Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
You Can't AI Your Way Out of Not Knowing Your Audience
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.
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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 is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and today we're going to be talking about a pet peeve of mine. And that is that you can't AI your way out of not knowing your audience. I am talking to people on a regular basis who are using AI to create content, using AI to solve problems, using AI to fill in the blank, whatever that happens to be, right? And the problem that we're running into is that they don't understand their customer. That's a huge problem, right? They're not doing the fundamentals to really understand who their customer is. And I was actually just talking to someone who told me how they were using AI to be able to question their target audience and learn more and understand about their audience. AI tries to be happy and help you and tell you that you're always right. It doesn't necessarily always use the words that your target audience uses. It doesn't always reflect the pain points that your audience uses because I'd say sometimes your target audience doesn't always understand the problem themselves. And that's a real struggle, right? So people are again asking AI to do all this stuff and they can't tell me who their audience is. So understanding your audience is fundamental marketing, marketing 101. You have to understand your audience. It is so underrated, and so many people skip this step. And I think it's just so important. When you're skipping to Chat GBT or Claude or Perplexity or Gemini or wherever you're going without doing the groundwork or having AI fill in the groundwork, that's not helping you. That's not creating better content. That's just creating sloppy work. AI can't tell you who to talk to or what matters to them. You need to tell that to AI if you want it done right. Okay. So I did this myself because I was totally exhausted and just trying to get something done. And the results were not good. I got bland results with bland answers and bland word choice. And the headline and subheadline and body copy of the web page I was building meant nothing. It said nothing. I talked to a couple of people about what I was rolling out, and they told me how it was going to help them and that they could see it helping them. And they talked to me about their problems and I could see how this would solve that problem. I listened and wrote down their words. I used their words in the landing page. And it was like boom. It's got personality, it's got impact. It has really what was needed to make a difference. If you can't explain who your ideal audience is, who your ideal donor or customer is, how do you expect AI to help you write to them? How do you expect AI to do anything for you that's not going to feel forced or fake? So I want you to think about who your audience is, not demographics. Oh my gosh. So I teach marketing faculty at Rochester Christian University here locally in Metro Detroit. And I am always talking to my students about, I don't just want demographics. When I read about your target audience, I should be able to visualize this person in my head. I remember when I went to, it was like a business help service that my county had. And I went there and they had all of these personas based on credit card data and things like that. It was a system that the health department had for some reason. And this is a long time ago. Anyway, they had these categories of people that were very likely to be shopping for certain things. And I think it was like a parquetry type flooring service that did really high-end stuff. And we were trying to find their target audience. So anyway, we um go, we meet with the county, and we really talk through who this target is. They had things down to she's 45 plus. She stopped at Target and Costco and Nordstrom. She wasn't doing a lot of online shopping 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 into detail. And they could tell this from buying behavior off of credit card data. You could picture this woman, right? You could picture her going to Whole Foods and Target and Nordstrom and all of the places, right? You can see what she's going to buy. You can see where what kind of words to use to talk to her. You can understand where she's going to be. And it was such a powerful persona that we had that we were able to leverage to really identify those opportunities. Yes, I get it. Not all of us have access to that like six-figure solution, right? That's going to spit out our target audience. But we don't need it. We just need to understand our customers. So think about your favorite customer. Think about who they are, what they do, what attracts you to them? What are those differentiating factors that make you think of them instead of another client, right? Or is there someone you really want to work with? Who are they? What are they? What keeps them up at night? What language do they use to describe their problems? Where are they already hanging out? I've had a client who has people that don't hang out. They go to work, they go home, they're doing their kids' soccer games or baseball games or swim meets or whatever it is. And they're really not going anywhere. They're not spending time online unless it's getting their work done because they're so overwhelmed at work. How do you reach those people? Well, it's got to be a personal intro at that point, right? We need someone to refer you in to get you there. And then after that referral, they might not be ready to buy, but you get them on your email list and then you're able to stay top of mind. But we found people that don't go anywhere that we can't find online, that we can't advertise, that we can't do podcasts for. But we were actually able to say, okay, well, we know this. And now that we know this, we can take actions to do harder work, unfortunately, right? Because there's no mass reaching people if you're getting referrals in to meet them. But that's the type of stuff that we need to know so that we can do that. Now, I recommend conversations for this, right? You want to talk to people, you don't want to make assumptions and you don't want to send a survey. I had a client that was like, I sent out the survey with the questions you asked. And I'm like, What? People edit themselves when they're doing a survey. People edit themselves if they're sending an email. You're not getting the words that are coming right out of their heads unless you're talking to them. And so I recommend not doing a survey, 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's super important to do. And then someone's like, well, I thought AI is supposed to make my life easier. It is. Yes, this is harder than just using AI, but it is necessary because if you're able to give AI this input, you're gonna have such, so much stronger output. Okay. I cannot stress enough how much this is overlooked. So I want you to think about when was the last time you had a real conversation with your audience instead of guessing what they wanted? The last time you asked somebody, 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 night in your business or your life, right? What are those things that you you're struggling with that you wish you had a solution for? What are those things that you don't want to do? And getting the words directly from them. It is such a powerful exercise. Yes, it's work. Yes, it involves talking to people. Yes, it involves picking up the phone or texting and scheduling a call or sending a Calendly link or whatever it is that you happen to do. But that's just so powerful. So once you've done the work, then it's about leveraging AI. Then you can put this information into AI, and AI can help you create content for that person using the words that they use in the voice and tone that they're using in. AI can amplify us if we know what we're doing. It cannot replace us. Definitely, at least not yet, right? So again, it can help you brainstorm angles, it can refine your voice, it can speed up drafts, it can give you that first draft. I just actually spent a couple hours earlier today while I was recording this, working with a client, creating a landing page, creating a thank you page for after someone finished the landing page, creating a series of three emails that they would get in the drip campaign, delivering their freebie. But she did the hard work. She had the target audience information. She knew her target audience, she knew what they were struggling with, she knew the words that they were using, and that reflected in the content. And now she's tweaking, not rewriting. Okay. And I think that that's really important. There's a big difference in your results if you say write me an email or write me a blog post about, then, hey, here's my audience, here's what they care about. Write me an email in my voice about this topic and be sure to cover X, Y, and Z in a way that's going to appeal to them. Very different prompts, right? So I think that that's really important to share and to really understand. I cannot stress it enough. I know it is hard work, it stinks, it's not stuff that we want to do. It takes up time and it doesn't feel as valuable as just moving and getting things done and checking it off the list. But it's probably more important than anything else you're gonna do. So I want to say AI is not the enemy. AI is my BFF. Claude is my BFF when it comes to writing, but it's not magic. Okay. AI is not magic. Sometimes it does feel like it's magic, especially when you give it the right information, but it's trying to make you happy, trying to make you feel good, and tells you you're right all the time. So I want you to write down everything you know about your audience. Go ahead and grab my define your audience, your dream, your dream audience guide down in the in the show notes. I don't want you to fill it out with things that you assume. I don't want you to fill it out with things that you asked perplexity for. I want you to fill it out with things that you know, things that you really know, right? Things that you understand. Identify the gaps in what you're not sure of, right? I still remember to this day, I was talking about content marketing, which I think is a lot more common of a phrase now, but it was jargon back when I was using it. My target audience didn't use content 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 it was. It was podcasting or blog writing or emails or social posts, whatever that happened to be. That's what content marketing was to them, not an overarching umbrella. When I explained it, they were like, 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 you create content based on what you learned, what your customer or client wants. Marketing has always been about understanding people. The tools have changed, but that truth that we're after, that resonation, that no-like and trust factor, that hasn't changed. Not since the beginning. So do me a favor, jump on into the show notes, grab a copy of the free guide that will help you define your target audience. And once you've filled it out, then you can start uploading it into your conversations with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whomever it is that you're talking to, and they can help start appealing to your audience with wording that's just not watered down and actually really appeals to them. Thank you again so much for tuning in today. I hope this gets you motivated to make a few phone calls and really understand your audience because it is so important. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.
