About Shannon McGuirk
With over 12 years’ experience driving brand awareness and organic growth, Shannon has worked at leading agencies including Aira Digital, Bottle PR and Re:signal, helping ambitious brands turn visibility into measurable results through award-winning digital PR and content marketing. In 2026, she launched her own digital PR consultancy; Peach.
A senior PR leader and mentor, she’s led high-performing teams of 30+ and managed multi-million-pound P&Ls, blending creative excellence with commercial impact. Shannon has partnered with global brands such as Booking.com, PrettyLittleThing, AXA PPP Healthcare and N Brown Group, delivering campaigns that strengthen reputation, reach and revenue.
A regular speaker at MozCon and BrightonSEO, she is passionate about sharing knowledge and championing women and the next generation in marketing.
Talk details
Persona Driven Digital PR
How Understanding Your Audience Supercharges Creative Relevance and Media Coverage in an AI-Focused World
Overview
In an AI-obsessed Digital PR landscape, execution has never been easier and differentiation has never been harder.
Ideas, data sets, headlines, and even outreach strategies can now be generated at speed. But while AI has flattened how we execute Digital PR, it has also exposed a critical weakness in many campaigns: a shallow understanding of the audience they’re trying to influence.
This training session is designed for experienced Digital PR professionals who want to move beyond surface-level personas and generic ideation, and instead build campaigns rooted in buyer psychology, intent, and decision-making.
Rather than revisiting the fundamentals of Digital PR, this session goes deeper into the buyer’s journey and shows how mapping robust, outcome-driven personas unlocks more relevant ideas, stronger narratives, and coverage that actually influences commercial decisions.
What You’ll Learn
Why audience understanding is now the most powerful competitive advantage in Digital PR.
How buyer journeys really work in complex B2B and B2C decision-making environments.
How to build advanced buyer personas that go beyond demographics and job titles—focusing on psychology, behaviours, and pain points.
How to map personas to specific Digital PR outcomes, not just link numbers.
How to generate Digital PR ideas that resonate in an AI-saturated media landscape.
What Makes This Session Different
This is not a “what is Digital PR” session that focuses on vanity metrics such as link volume alone.
It’s a strategic, hands-on session focused on deeper thinking, not tools.
What You’ll Take Away
You’ll leave with practical frameworks for:
Building stronger buyer personas.
Mapping PR activity to buyer intent.
Creating Digital PR ideas that are harder to replicate—and easier to justify commercially.
In a world where AI can generate ideas instantly, understanding your audience is what makes them matter.
