3 steps to create detailed ICPs and buyer personas with AI

93% of companies that exceed lead and revenue goals segment their database by buyer persona.

Many businesses struggle to understand their target audience, leading to missed opportunities and ineffective marketing strategies.

Close the gap between your business and clients by creating accurate buyer personas that resonate with your customers. You can get your ideal client profile without spending hours on research and analytics by using lemlist’s AI. 

In this article, we will reveal 3 steps to creating detailed buyer personas with the help of AI.

Try lemlist's free Buyer Persona Generator

Type in your business email address so lemlist can fetch your business description and value proposition. 

To get better results, edit the description and add more details. 

Then, lemlist will show you 3 client profiles that fit your business proposition.

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Step 1: Use AI to identify your ideal companies

First, identify the types of companies that would get the most value from your product or service.

If you already have clients, check your client list and highlight the ones that:

• Bring you the most profit
• Gain the most value from you
• Have been with you the longest

Essentially, these are your best clients, and you want more of them!

Is your client or leads list a bit messy? You can clean it for free and enrich your leads with lemlist’s free G-Sheet addon.

If you don’t have clients yet, identify potential ones and reach out to them on LinkedIn.

Network in order to find out:

• The struggles they might be facing
• Who is the end-user and who is the decision-maker
• If it makes sense for them to proceed with a solution like yours

To save time on your LinkedIn outreach, use an AI-powered cold outreach automation tool. They create personalized outreach sequences for you, which drive more replies in less time.

Here’s how to set that up using lemlist’s AI sequence generator. If you don’t already have a lemlist account you can sign up here, for free.

To use it:

1. Create a new campaign in the lemlist app, and choose “Artificial intelligence” under the Sequence tab.

2. Fill in the requested data (value proposition, intent, tone, target audience, etc.). This trains the AI to use the best sequence and copy to reach out to your prospects on LinkedIn.

3. Click “generate sequence.”

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With this tool, you can network 2x faster and get replies that help you understand your target audience firsthand. For more help networking, use our guide to networking email campaigns.

To learn everything you need to know about creating personalized outreach sequences with AI, take a look at our 3-step guide to outreach with AI.

Step 2: Gather information about your ideal clients with AI

Once you’ve got your list of best clients (or best potential clients), gather information about them.

Here’s some of the information you’ll need:

-> Are they serving other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C)?

→ What industry are they in?

→ Who are they trying to reach?

→ What's their unique selling point?

You can get an automated enriched company list with the above information using n8n and ChatGPT. Here’s how:

Make a spreadsheet of your list of companies and their market, industry, target audience, and value proposition in Google Sheets. It should look something like this. 👇

Next, use our n8n template. Here’s how:

1. Sign-up to n8n.io and create a new workflow.
2. Go to https://app.n8n.io/workflows/1862 and click on “Copy Workflow.”
3. In your blank workflow, paste the workflow.
4. This is what it should look like. 👇

5. Authenticate yourself in Google Sheets nodes.

• double click on the node
• select 0auth2
• click on “create new credential”
• Sign in with your Google Account

6. Connect your sheet to the workflow.

• copy-paste the URL of your sheet into the 2 Google Sheets nodes 👇

7. In your Google Sheet, make sure your columns are named exactly like this: Domain, Market, Industry, Target Audience, Value Proposition.

8. In the OpenAI node, add your API Key.

Sign up for an account with OpenAI and obtain an API key for ChatGPT.‍ To get the API key, follow these steps:

• click on your name in the top-right corner
• click on view API Keys
• create new secret key
• copy the key

9. Run the workflow, and voila! You’ll have an enriched list that looks like this. 👇

To learn more about following this process with Make.com or n8n, check out this guide to enriching company lists with chatGPT.

Step 3: Create detailed buyer persona profiles with AI

Once you have your enriched list of companies, think about the actual person from your target companies who will make the decision to purchase your product.

This is the buyer persona.

Use ChatGPT to generate it for you.

Here’s a prompt you can use to get detailed buyer personas and boost your outreach personalization:

You're a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience.
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You're a master at creating the most unique and unusual growth strategies. You've helped the fastest-growing companies in the world skyrocket their growth and customer acquisition.
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Your tone of voice should be actionable, no-fluff, approachable, casual, and storyteller.

Generate 5 detailed buyer personas for an individual who would be interested in [DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE].

The buyer personas should include the following information:
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1. Name: (insert the name of the persona)
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2. Position: (insert position or role of the persona)
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3. Professional background: (describe the professional background, experience, or expertise of the persona)
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4. Goals and objectives: (specify the goals and objectives that the persona wants to achieve in their professional life)
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5. How they heard about [YOUR COMPANY NAME]: (indicate the channels or sources through which the persona became aware of your company)
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6. Path to purchase: (describe the typical journey or steps the persona takes when considering and making a purchase related to your product or service)
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7. Potential barriers: (identify the factors or concerns that might hold the persona back from buying your product or service)

Remember to provide sufficient detail and context to ensure the generated personas are accurate and useful. Please present the buyer personas in the form of a table.

We ran this prompt for lemlist and got 5 detailed buyer personas. Here’s an example of one of them:

Once you have this information, you can use it to personalize your cold outreach to get more replies and build more meaningful relationships.

To use apply your buyer personas and level-up your personalization, check out this list of 9 AI tools that automate email personalization.

The key takeaways

Define your buyer personas to understand your audience's challenges and provide them with the right solution: yours.

This helps you:

→ drive revenue

→ shorten the sales cycle

→ close more deals

To define your ICPs and buyer personas with AI:

→ network with your ideal companies using an AI-automated outreach tool like lemlist

→ enrich your company list with tools like ChatGPT and lemlist's free G-sheet addon

→ generate detailed buyer personas with the ICP genator

P.S. If you want the ultimate guide to defining your B2B target audience, download this free eBook, which comes with a template that’s already helped generate 20k+ customers.