Real data and AI: create real buyer personas with SEOZoom!
Everyone talks about buyer personas, but few actually use them or exploit them well. Between Excel spreadsheets, hypothetical profiles, and generic models, mistakes are just around the corner, and you risk ending up with nothing more than a fake name, a generic age, and a job title thrown in to fill out a form.
The underlying concept is almost trivial: understanding who you want to reach is the basis of any strategy that aims to achieve even minimal results. To do this, however, you need tools that help you define your audience in a practical, reliable, content-oriented, and multi-channel communication way. Not just to segment, but to write better, choose the right channels, adapt tone and messages, and optimize time and resources.
This is where SEOZoom comes in. With the new version of the platform, you can build real, consistent, multi-channel buyer personas that are ready to guide every strategic decision, from content to campaigns, from social media to positioning. So you can stop guessing who your audience is and take the first step towards really talking to them.
Why buyer personas are (still) necessary
Buyer personas are still one of the most concrete tools for guiding a brand’s communication choices. They are used to understand who you want to reach, but also to define what to say, where to say it, how, with what objective, and with what resources.
Much content, on the other hand, is created “backwards”: designed for an undefined audience, written in neutral language, published without any real direction. The result is pages that don’t perform, campaigns that don’t convert, messages that find no audience.
In fact, talking to everyone often means reaching no one.
Without a clear map of your audience, even the best ideas remain unfulfilled. You may have a great product, a good editorial plan, and solid advertising investment, but if you don’t know who you want to engage, every choice risks being random. And if the message isn’t aligned with the recipient, everything falls apart—from the tone to the proposal, from the promise to the call to action.
But a generic definition of the target audience, an audience built on aggregated data or personal insights, or even a generic profile—age, fictitious name, interests—that you simplistically call a “buyer persona” is not enough. You need consistent, concrete, and updatable profiles that help you make smarter choices: what to write, where to communicate it, what tone to use, what needs to focus on, how to stand out in the continuous flow of content.
Only then does the data have a real basis and truly reflect the behavior of the people who interact with your content; otherwise, they remain fictional characters. Useless, if not harmful.
It’s not theory, it’s strategy
Let’s repeat it because it’s important: every piece of content has a specific audience, every channel has its own rules and language, every touchpoint is a different opportunity to be chosen.
Buyer personas serve precisely this purpose: to understand how to shape a message, what tone to adopt, what needs to be addressed, and what goals to help achieve. They are not theoretical models, a formal step to be completed once and then filed away, but a living and operational working tool. If they are well constructed, they become the starting point for more effective content, more targeted strategies, and more credible brands.
One of the most common problems in digital marketing strategies is the lack of segmentation. Texts are published “for everyone,” campaigns are launched with the same message on every channel, and we speak generically to an audience that has never really been defined. And so we end up not speaking to anyone.
The result is always the same: ineffective advertising, flat content, poor response, and unclear brand perception. Buyer personas, if built seriously, serve to avoid all this. They allow you to choose what to focus on, what tone to use, and what need to activate.
Today, a person is not just a target
Thinking that “having a target” is enough to communicate effectively is a mistake that we can no longer afford to make today. The way people search for a product, read content, open an email, or comment on a post is constantly changing.
Every touchpoint tells a different story: social media feeds, landing pages, articles, newsletters, and voice assistants never speak to the same audience in the same way. And today, you can no longer work with a single, vague vision of your user.
Buyer personas help you connect content, channels, and goals starting from those who receive them. This allows you to identify not only who you want to reach, but also in what context you encounter them, what expectations they have, and what kind of response they expect. Furthermore, you can identify what doubts they have and what language they recognize as authoritative.
Understanding who you are dealing with allows you to make your multi-channel strategy a coherent communication, rather than just a list of various actions.
How to build buyer personas today (without making anything up)
Collect useful signals, interpret them correctly, and transform them into profiles consistent with your communication goals: in short, this is how you build a buyer persona.
You have to go beyond the old ways of thinking, not write a profile with a made-up name and hypothetical characteristics, but observe the real behavior of people and understand what they are looking for, how they move online, and what they expect from a brand.
Those who work with content, advertising, or product strategy have much more data at their disposal than in the past. The problem, if anything, is being able to filter the relevant data and use it methodically.
Use data, not assumptions
There is no shortage of sources today: search queries, Google Trends, browsing data, customer service requests, chatbots, organic feedback on social media. These are all valuable signals that show not only who is interacting with the content, but also with what intent and at what stage of the journey.
The key is to distinguish between strong signals and weak ones. The former relate to explicit needs, frequently asked questions, and recurring objectives. The latter are often noise: data that seems useful but does not lead to any concrete decisions. Understanding the difference is the first step in building reliable buyer personas that really help you write, design, and communicate better.
AI assistance: useful, but not magical
Artificial intelligence can speed up and improve the process, but it needs to be guided. Using a generic prompt on ChatGPT to create a buyer persona often results in a flat profile that is disconnected from reality and lacks strategic depth. You need skills, starting data, and the ability to iterate. A well-constructed prompt can only yield useful results if it is based on concrete signals.
You need to change your approach: buyer personas are no longer a static element to be created once and for all. Today, they can (and must) be dynamic, linked to the context, the query, the content, and the channel.
The goal is not to create a universal archetype, but to have tools at your disposal to better segment, personalize messages, and act more precisely on each touchpoint.
Building buyer personas with SEOZoom: two paths, one goal
Let’s get down to business.
With SEOZoom, you can put aside empty templates, endless meetings, and imaginative brainstorming sessions and create a buyer persona in a simple and targeted way, starting from what you already have: your website or your content.
In the new version of the platform, you have two operating modes at your disposal. Both are based on artificial intelligence, but with different approaches: one looks at the project as a whole, the other analyzes specific content. The result is always the same: real, useful persona profiles, ready to be used in any strategy thanks to a constant focus on consistency between content, audience, and channel.
Approach 1: standard construction from the domain
Standard construction is the ideal starting point if you already have an active website with a traffic base and an established content structure. In a matter of seconds, SEOZoom processes the available data and returns a concise but accurate representation of the potential audiences that orbit around the project.
For example, if you manage an e-commerce site, a blog, or any other type of website and want a clear picture of the audience that already interacts with your project, simply go to the AI Tools → E-Commerce → Create Buyer Personas section.
Here you will find a very simple form that asks you to briefly describe what you sell or what the focus of your website is. In just a few seconds, SEOZoom’s AI processes the project’s internal data (traffic, keywords, content, main entities) and generates a series of detailed persona profiles.
Each profile includes:
- age and professional role;
- goals and priorities;
- most common difficulties (typical “challenges”);
- interests and useful content.
All in a format designed for practical use. Perfect for writing an editorial plan, designing an advertising campaign, creating new product pages, or reviewing the structure of a website.
A practical example? For an informative blog on digital marketing, SEOZoom can generate profiles such as: “Marketing Manager who wants to train the team on buyer personas,” “Content Marketer looking for practical examples,” “Student who wants to find their way in the world of work.”
These are not abstract hypotheses, but people with real needs.
- Who needs it
Anyone who has an active website (e-commerce, blog, portal) and wants to understand who really visits it.
- When to use it
Before designing an editorial plan, launching campaigns, or writing new pages.
- How it works
Enter a description of the product/service → choose the language and number of results → get persona profiles based on project data.
- Why use it
To start with concrete data, segment better, and create content that speaks to the right people.
Approach 2: analysis starting from content (AI Engine)
The second method starts from content that has already been written: an article, a product page, or a guide. Simply analyze the URL with SEOZoom (or upload the text to the editorial assistant) and launch AI Engine.
SEOZoom explores the text, identifies the main keywords, entities, information structure, and FAQs suggested by Google (People Also Ask) and returns persona profiles linked to that specific content.
Each buyer persona is accompanied by:
- age and profession;
- explicit objective with respect to the topic covered;
- a series of real questions that reflect the doubts or intentions of those seeking similar information.
In practice, you find out who reads your content, what they expect to find, and what problems they want to solve.
You can use this information to:
- optimize content (angle, tone, structure, CTA);
- design related content with a view to clustering;
- personalize messages or funnels;
- improve visibility in AI engines.
In the case of the article on buyer personas already on SEOZoom, for example, AI Engine returned profiles such as:
- Sara, 38 – Marketing Consultant → looking for tools to help clients use personas;
- Giovanni, 50 – Sales Director → wants to improve sales processes through segmentation;
- Elena, 27 – Content Marketer → wonders how to adapt her tone of voice to different personas.
Each profile has different needs and levels of awareness.
The real advantage is here: you can decide whether to respond to everyone or tailor your content to a specific audience.
- Who needs it
Anyone who writes, publishes, or manages content—copywriters, SEO strategists, social media managers, editorial teams—and wants to optimize it for those who are really looking for it.
- When to use it
After writing content, before publishing it or updating it strategically.
- How it works
Analyze the page with AI Engine → SEOZoom extracts entities, intents, and FAQs → get profiles with real goals and questions.
- Why use it
To improve the tone, structure, visibility, and relevance of your content. And make it truly useful for those looking for it.
How to use buyer personas (for real)
Now that you’ve created your buyer persona, the real work begins. It’s not enough to just keep it there; you have to apply the information whenever necessary.
You can use them to write, but also to decide on the format of a piece of content, choose between two headlines, design the structure of a page, and organize information.
It’s a daily compass: it helps you understand when to be concise or in-depth, when to push on emotion or logic, when a CTA should reassure and when it can be bold. It gives you context, priority, and direction. And it only works if you really use it — every time you have to make a communication choice.
From content to tone of voice: practical ideas
Buyer personas can guide every stage of the work: they calibrate headlines, which must immediately speak to the reader’s needs; introductions, which can be direct or narrative depending on the profile; CTAs, which must activate the right persuasive lever — urgency, trust, curiosity, concreteness.
But they also change the structure of the content, which can be more guided, more concise, more in-depth, more visual. They help you choose the right angle, the necessary depth, and the most suitable structure.
They can also affect the user experience (navigation, microcopy), content organization (sitemap, tags, clusters), and even the naming of a product, category, or newsletter.
even the naming of a product, category, or newsletter can be guided by who you want to reach.
Every time you make an editorial or communication decision, referring to the person receiving the message allows you to do so more effectively. They allow you to move from “writing well” to writing well for someone in particular.
Personalization ≠ segmentation
Having ten weak profiles is not as useful as having three well-constructed ones. Your goal is not to multiply content or speak to every possible variation of your audience, but to choose which profiles are truly relevant to your project and work with those.
It is therefore better to have three strong buyer personas that can be updated and are operational than ten generic characters written just to fill a document.
A good buyer persona doesn’t complicate your work: it simplifies it. It helps you say no to what you don’t need, choose a clear direction, and focus on who can really make a difference.
How to create buyer personas: stop guessing and start using data!
Building buyer personas isn’t about storytelling, it’s about making better decisions.
When you know who’s on the other side, every piece of content becomes more targeted, every choice more informed, every message more effective.
SEOZoom offers you two ways to do this in a simple and concrete way: one based on your website, the other built around the content you write. Both aim at the same goal: helping you understand who you are trying to reach and who is already looking for you.
You have a solid foundation for writing, segmenting, communicating, and building. With an operational approach and real data.
Now that you know how they work, it may be useful to answer some common questions.
- What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a concise, strategic representation of a type of user or customer that a brand wants to reach. It is not a generic profile, but an operational model based on data, behavior, and context.
- What is the difference between a target audience and a buyer persona?
The target audience describes a group, often in statistical terms (age, gender, geographical area). The buyer persona represents a typical individual with goals, needs, communication style, and habits that are relevant to communication. It is used to make concrete decisions.
- What are buyer personas for?
To guide choices: what to write, how to say it, where to publish it, in what tone, and for what purpose. They are useful at every stage of the strategy: content, UX, campaigns, branding, support.
- How many buyer personas do you really need?
It depends on the project. In most cases, a few are enough, as long as they are well constructed. The goal is not to have every possible profile, but those that are relevant for decision-making.
- When is it useful to create a buyer persona?
Whenever you are working on content, campaigns, or strategies aimed at an audience. It can be useful before writing, when analyzing a page, when designing a new touchpoint or an advertising campaign.
- How do you build an effective buyer persona?
Start with data. Search queries, customer service, chatbots, browsing, and social feedback are all useful sources. Artificial intelligence can help, but it must be guided methodically. SEOZoom offers two concrete approaches to do this, starting from a domain or content.
- What mistakes should be avoided when creating buyer personas?
Inventing information, building overly abstract profiles, generalizing, creating too many useless characters. Buyer personas are useful if they help you make better choices, not if they remain on paper.
- How are buyer personas used in practice?
To adapt content, calibrate headlines and CTAs, choose the right angle for a message, design a page, write microcopy, and segment an advertising plan. Every part of communication can benefit from them.
