A marketer’s guide to talking to your audience

Here’s a thought experiment: You’re at an ice cream shop, picking a flavor for your foodie best friend. You’d probably go for something unique to delight them—brown butter sage, purple yam, maybe a black sesame. 

Now imagine you’re picking a flavor, but it’ll be served to every person who walks into the shop today. 

Suddenly, vanilla starts feeling pretty safe. Even inevitable. 

This is the “ice cream principle”: the idea that the more people you try to please, the blander your decisions become. And it’s happening in a big way across marketing right now, as generative AI drives content toward the most universally appealing, “vanilla” outputs it can. 

Today, the marketers who stand out are the ones who build their strategy on capturing and responding to real things their audience is saying—not catering to a bland common denominator. 

Emily Kramer, founder and creator of MKT1, has kept this principle in mind as she’s built out her 60K subscriber newsletter and marketing community. She plans her content calendar based on the conversations she has directly with her readers, regularly engaging with them through comments, LinkedIn polls, and surveys. 

As a result, her content is more pointed, interesting, and directly relevant to her readers’ needs and tastes.     

What LLMs want ≠ what people want 

Marketers today are under pressure to cater to SEO and AI search, making content that speaks to machines, not people. Meanwhile their audiences crave human connection and unique perspectives. 

When you forget about the human element, you end up treating audience research as a one-time activity, rather than a continuous conversation that drives your content strategy. 

“I think people get stuck in the old way of doing content, which honestly didn’t involve people as much,” says Emily. “We got into this pattern of thinking that content was SEO blog posts. But that doesn’t incorporate your audience.” 

While discoverability matters, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. It’s not enough for your audience to find your content; to convert, they have to like what they find.

“Search traffic is declining, and marketers want to make up that gap,” Emily adds. “But what’s actually happening is these second- and third-order effects of AI, where we see people don’t want AI-generated content. It’s the lowest common denominator.” 

A continuous conversation system for solo marketers 

In the fight against AI blandness, Emily has built a content strategy that treats audience conversations as a continuous, iterative process, rather than a periodic market research activity. And she manages to have all those conversations even as a solo marketer crunched for time. 

Here’s how she does it. 

Before you dive in: Pre-testing ideas 

Before she spends time on a deeper audience research project—like a full ICP interview or building out and analyzing a Typeform survey—Emily likes to gauge signals of early interest. 

This can look like: 

• Posting LinkedIn polls about topics she’s considering for a newsletter 
• Sharing rough diagrams or half-baked concepts for feedback as she drafts
• Looking at user engagement levels and comments to identify what people care about 
• Throwing out more general questions on social and in newsletters, asking readers about their biggest challenges 

This pre-testing helps direct the conversations Emily has, preventing wasted effort on content that nobody actually wants to read. 

Tactic: Add specific “pre-posts” to your calendar to feel out early signs of interest (or disinterest) about topics you may want to cover for your readers. 

While you’re researching: Dig into details 

Once she has an idea of the direction she wants to go, Emily uses surveys to collect deeper data about her audience. For example, a LinkedIn poll asking readers about their biggest marketing ops challenge might turn into a survey focused on attribution issues specifically. The findings can then be spun out into a full content series addressing an issue Emily knows her readers care about right now. 

Branded Typeforms adds a personal touch, so “the survey feels like part of the MKT1 brand experience,” she says. “It feels like a way for readers to participate, communicate, and be part of the things I’m putting out.” 

Capturing partial submissions, applying logic branching for different audience segments, and sharing her surveys across platforms helps Emily get more robust data. 

“My process is really iterative,” she says. “I take in a lot of opinions, but I’m in control of the final product, which leads to things that both resonate better and are also unique.” 

(Read more about Emily’s specific survey creation process here.) 

After you’ve listened: Plan, but stay flexible 

Once Emily has gathered those audience opinions—and followed up with them in comments, phone calls, and quick interviews—she can transform them into content that stands out in an AI-saturated market. 

This means creating content that directly addresses patterns she seeds in audience responses, features audience quotes and perspectives, and feeds into templates and resources based on actual workflows her readers have shared. 

Frequent audience check-ins mean frequent tweaks to her content calendar. Emily uses the insights she gathers to constantly adjust what she calls her “flexible, medium-term roadmap.”

Emily explains, “My content roadmap is very much shaped by the conversations that I’m having. As a result, a lot of the time I’ll put something out and someone will ask me: ‘How did you know this was the exact thing I was facing right now?’” 

Speak with specificity 

The ICP you need to reach is not a generic, faceless horde. They’re specific. And so are their needs, interests, challenges, and favorite ice cream flavors.  

As gen AI makes content (1) more prolific and (2) generic, B2B brands run the risk of looking inoffensive and utterly forgettable. 

The best way to stand out? Specific, opinionated content. 

The best way to create that content? Know what your audience is looking for. 

“Instead of just using LLMs to create content, we need to be making stuff that has a unique point of view,” says Emily. “You can use AI to help you brainstorm some of these angles, but what you really need is to involve your audience more.”

She adds, “Audience-driven content is so much better, and Typeforms are a great way to quickly gather a significant amount of information that can be used to shape content.”

Magic happens when you make your audience feel heard. When they see their actual challenges reflected in your content, they realize you’re having a two-way conversation. 

In a world of vanilla, be pistachio.