Using AI to understand your audience's motivations

We're now onto our inspiration section, where we explore the ingredients we need to put into our minds to produce sparkling ideas. This is where creativity meets strategy. They fall in love, settle down, and have lots of little idea babies. Now, if you're crafting something that's meant to change how people think, feel, or do, be it an advert, a story, a piece of art, or a truly delicious sandwich, it's essential to know what tickles your audience's fancy. If they're motivated by saving money, telling them that your product has been stitched by only the finest Italian grandmothers is unlikely to entice them out of their armchair. Likewise, if your audience craves exclusivity, telling them that you're the number one selling chocolate bar in North America is as appealing as a kill smoothie as a candy store. Understanding your audience's motivation helps you communicate a valuable benefit to them. It's like learning their specific language and then using it to write a love song. This prompt asks for information about your audience and what your offering is, and in return, it delivers a report that gives you a lot more understanding about what your audience is looking for and how they relate to the product that you're selling. Okay, let's jump in. Let's take it for a test drive. So let's have a look at our prompt here. "You are an insightful and empathetic strategist with a deep understanding of what motivates people to take action. I want you to give me a better understanding of {audience} and their relationship with our {offering}. Deliver your response in markdown without a code box with the following elements." Okay, here we go. This is a list of things that we're asking it to give us: A clever headline that outlines the specific needs of this audience. A short paragraph describing the audience. A table that outlines their relationship with the offering with the columns: "needs", "how they're currently filling needs", "how they can fill the needs better". A list of what would motivate them to choose our offering over an alternative. A list of what resistance they might have to change their current behavior. A suggestion of what the most persuasive message might be to change this audience's behavior from what they're currently doing to choosing our offering instead. So we're really trying to get into their minds here. What are they currently doing? What should they be doing? How can we get them from where they are to where we want them to be? It's really important. What we're looking here is how can we motivate them to transform themselves from state A to state B? That's what this is about. It's something that I teach a lot, I'm very passionate about. Right. Let's have a look here. We'll put in something you're probably going to be quite familiar with. So for our audience and our offering, our audience are busy people who want to eat healthy without the hassle. Okay. The offering is instant meals with all the nutrients you need and natural ingredients. You're probably familiar with this kind of product, so let's have a look to see what it gives us here. Okay, great. Now, remember, this is just the output of an AI. You would want to properly augment this with human thinking. If you've got some human strategy, use that instead, okay? Or merge the two together to create something useful. But this can just help us get a bit more of an idea about our audience, where they are, what their minds are like, what their resistance could be. And that can be really, really useful. So here, the Clever Headline, saying as it is, give a Clever Headline: Healthy Eating Made Simple: Fueling the Busy Lives of Today With Nutrient-Rich, Instant Meals. Okay. That says what it is quite clearly. These are busy individuals often juggling work, family, personal commitments. Table outlines the relationship with the offerings, what their needs, quick meal solutions, nutrient-rich food, convenient and easy to make. List of what might motivate them to choose our offering over the alternative: Time savings for instant preparation, health benefits from natural, nutrient-dense ingredients, variety and meal options to prevent boredom, competitive pricing with current convenience food, environmental consciousness with sustainable packaging. Of course, we don't know if that's true. There's things in there that we would need to check, so we can't take all of this stuff as being absolute gospel, as being the absolute truth. We have to check it to make sure that what it's giving us is correct. But this can be a great place for us to start, and it can just help us to understand our audience a little bit better so that we can be more persuasive, more effective when we're actually talking to them. It's pretty good, isn't it? But remember, you have to check all the details first if you're really going to rely on it. If you've got actual research, maybe consult that first. But this prompt is a great addition. As a bonus, it might help you better understand someone in your own life. In fact, I wonder what it can tell me about my weird Uncle Norman. Although I don't even think technology can decipher that guy, probably can't get the signals through his tinfoil hat.