How to Overcome Biases in Persona Creation for a More Effective Marketing Strategy

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How to Overcome Biases in Persona Creation for a More Effective Marketing Strategy

Creating personas is crucial to truly understanding your audience and targeting them better. However, it's not always easy, especially with the growing use of technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI). Biases, whether due to technological limitations or human errors, can make personas less accurate, thereby reducing the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Let’s explore the limitations of AI in persona creation, the dangers of biased data, and the importance of human input in refining these profiles.

The Advantages of AI in Persona Creation

AI offers many benefits when it comes to creating personas, especially in terms of speed and simplicity. It can analyze vast amounts of data simultaneously, which is highly useful for getting an initial idea of the customer profile. This is particularly handy because, when you're starting a business or analyzing a project, you need to begin somewhere. AI can provide this first vision, even if it’s based on somewhat lower-quality information about the target audience.

It's better than starting from scratch without any idea of what the market expects. Indeed, while AI tends to simplify things, it can make fewer mistakes than a human relying solely on intuition. It can gather objective data and draw trends from it, where a human might be swayed by personal biases.

Another major advantage is the ability of EdenPersona's AI to create personas with just one click. This is also useful for established companies launching new projects, as they don’t have to start from scratch. They can get a basic persona in seconds, which they can refine later. To go further, it's recommended to feed the AI with more specific information about the target audience, either by importing data through a CSV file or filling out the form with detailed, field-collected insights.

The Limits and Risks of AI-Created Personas

Beware: some online tools offer automatic persona creation based on data collected from social media and Google Analytics. 

Surprisingly, this method worked better a decade ago than it does today! "Why?" you might ask with a puzzled expression. Well, the data collected this way is becoming less and less qualitative. Privacy regulations like GDPR, cookie blockers, and the policies of Google, Meta, and Apple are making data collection increasingly limited.

The available data pool is shrinking, which makes personas less reliable and can lead to significant gaps in audience understanding. AI, relying on incomplete data, generates profiles that may not accurately reflect reality.

Want proof?

To see for yourself, check your Google Analytics data. In the Users section, select demographic data by age. How many of your visitors are labeled "Unknown"? Isn't it a huge percentage of your traffic? The same will apply to other criteria: gender, age, interests, location...

If a large portion of your audience refuses cookies or hides their information from Google, your marketing based on this data will be completely off-track!

The same goes for data from social media: privacy protections inevitably bias these results.

So, how can you create a persona that truly reflects your target customer?

If you have data from your CRM, with information about your clients and prospects, EdenPersona can analyze it for you to extract a typical profile during the persona creation process.

To do this, simply import a CSV file with this data into EdenPersona's magic form. With this type of data and the precise work of artificial intelligence, you’ll have a more solid and reliable base than most tools that create approximate profiles automatically.

But you can go even further to truly understand your prospects' needs, pain points, and language.

Human Input in Persona Creation is Still Essential

Creating quality personas requires human intervention. AI can provide a great starting point, but it cannot replace the real-life formulation of customers' motivations and needs.

Interviews, surveys, and direct observation are key methods for truly understanding customer psychology and challenging stereotypes.

You can also export your field observations into a spreadsheet and include them in your persona creation with EdenPersona.

By combining real-world data, the vast amount of data collected by AI, and the advanced capabilities of EdenPersona, you’ll create rich, nuanced, and genuinely useful profiles for marketing.

Toward More Authentic Personas

Persona creation is a process that must constantly evolve, through a collaboration between AI and humans. AI is an excellent starting point for analyzing the data provided. Additionally, EdenPersona automatically organizes this data, adds depth to the created profile, and allows further work that was unimaginable just a few years ago. You can even query your persona, interpreted by AI, or receive detailed insights about your target customer. But it's essential to recognize the limits of AI and actively work to correct the biases that may arise. A good persona is one that evolves with the audience and reflects as accurately as possible the reality of your customers.