Your New Persona is a Machine
Alright, B2B marketers, let’s talk about personas.
You've spent countless hours building them out. You've got "Marketing Mary," the CMO who values data, and "IT Ian," the CTO who needs to know about security. You know their pain points, their goals, and where they spend their time online.
But what if I told you there's a new, incredibly important persona that you haven't even considered? A persona that’s more influential than Mary and more technically discerning than Ian.
Your new persona is a machine.
The Problem With Old Personas
The old way of thinking about personas is incomplete. You're still building content strategies around where your human buyers hang out. But as we've discussed, a massive amount of your content is now being consumed, processed, and summarized by an AI before it ever gets to a human.
So, while you're busy making sure your content aligns with the needs of "Marketing Mary," you're not speaking to the machine that’s going to decide if that content even gets into Mary's search results.
Everyone needs to add a GenAI persona to their strategy.
How to Build Your Machine Persona
When you build a persona for a machine, you have to think like a machine. What keeps it up at night? How does it make decisions? You can’t ask it questions, but you can infer the answers based on how it operates.
Here’s what a flipped persona framework looks like:
Pain Points / What Keeps It Up at Night
My machine persona's biggest pain point is outdated or unstructured information. It hates when a blog post buries the answer to a question in a lengthy paragraph or provides a solution from five years ago. This can lead to what’s known as a hallucination—when the AI makes up a false answer because it lacks clear, accurate data. It also gets frustrated by an absence of sources.
Key Messaging that Resonates
My machine persona doesn’t respond to emotional appeals. It resonates with facts, clear formatting, and authority. It loves content that is organized with headings, bullet points, and numbered lists. Its key message is, "Prove it." It wants to see the data, the citations, and the external links that back up your claims.
Where It Looks for Information
This persona has a complex web of sources. While it still pulls from traditional blogs and websites, it is increasingly looking to real, conversational content on forums like Reddit and Quora. It also values white papers, technical documentation, and academic journals. This is why you must go to where the machine is, even if it's not where your buyers are actively looking to buy.
Its Team Structure
A machine persona works with a team of other AI systems. Its "team" includes web crawlers, semantic analyzers, and ranking algorithms. Each piece of its team has a specific role, and you need to make content that appeals to all of them. For instance, a web crawler looks for fresh information, while a semantic analyzer looks for context.
How It Makes Buying Decisions
A machine persona "buys in" to content based on its trustworthiness, relevance, and structured format. Its "decision" to use your content in a summary is based on a complex scoring system. It asks, "Is this information clear, accurate, and supported by a reputable source?" If you answer "yes" to all three, you've won the bid.
...and now you have a working persona for a machine!
This persona demands a content strategy that goes beyond old-school SEO and gets real about what it takes to be a trusted source in an AI-powered world.
⚡ Is your content really AI-ready? If you’re rethinking SEO and wondering how to make sure your brand shows up in GenAI search, we can help. Book a free GenAI consultation with Unreal Digital Group and get a clear plan for building your GEO strategy.
