Finding Your Audience and Message

Two decisions only you can make and the Claude prompt that sharpens them until they are specific enough to write from

Before Claude writes a single word for you, two decisions have to be made and only you can make them.

Claude cannot tell you who your audience is. It cannot tell you what your message should be. Those are yours. But once you have decided, Claude is extremely good at sharpening the decisions until they are specific enough to write from.

This lesson walks you through both decisions and ends with the prompt that locks them into your MARKETING.md file.

The Three Decisions

There are exactly three things you need to pin down before anything else in this course works.

Decision 1: Name One Real Person

"Small business owners" is not an audience. It is a category. You end up writing to a crowd and writing to a crowd means writing to nobody in particular.

Narrow it until you could describe a single person you can picture.

Too vague: "entrepreneurs."

Better: "solo founders running a service business."

Specific enough: "a freelance web designer who has been doing this for two years, charges $300 to $600 per project, works with local small businesses, and keeps losing work to agencies that charge ten times as much."

The third version is someone you can picture. You know what keeps them up at night. You know what they would roll their eyes at. You know what would make them stop scrolling. That specificity is what you are after.

For community members specifically, your audience is often the version of yourself from 6 to 12 months ago. The person who was where you were before you discovered Claude Code. That is an audience you understand better than almost anyone.

Decision 2: Name Their Problem in Their Words, Not Yours

Write the problem the way your audience would complain about it to a friend at the pub, not the way you would describe your solution in a pitch deck.

"Inefficient customer acquisition strategy" is how you would say it. "I never know where my next job is coming from" is how they would actually say it.

"Suboptimal conversion rates" is how you would say it. "People visit my website and then just do not contact me" is how they would actually say it.

"Manual workflows with high error rates" is how you would say it. "I spend every Sunday copying data from one spreadsheet to another and I hate it" is how they would actually say it.

If you find yourself writing like a brochure, stop. Rewrite it as a complaint. Complaints are specific. Brochures are generic.

The easiest way to get this right is to write the sentence your ideal customer says to their partner when they are frustrated with the problem you solve.

Decision 3: The One Message

Out of everything true about what you do, pick the one thing you want this audience to believe after seeing your content.

Not a list. Not "I am fast, affordable, and experienced." One sentence.

Test it with this question: if someone read only this one sentence and nothing else you ever posted, would they understand who you are for, what problem you solve, and why you are the right person, and would they want to know more? If it takes a paragraph to explain, it is not focused enough yet.

Too many messages: "I build websites that are fast, mobile-friendly, affordable, SEO-optimised, and I have been doing this for ten years with great client results."

One message: "I build websites for local service businesses that actually bring in enquiries, in a week, without agency prices."

The second version says who it is for, what it does, and the two things that make it different. Everything else is detail.

How to Get Claude to Sharpen These

You make the decisions. Claude checks whether they are specific enough.

Copy this prompt into Claude, fill in your rough drafts, and send it:

I am defining my audience and message for content marketing.

Here is my rough draft:

Audience (one specific person): [YOUR DRAFT]
Their problem, in their words: [YOUR DRAFT]
My one message: [YOUR DRAFT]

Review each of these and give me honest feedback:

1. Audience: Is this specific enough to picture one real human being including their

situation, their day, and their frustrations? Or is it still a category? If it is

still a category, ask me 2 to 3 questions to help me narrow it.

1. Problem: Does this sound like something a real person would actually say out loud

or does it sound like marketing language? If it sounds like marketing, rewrite it

the way someone would complain about it to a friend.

1. One message: Is this genuinely one idea or is it secretly two or three ideas

compressed into one sentence? If it is multiple ideas, tell me which one is the

sharpest and why, and rewrite just that one.

Do not write any marketing content yet. Only help me sharpen these three inputs.

This is a back-and-forth conversation. Push back on Claude's suggestions. You know your audience better than it does. Claude's job here is only to catch vagueness, not to make decisions for you.

Common Mistakes

Writing for too wide an audience to avoid leaving anyone out. "I want to reach anyone who might need this" sounds reasonable. In practice it means your content never says anything specific enough to make anyone stop scrolling. Narrowing your audience does not mean fewer people. It means the right people recognise themselves immediately.

Writing the message as a list of features. "Fast, affordable, experienced, and reliable" describes half of all service businesses. It does not give anyone a reason to pay attention to you specifically. One sharp claim beats a list of reasonable ones every time.

Changing your audience every week based on what you feel like writing about. This is why you write it down and save it. Your audience and message should hold steady for months. You will update them eventually but it should be a deliberate decision and not a drift.

Save It to MARKETING.md

Once you are happy with all three, add them to your MARKETING.md file:

## Audience

[FINAL: one specific person you can picture]

## Their Problem (In Their Words)

[FINAL: how they would complain about it to a friend]

## My One Message

[FINAL: one sentence covering who it is for, what it does, and what makes it different]

Every prompt in the rest of this course references this file with @MARKETING.md. If this is not written down, every Claude session starts from scratch and everything you produce will feel inconsistent because it is.

Your Action Right Now

Write your three rough drafts covering audience, problem, and message. Run the Claude prompt above to pressure-test them. Save the sharpened versions to MARKETING.md before moving to the next lesson.

Everything after this point assumes this file exists and is filled in.