Wondering why your AI keeps handing you rubbish? I might know. Could it be that you never actually told it who it’s talking to?
Most people type something like “write a social media post for small business owners” and then wonder why what comes back sounds like it was written for absolutely everyone and, therefore, absolutely no one. If you put vague information in, you’ll get vague information out that you can’t use.
The fix isn’t a cleverer prompt. It’s giving your AI one single, specific person to write to, not a demographic, not a target market, not “my ideal client.” One person, with a name, a life, and a reason to care about what you’re saying. That’s what worked so well for me when I started working out how to train my AI social media assistant to be a proper ally, not something else that needed a lot of extra work!
Why “Small Business Owners” Isn’t a Person
Think about how you actually talk to a friend over coffee versus how you’d address a room of three hundred strangers. One is warm, specific, and lands. The other is careful, general, and perhaps lacks some elements of the real you.
Your AI does the same thing you would. Give it a room full of strangers to write to, and it writes safely, generically, for everyone at once. Give it one person, and suddenly it has something to aim at.
What Your AI Actually Needs to Know
Before your AI can write like it knows your customer, you need to teach it about your customer. It needs three things spelling out, properly, not assumed.
Who the AI is to you, and who your reader is. Your AI needs to understand the relationship: it’s your collaborator, you’re the expert with the credentials and the experience, and the person on the other end is someone specific who hasn’t got where you are yet. Skip this, and it’ll write like it’s talking to a peer rather than a customer.
Exactly who it’s speaking to, and what actually moves them. Not just their job title or age bracket, but the emotional and practical triggers that make them stop scrolling. What are they afraid of? What do they secretly want? What’s the version of their life they’re hoping your product or service gets them closer to?
How it should sound while doing it. The same information delivered kindly lands completely differently to the same information delivered coldly. Your AI needs telling which one you want, every single time, or it’ll default to generic and slightly patronising.
A Person Called Amelia
In my own AI training documents, I don’t write to “female business owners aged 30 to 50.” I write to one person. I’ve given her a name, a business, a specific Tuesday morning where she’s staring at a blank screen wondering if her work is even interesting enough for anyone to care about. I’ve called her Amelia and I have worked so hard to define her to my AI that I feel like I know her just as well as I know my customers, which is exactly the point.
That’s the level of specificity that makes an AI-written post actually sound like it understands your customer, rather than any customer.
Where This Leaves You
If your AI-generated content has been sounding hollow, this could be why. It was never given a real person to write to, so it did the only thing it could: it wrote to everyone in the vague area you told it, which means it landed with no one.
This is one of the big things I teach inside Train Your AI Social Media Assistant in Sixty Minutes, how to build your own one-person training document, step by step, so your AI finally knows who it’s talking to before it writes a single word.
Grab your copy of Train Your AI Social Media Assistant in Sixty Minutes here
And if you’d like ongoing support putting this into practice, this course also lives inside the Vault as part of my Small & Supercharged Mastermind membership, alongside trainings, group coaching, and a community of rural, equestrian and canine business owners doing exactly this kind of work.
