Using AI to Build Your Avatar and Your Content Plan

In my book I asked you to stop talking about a “target market” and start talking about a person. Give them a name. Decide where they live, what they drive, where they shop, what they worry about at night. Then stop asking “what does the market want?” and ask “what does Joe like?” It was a simple trick and it worked because a person is something you can have a conversation with. A market is not.

What has changed since then is that you can now have that conversation, with a tool that will play Joe convincingly enough to surface the questions you forgot to ask. That is the best use of AI in marketing I know of, and most owners never think to use it that way.

Start from the worksheet, not from scratch

The temptation is to open the tool and type “create a customer avatar for a landscaping company.” Do not. You will get the same generic profile as every other landscaper who typed that sentence, and you will have learned nothing about your customers. The tool does not know them. You do, imperfectly, and that imperfect knowledge is the raw material.

So begin with the avatar worksheet you filled out earlier in this course, every question on it and whatever you added. Paste the whole thing in, including the parts you were unsure about. Then ask the tool to do three things, one at a time. First, tell you what is missing or contradictory in what you wrote; a good tool will notice that a customer who “values quality above price” but “always shops around for three quotes” needs a closer look. Second, ask it what questions it would want answered before writing to this person. Third, ask it to write a one-page day-in-the-life of your avatar, from waking up to going to sleep, and read it as a customer would. Where does it ring false? Fix the worksheet there, not the story.

That is the pattern for everything in this lesson: your knowledge goes in, the tool sharpens, you decide.

Interview your avatar

Now the useful part. Tell the tool: “You are Jane, described above. I am going to ask you questions and I want you to answer as she would, honestly, including things she might not say to my face.” Then interview her.

What were you doing when you realized you needed this? What did you search for first? Who did you ask? What made you distrust the first company you looked at? What would make you pay more than the cheapest quote? What are you afraid will go wrong after you hire someone? What would make you tell a neighbor about the experience?

Do not treat the answers as facts. They are a wide list of plausible human reactions, drawn from an enormous amount of ordinary experience, and they are excellent at reminding you of the things your actual customers have said that you forgot to write down. When an answer surprises you, do not put it in the plan. Put it on a list of things to ask your next three real customers. The tool generates hypotheses. Your customers confirm them.

If you serve two clearly different kinds of customer, a homeowner and a property manager, say, build two avatars and interview both. You will find they need different words, and that alone will change your marketing.

From the interview to a plan you can keep

The interview will leave you with pages of questions, fears and moments. That is your content. Every question Jane asks is a post, an email paragraph or a page on your website that answers it. Every fear is a piece of reassurance you can show rather than claim: a photo of the crew cleaning up, a short explanation of your guarantee, a customer explaining what they were nervous about and what happened.

Ask the tool to organize it. Paste the interview back in and ask for a table with three columns: the question or fear, the format that fits it best (a photo post, a short video, an email, a page), and the moment in her decision when she needs it (before she searches, while comparing, after hiring). Then ask it to arrange twelve of them into a month at the cadence you decided on in the social media lesson, two or three a week, with one useful email. Cut anything you could not produce with your phone and an honest afternoon. A plan you cannot keep is a plan you will resent.

Keep the plan in whatever you already use, a spreadsheet, a notes app, the calendar in your scheduling tool. Then return to the avatar every quarter. Paste in the questions real customers actually asked you and ask the tool what has shifted. The avatar is never finished; you keep it up to date.

Paste your avatar worksheet into an AI tool and ask it what is missing. Fix the worksheet. Then run a twenty-question interview with your avatar and mark every answer that surprised you. Ask your next three real customers those exact questions. You will have a sharper avatar and the beginnings of a content plan by the end of the week.

Plan on two to three hours the first time, including fixing the worksheet, running the interview and laying out the month, and half an hour a quarter to keep it current. The tools cost nothing or a small subscription. The part that costs something is asking real customers the follow-up questions, and that is also the part that makes it worth doing.