You Can't AI Your Way Out of Not Knowing Your Audience

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In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, host Kendra Corman tackles one of her biggest marketing pet peeves — believing that artificial intelligence can replace truly knowing your audience. With AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini becoming everyday marketing helpers, many professionals are skipping the fundamentals of understanding their customers. Kendra explains why that shortcut leads to bland, ineffective content and what to do instead.

The Problem with Skipping the Basics

• Many marketers use AI to generate content without doing the essential groundwork of understanding their audience.
• AI tends to “make you happy” — it tells you what you want to hear, not necessarily what your target market is actually thinking.
• When you rely solely on AI, you end up with generic, emotionless copy that fails to connect.

Understanding Your Audience: The Real Marketing 101

• Knowing your audience isn’t just about demographics — it’s about visualizing the person you’re talking to.
• Kendra shares a story about working with a local business that used detailed data to build realistic customer personas—down to shopping habits, lifestyle, and motivations.
• You don’t need expensive software to do this. Start by thinking about your favorite client and what makes them unique.

How to Really Learn About Your Audience

• Skip the surveys—people edit themselves when writing responses.
• Have real conversations with your audience instead. 

Ask questions like:

• What’s keeping you up at night?
• What frustrates you most about your business or life?
• What do you wish you had a solution for?

These conversations give you the exact words and emotions that resonate with your audience — words you can later feed into AI for far more powerful results.

Using AI the Right Way

• Once you understand your audience, AI becomes a powerful tool — not a replacement for human connection.

AI can help you:

• Brainstorm ideas and refine your voice
• Draft faster and polish existing content
• Create consistent, audience-specific messaging

The difference between “Write me an email” and “Write me an email for this audience, in this voice, about this problem” is night and day.

Key Takeaways for Marketers

• AI isn’t the enemy — but it’s not magic either.
• You are the strategist. AI can only amplify what you already know.
• Know your audience better than anyone else, and your marketing will never sound forced or fake.

Whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or content creator, this episode will challenge you to return to the roots of great marketing: understanding people.

👉 Grab Kendra’s free “Define Your Dream Audience” guide and start using real audience insights to make your AI tools work for you — not the other way around.

Looking to leverage AI? Want better results? Want to think about what you want to leverage?

Check and see how I am using it for FREE on YouTube.

From "Holy cow, it can do that?" to "Wait, how does this work again?" – I've got all your AI curiosities covered. It's the perfect after-podcast snack for your tech-hungry brain.

Watch here

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:27):
Hi, I'm Kendrick Korman.
If you're a coach, consultant,or marketer, you know marketing
is far from a perfect science.
And that's why this show iscalled Imperfect Marketing.
Join me and my guests as weexplore how to grow your
business with marketing tipsand, of course, lessons learned
along the way.

(00:52):
Hello and welcome back toanother episode of Imperfect
Marketing.
I'm your host, Kendra Corman,and today we're going to be
talking about a pet peeve ofmine.
And that is that you can't AIyour way out of not knowing your
audience.
I am talking to people on aregular basis who are using AI
to create content, using AI tosolve problems, using AI to fill

(01:16):
in the blank, whatever thathappens to be, right?
And the problem that we'rerunning into is that they don't
understand their customer.
That's a huge problem, right?
They're not doing thefundamentals to really
understand who their customeris.
And I was actually just talkingto someone who told me how they
were using AI to be able toquestion their target audience

(01:38):
and learn more and understandabout their audience.
AI tries to be happy and helpyou and tell you that you're
always right.
It doesn't necessarily alwaysuse the words that your target
audience uses.
It doesn't always reflect thepain points that your audience
uses because I'd say sometimesyour target audience doesn't

(01:59):
always understand the problemthemselves.
And that's a real struggle,right?
So people are again asking AI todo all this stuff and they can't
tell me who their audience is.
So understanding your audienceis fundamental marketing,
marketing 101.
You have to understand youraudience.
It is so underrated, and so manypeople skip this step.

(02:22):
And I think it's just soimportant.
When you're skipping to Chat GBTor Claude or Perplexity or
Gemini or wherever you're goingwithout doing the groundwork or
having AI fill in thegroundwork, that's not helping
you.
That's not creating bettercontent.
That's just creating sloppywork.
AI can't tell you who to talk toor what matters to them.

(02:47):
You need to tell that to AI ifyou want it done right.
Okay.
So I did this myself because Iwas totally exhausted and just
trying to get something done.
And the results were not good.
I got bland results with blandanswers and bland word choice.

(03:11):
And the headline and subheadlineand body copy of the web page I
was building meant nothing.
It said nothing.
I talked to a couple of peopleabout what I was rolling out,
and they told me how it wasgoing to help them and that they
could see it helping them.
And they talked to me abouttheir problems and I could see

(03:31):
how this would solve thatproblem.
I listened and wrote down theirwords.
I used their words in thelanding page.
And it was like boom.
It's got personality, it's gotimpact.
It has really what was needed tomake a difference.
If you can't explain who yourideal audience is, who your

(03:57):
ideal donor or customer is, howdo you expect AI to help you
write to them?
How do you expect AI to doanything for you that's not
going to feel forced or fake?
So I want you to think about whoyour audience is, not
demographics.
Oh my gosh.
So I teach marketing faculty atRochester Christian University

(04:21):
here locally in Metro Detroit.
And I am always talking to mystudents about, I don't just
want demographics.
When I read about your targetaudience, I should be able to
visualize this person in myhead.
I remember when I went to, itwas like a business help service

(04:41):
that my county had.
And I went there and they hadall of these personas based on
credit card data and things likethat.
It was a system that the healthdepartment had for some reason.
And this is a long time ago.
Anyway, they had thesecategories of people that were
very likely to be shopping forcertain things.

(05:03):
And I think it was like aparquetry type flooring service
that did really high-end stuff.
And we were trying to find theirtarget audience.
So anyway, we um go, we meetwith the county, and we really
talk through who this target is.
They had things down to she's 45plus.

(05:25):
She stopped at Target and Costcoand Nordstrom.
She wasn't doing a lot of onlineshopping at the time.
Talk about she drove a minivan,her kids were all out of the
house.
She was mostly a grandmother.
Like they really went intodetail.
And they could tell this frombuying behavior off of credit
card data.

(05:46):
You could picture this woman,right?
You could picture her going toWhole Foods and Target and
Nordstrom and all of the places,right?
You can see what she's going tobuy.
You can see where what kind ofwords to use to talk to her.
You can understand where she'sgoing to be.
And it was such a powerfulpersona that we had that we were

(06:11):
able to leverage to reallyidentify those opportunities.
Yes, I get it.
Not all of us have access tothat like six-figure solution,
right?
That's going to spit out ourtarget audience.
But we don't need it.
We just need to understand ourcustomers.
So think about your favoritecustomer.
Think about who they are, whatthey do, what attracts you to

(06:35):
them?
What are those differentiatingfactors that make you think of
them instead of another client,right?
Or is there someone you reallywant to work with?
Who are they?
What are they?
What keeps them up at night?
What language do they use todescribe their problems?
Where are they already hangingout?

(06:56):
I've had a client who has peoplethat don't hang out.
They go to work, they go home,they're doing their kids' soccer
games or baseball games or swimmeets or whatever it is.
And they're really not goinganywhere.
They're not spending time onlineunless it's getting their work
done because they're sooverwhelmed at work.
How do you reach those people?
Well, it's got to be a personalintro at that point, right?

(07:18):
We need someone to refer you into get you there.
And then after that referral,they might not be ready to buy,
but you get them on your emaillist and then you're able to
stay top of mind.
But we found people that don'tgo anywhere that we can't find
online, that we can't advertise,that we can't do podcasts for.

(07:40):
But we were actually able tosay, okay, well, we know this.
And now that we know this, wecan take actions to do harder
work, unfortunately, right?
Because there's no mass reachingpeople if you're getting
referrals in to meet them.
But that's the type of stuffthat we need to know so that we
can do that.

(08:01):
Now, I recommend conversationsfor this, right?
You want to talk to people, youdon't want to make assumptions
and you don't want to send asurvey.
I had a client that was like, Isent out the survey with the
questions you asked.
And I'm like, What?
People edit themselves whenthey're doing a survey.
People edit themselves ifthey're sending an email.

(08:22):
You're not getting the wordsthat are coming right out of
their heads unless you'retalking to them.
And so I recommend not doing asurvey, but definitely having
conversations with those people.
It's, I know it stinks.
It stinks, it's hard work.
It's not the best, but it'ssuper important to do.

(08:43):
And then someone's like, well, Ithought AI is supposed to make
my life easier.
It is.
Yes, this is harder than justusing AI, but it is necessary
because if you're able to giveAI this input, you're gonna have
such, so much stronger output.
Okay.
I cannot stress enough how muchthis is overlooked.
So I want you to think aboutwhen was the last time you had a

(09:06):
real conversation with youraudience instead of guessing
what they wanted?
The last time you askedsomebody, not checked in with
them, not had a status meeting,but actually said, What are you
struggling with?
What is your organization?
What's keeping you up at nightin your business or your life,
right?
What are those things that youyou're struggling with that you

(09:27):
wish you had a solution for?
What are those things that youdon't want to do?
And getting the words directlyfrom them.
It is such a powerful exercise.
Yes, it's work.
Yes, it involves talking topeople.
Yes, it involves picking up thephone or texting and scheduling
a call or sending a Calendlylink or whatever it is that you
happen to do.
But that's just so powerful.

(09:47):
So once you've done the work,then it's about leveraging AI.
Then you can put thisinformation into AI, and AI can
help you create content for thatperson using the words that they
use in the voice and tone thatthey're using in.
AI can amplify us if we knowwhat we're doing.
It cannot replace us.

(10:10):
Definitely, at least not yet,right?
So again, it can help youbrainstorm angles, it can refine
your voice, it can speed updrafts, it can give you that
first draft.
I just actually spent a couplehours earlier today while I was
recording this, working with aclient, creating a landing page,
creating a thank you page forafter someone finished the

(10:30):
landing page, creating a seriesof three emails that they would
get in the drip campaign,delivering their freebie.
But she did the hard work.
She had the target audienceinformation.
She knew her target audience,she knew what they were
struggling with, she knew thewords that they were using, and
that reflected in the content.
And now she's tweaking, notrewriting.

(10:52):
Okay.
And I think that that's reallyimportant.
There's a big difference in yourresults if you say write me an
email or write me a blog postabout, then, hey, here's my
audience, here's what they careabout.
Write me an email in my voiceabout this topic and be sure to
cover X, Y, and Z in a waythat's going to appeal to them.

(11:15):
Very different prompts, right?
So I think that that's reallyimportant to share and to really
understand.
I cannot stress it enough.
I know it is hard work, itstinks, it's not stuff that we
want to do.
It takes up time and it doesn'tfeel as valuable as just moving
and getting things done andchecking it off the list.

(11:36):
But it's probably more importantthan anything else you're gonna
do.
So I want to say AI is not theenemy.
AI is my BFF.
Claude is my BFF when it comesto writing, but it's not magic.
Okay.
AI is not magic.
Sometimes it does feel like it'smagic, especially when you give
it the right information, butit's trying to make you happy,

(11:57):
trying to make you feel good,and tells you you're right all
the time.
So I want you to write downeverything you know about your
audience.
Go ahead and grab my define youraudience, your dream, your dream
audience guide down in the inthe show notes.
I don't want you to fill it outwith things that you assume.
I don't want you to fill it outwith things that you asked

(12:17):
perplexity for.
I want you to fill it out withthings that you know, things
that you really know, right?
Things that you understand.
Identify the gaps in what you'renot sure of, right?
I still remember to this day, Iwas talking about content
marketing, which I think is alot more common of a phrase now,

(12:39):
but it was jargon back when Iwas using it.
My target audience didn't usecontent marketing.
They didn't know what it was,and I didn't know how to explain
it to them.
And so it really was whatever itwas.
It was podcasting or blogwriting or emails or social
posts, whatever that happened tobe.
That's what content marketingwas to them, not an overarching

(13:00):
umbrella.
When I explained it, they werelike, Oh, yeah, that makes
perfect sense, but it wasn't.
So again, fill out the form,identify the gaps, fill in those
gaps, then use AI to help youcreate content based on what you
learned, what your customer orclient wants.

(13:22):
Marketing has always been aboutunderstanding people.
The tools have changed, but thattruth that we're after, that
resonation, that no-like andtrust factor, that hasn't
changed.
Not since the beginning.
So do me a favor, jump on intothe show notes, grab a copy of

(13:44):
the free guide that will helpyou define your target audience.
And once you've filled it out,then you can start uploading it
into your conversations withChatGPT, Gemini, Claude,
whomever it is that you'retalking to, and they can help
start appealing to your audiencewith wording that's just not
watered down and actually reallyappeals to them.

(14:06):
Thank you again so much fortuning in today.
I hope this gets you motivatedto make a few phone calls and
really understand your audiencebecause it is so important.
Until next time, have a greatrest of your day.