From static personas to a living intelligence system.
Magnus partnered with a global talent and leadership advisory firm to rebuild its approach to audience personas, moving from a static, demographic-led document to a motivational persona system built to inform content and campaigns at scale.
Turning a persona document into a persona system
Context
The client had already invested in persona research: named individuals, photographs and preferences, built from real interviews. The personas were thorough, but demographic and role-led, reflecting an assumption that senior buyers make decisions rationally. Content built from them was competent but rarely landed with the emotional precision the client's email nurture and website content needed.
Reframe
The brief moved from refining existing personas to rebuilding the method behind them. The real question wasn't who the buyer was, but what was motivating them: their pain points, anxieties and the emotional triggers behind engagement. The opportunity extended further — personas needed to stop being a document someone had to go and find, and become something present whenever content decisions were being made.
Solution
Magnus developed a consistent 18-part schema covering motivational drivers, jobs to be done, pain points and emotional triggers, applied identically across every persona. More than 40 personas were built across roles and markets — distinct CEO personas for the UK, Germany and Australia, for example, sharing a common structure while surfacing market-specific nuance. Personas were stored in a queryable system rather than a document, surfaced through web pages and conversational chat, so any team member could consult a persona directly, or simulate how a group of personas might respond together to a shared strategic question.
Impact
Content built from the new personas outperformed the client's previous content on engagement and site visits. Use of the personas across the business increased, moving from an occasional reference document to a working part of how content and campaigns get planned.
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