Target Real Audience Queries with Persona-Based Prompt Generation

When search was solely based on Google, personas were often treated as a nice-to-have. Keywords can be neatly matched with intent.

In AI search though, personas can be a vital tool for understanding holistically how your brand appears, and how to tailor your narrative as different audiences think, search, and decide.

Prompts can go into remarkable detail. These can express so much more than what the person wants. They might say exactly who the person searching is and the constraints they're operating under.

The problem is: Brands face limitations in defining their prompt sets. Often these are based on instinct and what users might ask, not how different audience segments actually frame their questions.

Semrush Enterprise AIO's new Persona-Based Prompt Generation helps to solve this.

Now teams can identify and track prompts tailored to their key audiences and their requirements. Then, they can shape their content and brand narrative in response. This ensures an AI visibility strategy that reflects and answers your market comprehensively.

In the world of search engines, you aimed to rank a page that matched the keyword and intent behind it. Your brand would earn visibility, get the click, and fulfill the intent. Personas were helpful but in many cases optional.

In the growing world of AI SEO, prompts can be much more informative of the person searching. Marketers aren't just optimizing for search intent or demographics anymore but also optimizing for behavior and deeper preferences.

For example, if a person prompts ChatGPT something like "I'm an email marketing manager at a mid-sized charity. Can you draft a checklist for evaluating new CRM vendors, making sure they cover GDPR regulations and cost under $10K a year." then ChatGPT would have background information about the user's profession, industry, general compliance needs, budget ceilings, and preferred content formats.

While not all prompts provide this level of depth, any extra additional information can unlock more targeted messaging. With an understanding of where and how your brand shows up for key personas, you can show up more often, better answer the real queries of your audience, and ultimately be selected more.

It can take significant time and effort to create personas, and even then, they may be static PDFs that aren't naturally embedded into your workflows.

But skipping person-based tracking in AI search creates risks:

Semrush Enterprise AIO's Persona-Based Prompt Generation capabilities empower brands to implement high-quality prompt tracking, and better optimize their narratives for different key audiences.

Teams can now add multiple characteristics and better tailor their prompts around important segments, then zoom into how these different groups types think, search, and ask questions.

The benefits flow on across SEO, content, and brand:

Persona-Based Prompt Generation removes much of the manual effort from identifying prompts, but tracked prompts can be continually validated, expanded, or grounded in real customer language over time.

Here are some starting points and tips for translating insights into further prompts for tracking.

Your sales and customer success teams document some of the clearest signals you’ll ever find. Call transcripts, discovery notes, renewal conversations, and onboarding feedback can all surface:

Analyzing these materials helps you to find patterns that mirror how your buyers actually think and ask questions. Instead of guessing at phrasing, you can model prompts on real objections, comparisons, and validations that are already proven.

Community discussions show natural language through the lens of real experiences. Reddit threads, LinkedIn comments, and niche forums are where buyers:

Direct touchpoints like post-signup or post-purchase surveys are ideal for uncovering recurring points of friction These especially help to reveal where expectations are initially being missed or exceeded:

With these insights validating and expanding the prompts created by Persona-Based Prompt Generation, brands can build out truly holistic AI visibility tracking. They can also focus their content and positioning on how customers really decide.

Semrush Enterprise AIO’s Persona-Based Prompt Generation helps teams to understand the people behind the prompts and ensure your content speaks to their specific needs, constraints, and decision-making contexts.

Brands can now efficiently embed persona-based targeting directly into their AI search tracking and optimization workflows. Doing so unlocks a host of strategic advantages, closes visibility gaps and enables messaging that’s tailored to match the terminology and requirements of different audiences.

This means that brands can shift from optimizing for what people search to optimizing for who is searching. A change that helps grow both visibility and revenue.