Create Personas with SparkToro data | Free Audience Persona Generator by Delve AI

SparkToro helps you conduct audience research and tells you where your audience hangs out online – what they read, watch, listen to, and follow. All of this critical information comes from three trustworthy sources: anonymized clickstream, Google SERPs, and public social profiles. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could convert this data into actionable personas?

With Delve AI’s audience persona generator, you can combine the richness of SparkToro’s audience data with Delve AI’s persona generation expertise. We’ve been generating personas for 6+ years, serving 45,000+ brand/agency users in over 100+ industries worldwide.

Our free software lets you create data-driven personas for your target audience using SparkToro’s audience reports. The process is simple, and you can leverage the persona generated to learn how customers make buying decisions and what triggers their search for new products or solutions.

This post outlines the SparkToro data-based persona development process and also mentions the additional capabilities – digital twins and synthetic market research – you derive from Delve AI.

How to Create a Persona with SparkToro Data in Delve AI

If you don’t have solid first-party or second-party customer data sources to create a persona, Audience Persona by Delve AI is the place to go. You can generate data-driven personas by entering just a brief description of your target audience, or by uploading your SparkToro audience reports.

It takes our software only a little while to automatically generate an audience persona for you. Let’s discuss the three-step process in more detail.

Step 1. Generate SparkToro audience reports

You need to create audience reports in SparkToro, and then export them before you generate personas in Delve AI. If you haven’t created one, simply log in to SparkToro and follow these steps:

• Select the “Create a new report” option from the main dashboard.
• Add an audience description and select a location.
• Hit the “Create Report” button.

Once you’re done, SparkToro quickly generates an audience report based on your inputs. Each report usually contains the following information:

• Demographics (age, gender, job profile, skills, location, etc)

• Websites (high-affinity sites, press and media)

• Preferred social networks, search engines, and AI tools

• Social accounts followed: YouTube channels, podcasts, & subreddits

• Topics: High-affinity keywords, search terms (Google/Bing), and resonating topics.

Step 2. Export your SparkToro data

You can export the full audience report in an XLSX format by clicking the “Export all data” button in the Audience Research dashboard. Here’s a sample of what the report looks like.

Step 3. Upload SparkToro reports to Delve AI

After you’ve exported and downloaded the complete audience report from SparkToro, upload it to Delve AI.

First, log in to Delve AI, and then navigate to Persona > Audience Persona. When you get to the dashboard, add a brief audience description and upload your SparkToro audience report. Finally, click the “Create personas” button.

Step 4. Create personas using Audience Persona by Delve AI

Once you’ve uploaded your data, Delve AI automatically analyzes and creates B2C or B2B personas for your audience, depending on the context and industry.

Each persona comes along with the following attributes:

• Name, image, quote, and biography
• Basic demographics (age, gender, location, education, income)
• Job title, seniority, industry, company size
• Job responsibilities, skills, and experience
• Personal/professional goals and aspirations
• Pain points, challenges, buying barriers
• Interests, values, and hobbies
• Preferred social media networks, press/media, and websites
• Influencers and brands they follow online
• Content types and consumption preferences
• Hashtags, YouTube channels, and subreddits followed
• Search keywords, queries, and topics
• Sample user journey

As you can see, the audience persona summary card contains the persona name, age, urbanicity, marketing generation, and location. It also includes tabs: Persona details and Distribution.

For representation, we’ve created an audience persona for Nike. The AI-generated persona depicts Benjamin Gilbert, a 28-year-old individual from New York, USA, who’s obsessed with Nike sneakers. Persona details give you his basic demographic details, plus his location and a quote describing what he’s looking for.

This is followed by four important modules: Profile information (summary and personal aspirations), buying behavior (factors influencing purchase decisions and buying triggers), psychographics (goals, motivations, and key needs), and key obstacles (core challenges, day-to-day pain points, and perceived barriers).

You also get to see his job profile and lifestyle: he works in operations for NYC Health + Hospitals, plus has cats and rides a bicycle.

News sources, social networks, and brands further tell you that he’s active on YouTube, reads Sky Sports, and follows Reebok and New Balance.

These modules are followed by the popular websites (asics.com, hoka.com, brooksrunning.com), YouTube channels (ASICS America, Under Armour, Athletico Physical Therapy), subreddits (r/fitness, r/personalfinance, r/entrepreneur), and content types (videos, community sharing, forums, news articles) that Steven engages with.

His preferences across categories like sports, entertainment, and news are tabulated next. We see that Steven’s into running and cycling, and mainly reads movie-related news.

Products & Services show that he’s interested in home decor, electronics, and programming. Plus, he’s likely to attend sports events and conferences (eg, the NHL Playoffs and March Madness), and hit the gym.

His hobbies, values, and interests reiterate the same thing, i.e, he’s a health and fitness nut who’s interested in technology.

“Steven’s Likely Interactions with Nike” looks into his first interaction with Nike and the resources that influence his decisions. For instance, he’s influenced by social media and brand promotions.

The second tab, Distribution, shows the audience distribution within this persona segment across three categories: how, who, and where.

• HOW: Device types and social networks. Also includes the paid + generic keywords and organic + generic keywords.

• WHO: Age, gender, language, industries, sectors, job function, company size, seniority levels, job titles, and organizations.
• WHERE: Urbanicity, city, country, and region.

The Audience Persona tool also comes with a sample Journey map that divides the customer journey into stages and touchpoints and helps you identify their needs and problems at each step.

You can download and share each of these reports (Persona details, Distribution, Journey map) in JPG, PPT, and PDF formats by hitting the Export button.

Bonus: Chat with your audience persona

Our free audience persona plan lets you create an audience profile using your SparkToro data. It also gives you access to our Digital Twin of the Customer software, which generates dynamic, virtual avatars of your persona segments. You can interact with your personas in 15+ languages.

You and your whole team can chat with the digital twin directly from your Delve AI dashboard or via a collaboration tool like Slack.

Ask the digital twin questions and get feedback on new messaging, campaigns, or product concepts. You can further upload your ad, email, or landing page copy and ask your persona if they like or dislike it. You’ll get responses in seconds.

Since the twin is based on rich SparkToro audience research data, the output closely reflects what your target audience actually wants, feels, and prefers.

Move on to Synthetic Market Research

Most AI persona generators, tools, and templates stop at personas. Delve AI doesn’t. Not only does it let you chat with personas, but it also lets you conduct market research with them.

You can generate hundreds of thousands of synthetic participants from your audience persona and use them to run qualitative and quantitative research studies. All you have to do is sign up for Delve AI’s Synthetic Research software.

Once signed up, the AI market research tool allows you to:

• Create synthetic user panels
• Run surveys and interviews
• Conduct focus group discussions (human-moderated, AI-moderated, or human + AI co-moderated)

Unlike traditional research, with Delve AI, you don’t have to recruit participants, schedule interviews, or manually analyze responses.

Each synthetic respondent represents a customer type that exists within your audience persona. You can utilize the panels for product innovation, marketing, competitor benchmarking, and market exploration studies. The entire list is covered in this article: 13 Best Use Cases of Synthetic Research by Delve AI.

To run a study, go to Synthetic Research > Studies, and select the kind of study you want to run, i.e., a survey or a focus group (human, AI, or AI-assisted). Then, specify the panels, number of participants, and your research goal.

Our synthetic research platform will generate and analyze user responses for you. You’ll be able to see the results – graphs, themes, codes, transcripts, and an in-depth study report – once the study is completed.

With synthetic research, you’ll be able to get audience feedback in hours, not weeks. You can simulate edge cases, unusual scenarios, and more to learn how your target audience reacts to a new idea and achieve rapid iteration cycles. All you need to start is a persona.

So, upload your SparkToro audience reports and build data-driven personas with Audience Persona by Delve AI today!