Audience Insight: The Hard Work That Makes AI Content at Scale Possible

I recently revisited the very first article I wrote about audience and persona research, back in 2021 when Only Good Content was in its infancy. Suffice to say, a lot has changed since those early days.

Back then, the biggest barrier to getting things done was time. Most teams knew it mattered; they just struggled to find the hours or the budget to do it properly.Today the challenge looks a little different. We don't lack the tools or the data to develop really meaningful audience insights, but many marketers are tempted to skip the hard work because AI makes it look optional.

The marketing environment has changed, the fundamentals have not

AI has reshaped the way content is created and distributed. What once took days now takes minutes. Yet the real question remains the same: do you know who you are talking to, and what they care about?

In moments of rapid change, there's always a risk of mistaking speed for strength. We saw it during the first months of remote work in 2020, when teams adopted new platforms overnight. The tools solved an immediate problem, but created new ones: overlap, data sprawl and inconsistent processes that took months to untangle.

The same pattern is emerging in marketing. The novelty of faster output can hide weak foundations. Without audience insight, AI will only magnify the inconsistencies already in your system.

Audience understanding is not an optional extra for serious B2B content marketing teams. It should be treated as strategic infrastructure. I recently wrote about why content calendars still count as critical infrastructure - they're the systems that hold your marketing together as channels, teams and tools evolve. Audience research serves the same role. It's the groundwork that keeps that system coherent and credible.

The cost of skipping the fundamentals

When you skip those fundamentals, the cracks may not show immediately. They'll start to appear later, and usually at an incredibly inconvenient time, such as when a flagship campaign falls flat after significant investment. AI can make content production look efficient until the revisions start: rewrites to fix tone, compliance reviews that flag inconsistency, and rework to align with strategy that was never fully defined.

Speed without structure always carries a cost. In the end, what looks like acceleration often becomes time spent repairing problems that could have been avoided with better groundwork.

What still matters in B2B content marketing

The fundamentals of audience research remain the same, even if the tools have changed.

Personas

A well-developed customer persona is more than a brief profile. It distils what you have learned about how your audience thinks, what they value and how they make decisions. The best personas feel familiar, because you can picture the person behind them.

My best advice in keeping them fresh is to treat them as living references, rather than something developed at a point-in-time then revisited every couple of years. Build them from a mix of data and real conversation. The point is to understand how your audience thinks, decides and measures success (not just who they are on paper).

A note on using persona tools wisely

There's no shortage of tools that promise to build personas for you. HubSpot’s Make My Persona, UXPressia and Smaply are all helpful for creating a first cut. They give you a structure to work within and can help you move from a blank page to something tangible.

That said, a generated persona is only ever a starting point. Before you use it to shape messaging or content decisions, test it with the people who know your audience best: your internal teams who speak to customers every day. They will quickly spot anything that feels off or incomplete.

If you can, go one step further and validate your draft persona with a trusted customer. A short conversation can reveal nuances that no template or data set will ever capture. Those insights are what turn a persona from a profile into a usable reference point.

Tools can speed up the mechanics of persona creation, but understanding still comes from people. Treat automation as your first draft, and validation as the step that makes it real.

Pain-point and intent mapping

Every piece of content should tie back to a real question or challenge your audience faces. Search intent is the modern reflection of that. If you know what they are trying to solve, you can meet them with useful, relevant content.

Content pillars

Content pillars help you define the space where audience needs and business priorities meet. These pillars connect research to planning. They are how you decide what deserves attention, and what can wait.

Discoverability and intent

As most marketers know, the arrival of large language models (LLMs) has pushed search and discoverability beyond keywords. Read more about that in our piece explaining how LLM search is changing B2B content marketing strategy. Generative engines return answers that demonstrate expertise and relevance. The same principle applies here: if you don't understand your audience and how they think and behave, your content won't appear when they go looking.

The work you put into audience research directly improves discoverability. It ensures your content answers real questions, written in the language your audience actually uses. That relevance matters for both algorithms and humans.

The long-term payoff of investing in audience insights

Teams that invest in audience understanding before scaling with AI are already seeing the benefit. They're publishing faster without losing coherence. Their stakeholders trust the output because it reflects shared understanding. Their calendars, governance frameworks and tone of voice hold up under pressure.

The fundamentals of B2B don't disappear when the tools evolve. They're what make speed sustainable. Audience insight and structured planning form the same foundation - the reason your content drives pipeline and revenue, not just awareness.

Still no shortcuts in 2025

Four years ago, I said there were no shortcuts. That hasn't changed - the hard work still matters. Before you turn to the next workflow or automation, stop and ask: do we still know who we're talking to, and what they care about?

If that answer isn't clear, that's where the real work begins.

Want to find out more about the role of audience persona research and other content marketing foundations in successfully scaling AI in your B2B content machine?

📖 Grab a copy of my new book, The Six-Week AI Content Sprint, to learn how to scale AI responsibily in your B2B content marketing program.

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This article is updated from a version first published as Should Audience Research Go in the Too-Hard Basket? in 2021.