What is a persona?
A persona is the voice your campaign writes in — tone, audience assumptions, favoured vocabulary, areas of expertise, what to avoid. You manage them on the Personas page in wp-admin (Structura → Personas), and every campaign attaches to exactly one of them.
Why personas matter
AI writing without a persona sounds like AI writing. Generic. Hedging. Slightly-too-formal. Posts that could’ve been written by any of a thousand other sites.
A persona is how you push back on that. You give it:
- A role or identity. “Senior nutritionist with 10 years clinical experience.” “Mechanical engineer who writes for hobbyists.” “Indie-game developer with a wry sense of humour.”
- An audience. Who they’re writing for — their reading level, what they already know, what they don’t.
- A style. Formal vs casual. Short sentences vs long. Jokes welcome vs no-jokes-please.
- Do’s and don’ts. “Always mention that cast iron needs seasoning.” “Never use the word ‘utilise’ — say ‘use.’”
With a well-crafted persona, the posts on your site sound like your site. Without one, they sound like the internet average.
One persona, many campaigns
A site can have many personas, and you pick one per campaign. If you run:
- A recipe blog with a “Emma the food blogger” persona.
- A side project on kitchen tools with “Marco the gear reviewer”.
- A monthly round-up with “Editorial voice (house style)”.
…that’s three personas, assigned to three different campaigns. They can share a site.
You can also reuse the same persona across campaigns. Most sites end up with 1–3 personas total.
The persona dropdown on a campaign offers the personas writing for this site, not every persona on your account. A persona you create here is added to the site automatically; one you created for a different site has to be added before it shows up. See The Personas page below.
Rotate personas automatically
Instead of picking one persona, you can set a campaign’s persona to Random per post. Structura then chooses a different one of the site’s personas for each post it writes — so a single campaign rotates across several voices instead of repeating one. The pool it draws from is the set of personas writing for that site, so add the voices you want in the rotation and leave the rest out.
One persona, many authors
A persona doesn’t have to match a real person’s name on the byline. You can configure the author field to credit a real author (yourself, a team member) while the writing voice is the persona’s. This is common for single-author sites: one real author, a specific persona that shapes the voice.
Where you set the author
The author is the real person a post is credited to: the byline your readers see and the author search engines read from the post’s structured data. Where you set it depends on how your site publishes.
WordPress sites. The author is the WordPress user you pick as the persona’s Publishing Author in wp-admin, in the persona editor or the setup wizard. Structura takes the display name, biographical info, profile picture and website from that user’s WordPress profile, so keep the profile filled in. There’s nothing to set in the customer portal.
Headless sites and article delivery. There’s no WordPress profile to read from, so authors live in the customer portal. You add each author once to your workspace, then assign one to each persona on each site. To set the author from a site:
- Open the site and go to Personas.
- Under Writing for this site, find the persona and click Add author, or Edit author if it already has one.
- Pick one of your Workspace authors, or pick New author to add someone: fill in Name and Short bio, add a photo with Upload photo (PNG, JPG or WebP, up to 2 MB), then fill in Profile page URL and Other profiles (one URL per line). Until your workspace has an author, the dialog opens straight on these fields.
- Click Save author.
To see every author in one place, go to Workspace library → Authors. You can add, edit and delete authors there. An author that a site still uses can’t be deleted: remove it from those sites first.
Editing an author’s details, with Edit details in a site’s dialog or under Authors, changes them on every site that uses that author. Remove author in a site’s dialog only takes the author off that persona on that site; the author stays in your workspace.
One persona can publish under different authors on different sites, and one author can be credited on several sites. That suits agencies that reuse a voice across clients. If a persona has no author on a site, its posts there go out with no author: Structura never invents a name or a bio, and never credits the persona itself.
A change applies to every post in that voice on the site, including ones already published. Your site shows it the next time it fetches the post from the headless delivery API. Article delivery is different: it sends the author along with each post when it publishes, and your site keeps what it received, so posts already sent keep the author they were sent with.
The Personas page
In wp-admin, go to Structura → Personas. You’ll see:
- A grid of cards, one per persona writing for this site.
- Available in your workspace — personas on your account that aren’t writing for this site yet, each with a Bind button that adds it. Remove from this site on a card does the reverse.
- A New Persona button (primary) and a Templates button (secondary) in the top-right.
- An empty state if you have no personas: No Personas Yet with two buttons, New Persona and Browse Templates.
Each persona card shows the name, the assigned author, and edit/ delete controls.
If you only run one site, everything you create lands in the grid and the Available in your workspace list stays empty.
Templates
If you’re starting from zero, Templates gives you a set of pre-built personas to base yours on. They’re not meant to be used directly — they’re starting points you customise.
Campaign vs persona — what belongs where?
Some settings might feel like they could live in either place. The rule of thumb:
- Persona = how you write. Voice, tone, audience, vocabulary.
- Campaign = what you write about. Topic, keywords, schedule, objective.
If you change the topic, it’s a campaign change. If you change the voice, it’s a persona change.
Next step
Create a persona if you haven’t yet, or Tips for writing good personas if you have and want to tighten yours.
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