Marketers who create compelling content in healthcare and higher education deal with complex topics, diverse audiences, and high-stakes messaging. Guiding content strategy with personas is a proven way to understand your audience and break through the noise with content that truly resonates.

But for too long, marketing personas have felt like dusty documents – broad generalizations based on limited data.  

We’ve all seen examples of the flat, dated approach to personas: “Sasha, the Busy Mom” or “David, the Aspiring Student” with a stock photo and bullet list of generic attributes. While these 2-D characters offer a starting point for general content and tone, they often lack the nuance and depth to truly connect with our audiences.  

A good persona can inspire insights that help us derive niche and emotional story topics to meet specific needs. Talking to existing students and alumni will yield answers that are shaped by their experience with your institution. But for prospective students, you want to address the questions and concerns that arise before they choose your brand. 

Creating AI-powered personas can help you identify niche topics that speak to the questions users might be too timid to ask in person: questions about cost, transportation, childcare, and how your institution partners with them to succeed. 

With a detailed prompt, you can use AI tools to generate detailed, dynamic personas that reflect real-world audience segments at scale. You can collate vast results that go beyond basic demographics to reveal intricate details about users’ motivations, pain points, and aspirations.  

Using these emotional insights, you can craft niche content that informs and connects—and that ultimately converts. Let’s discuss how you can make it happen. 

How to Get from Prompt to Persona 

Step 1: Gather the information you know 

Before you jump into writing the AI prompt, list high-level parameters that reflect your specific audience. Consider your enrollment statistics or appointment data: 

• Who are the people you’re serving? 

• What kind of information do they need? 

• What are some of the questions they’ll ask beyond that? 

• What are some of the things they’ll be worried about? 

• What might generate some excitement for these users? 

You’ll use these details to put together a specific prompt. The more precise the prompt, the better your results—AI tools use details to learn your expectations.  

Step 2: Draft your prompt 

We wrote this prompt into Google Gemini: 

The table Gemini created was not very visual, so we copy/pasted the Gemini output into ChatGPT to create a table. Here’s the prompt we used: 

You can now visualize Mike as he’s scrolling through nearby nursing programs and searching for financial aid. 

Important Note: We recommend that you do not upload any personally identifying information or protected health information (PHI) into AI tools. Instead, use generalized, anonymized information for idea generation and research.  

Related reading: The Joe Rogan Effect: Why Niche Content Is Key to SEO Success 

Generate Topics from Your Persona Results 

Nuanced, AI-driven persona results are not just for understanding our audience—they are goldmines of content topics. By tapping into the search results of potentially hundreds of similar people, we can identify niche content topics that will answer even the most specific questions. 

Let’s brainstorm a few ideas to help Mike on his journey to a nursing degree: 

Concern: Can I afford to go to college? 

Mike’s concerns mirror nearly every other prospective college student: How much will I need to pay up front? What will this degree really cost by the time I graduate? 

To overcome that barrier, Mike needs to land on a a solid financial aid page that provides both broad and niche answers – and prominent calls to action. This is where Mike’s conversion happens. 

Oakland Community College in Michigan provides these answers and actions right up front: 

• A callout featuring the tuition-free Michigan Reconnect program 

• A Top 10 listicle 

• Links to FAQ, net price calculator, and financial aid checklist pages 

• A customized FASA guide 

• A short video with an easily accessible transcript 

Most importantly, OCC places several “Schedule an Appointment” CTA buttons strategically throughout the page. Mike just needs one click to connect with an OCC admissions advisor. 

So how do we draw Mike’s attention to the financial aid landing page? You could create a finance-focused email campaign emphasizing unexpected financial resources to help him pay his college expenses. Hyper-focus his journey by emphasizing local grants and scholarships available only at your school, and tag community partners for increased brand trust. 

You could also support this personalized email campaign further with a finance-focused social media campaign leading up to an upcoming application deadline: 

• Highlight a “scholarship of the week” 

• Profile a recent graduate who got a nursing scholarship  

• Ask followers for their tips on writing strong scholarship applications 

All of these integrated content pieces should circle back to the same goal: Converting Mike’s questions into an application to nursing school. To get there, Mike will need to navigate through his chosen college’s program page – but is it optimized for conversion? 

Apply what you’ve learned from Mike’s persona to make your program pages do their real job: Emphasize career outcomes, addressing potential pain points, and – most importantly – provide clear calls to action. 

Hope: I want to get a stable, well-paying job. 

Before Mike enrolls in classes, he needs to know what the job market is like for new nursing graduates in his region. Mike knows that healthcare workers are in big demand, but he’s looking ahead to stability and living on his ow 

When the financial aid deadline has passed, Mike’s personalized email campaign can pivot to current career outlooks. His stories can be niche by zeroing in on what Mike can expect to earn in the field in the next five years and what degree will get him there. 

The University of Texas-Permian Basin used this approach with a blog post on growth industries in West Texas. Their story featured a young working couple who took advantage of UTPB’s convenient master’s degree programs to upskill their degrees tailored to their individual goals and interests. 

This niche story turned into long-tail earned-media success for UTPB. One year after publication, the story was still #1 on Google for the search term “what degree will get me a better job in west texas.” More than two years later, the story still ranked #2 on Google. 

That kind of success tells us that niche doesn’t mean a one-off success with a one-time campaign. Niche stories and personalized campaigns get at the heart of universal emotions that power life-changing decisions. 

The Future of Niche Storytelling 

Meaningful engagement starts with audience insights. In health care and higher education, where trust and relevance are paramount, leveraging AI-generated personas can be a springboard to revealing niche story ideas. That’s how you live your brand and demonstrate your true differentiators.