when you add their behaviours, goals and preferences, you can still miss the things that drive their decisions. They don’t necessarily tell you what’s going on in their head when they’re deciding to buy, what’s at stake for them personally or what might stop them from choosing your business.

A useful persona doesn’t just describe your audience. It explains what matters to them and why.

And in a world where people increasingly turn to AI to help solve their problems, understanding that difference matters more than ever.

AI knows more than the prompt

Think about how people are starting to use AI at work. They’re not always starting from scratch with a blank prompt. Depending on the tool, its settings and the context available, AI can draw on previous conversations and other information to interpret what someone needs. Their role, priorities, challenges and the work they’re trying to get done can all influence the response.

That understanding can become a live picture of the person using the tool. It helps the system interpret what the person needs and filter the information it returns.

So when someone asks for help solving a problem, the AI isn’t simply matching words in a search. It’s using the context available to make the results more relevant.

But there’s another important part of this. People tend to describe problems as they experience them, rather than diagnose the underlying cause. They explain what’s going wrong, why it’s frustrating and what they need to change. Those details can reveal far more about their situation than a job title or a list of behaviours ever could.

Is your brand ready for this?

If your content is vague, generic or built around what you want to say rather than what your audience needs to know, then it has little to offer. If your brand is clear about who it helps, what it helps them achieve and why it matters, you give AI something useful to recognise and bring into the conversation.

This is no longer just about getting found; it’s about being relevant when the right opportunity appears.

The same audience doesn’t mean the same need

Let’s say you run a business that provides finance solutions. Two business owners might look almost identical on paper. They could be the same age, work in the same sector and run businesses of a similar size.

But one is struggling to keep on top of sales follow-ups. The other is preparing to sell their business and needs clear, reliable reporting.

The persona is pretty much the same, but the motivation is very different.

The first owner might be frustrated that opportunities are slipping through the cracks and worried that growth is becoming harder to manage. The second might be concerned about proving the value of their business and making sure nothing undermines a potential sale.

Both need finance solutions, but the problem means something different to each of them. Those differences affect what they look for, the questions they ask and what they need to hear before they’re confident enough to buy.

A persona that stops at age, job title and company size won’t help you understand the difference. It won’t tell you what each person is trying to achieve, what’s getting in the way or what they need to hear before they’ll take action.

And if you don’t understand those things, how can you expect your brand to speak to them in a way that feels relevant?

For our finance business owners from above, a message about ‘innovative finance solutions for business growth’ doesn’t speak clearly to either audience. It could be aimed at almost anyone, which means it’s unlikely to feel especially relevant to anyone.

Relevance makes decisions easier

People are busy. They don’t have the time or inclination to wade through information that doesn’t apply to them. They want to make decisions with less effort and more confidence.

AI is becoming part of that process. It can use its understanding of the person to narrow down information and surface what appears relevant to their situation.

When a recommendation reflects a real need, it has a head start. If the brand then delivers on the expectation, the person may have less reason to start their research all over again.

This is why understanding your audience needs to go beyond what they do and what they say they want. You need to understand the pressure they’re under, the risks they’re trying to avoid and what a successful outcome would mean to them. That’s the insight that makes your message relevant to the decision they’re trying to make.

That creates a clear challenge for brands. You need to understand your audience well enough to make your value easy to recognise, your message easy to understand and your content useful to the people you’re trying to reach.

There’s no shortcut to that understanding. Here’s our process for creating better audience personas.

Stop treating personas as a tick-box exercise

A persona shouldn’t be a document that gets created, presented and forgotten. It should shape the decisions you make across your brand.

The aim isn’t to create the most detailed persona possible. It’s to understand the things that will change how you communicate. 

Here’s what we do for our clients:

Talk to your customers

We start by understanding what prompted people to look for a solution in the first place. What was happening in their business? What had become difficult? What were they trying to change, and what could have stopped them from buying?

Before we talk to them, we plan the questions we’ll ask, making sure they’re relevant to your products/services and informative enough to help you tailor your messaging. 

Talk to your sales team

Your sales team hear objections, frustrations and buying triggers day in, day out. They’re a goldmine of information, but are often forgotten by marketing teams. 

We ask them what customers talk about when they initially reach out, what questions come up repeatedly and what conversations turn prospects into buyers.

We’re looking for more than the reasons people give for buying. We want to understand what made the problem important enough to act on, what nearly stopped the decision and what finally gave them confidence to move forward.

Look at what your customers are already telling you

Reviews, emails, enquiries, search queries, support conversations and sales calls are full of the language your audience uses to describe their problems. We don’t just look at what they bought; we look at why they needed it.

This process is designed to answer several questions:

The answers to these questions will influence the content you create, the messages you lead with and the way your sales team explains what you do.

Your brand needs to demonstrate it understands your audience

Audience insight shouldn’t stop at messaging. It should inform the whole brand.

Your verbal identity needs to use language your audience understands and address the things they care about. 

Your visual identity needs to communicate in a way that feels appropriate to their expectations, while still giving your business a distinctive point of view.

That doesn’t mean designing by committee or giving customers everything they ask for. It means understanding their world before deciding how your brand should show up in it.

When your brand reflects a problem people recognise and communicates why your business is relevant to solving it, you give them a reason to pay attention. That is far more powerful than simply telling them you’re trustworthy, customer-focused or the best in your field.

We remember the brands that make us feel recognised. The ones that seem to understand what we need and why it matters. Generic messages don’t create that connection; relevant ones do.

Put your personas to work

Here’s a simple test: look at your current personas and ask what has changed.

Have they influenced your content? Do they shape the way your sales team talks about your offer? Can you see their impact on your messaging and visual identity?

If the answer is no, they’re not doing their job.

Your audience is already using AI to make sense of information and narrow down their options. When people describe their problems to AI, the system may have context about their situation that goes beyond the prompt itself. Your brand needs to be clear about the problems it solves and why its offer is relevant, so that both people and the systems helping them make decisions have something meaningful to work with.

Your brand needs to be just as clear about who it’s for, what it helps them do and why they should care.

We need to start by understanding your audience. Then, we need to turn that understanding into a brand people can recognise, trust and act on.

If your personas aren’t helping you do that, it’s time to improve them.

Want to know whether your brand reflects what matters to your audience? Let’s talk.