There’s no doubt AI is changing marketing.
It’s never been easier to create content. Blog articles, social posts, ad copy, email campaigns, creative variations. Tasks that might have taken hours can now be done in minutes.
And overall, I think that’s a good thing.
Used well, AI can give marketers more time to focus on strategy, problem solving, relationship building and the bigger commercial challenges that actually drive growth.
But it does create a new challenge.
When everyone has access to the same tools, the same prompts and the same technology, it gets harder for businesses to stand out
We’re already seeing it, more content is being created than ever before, but a lot of it is starting to feel a bit samey. You can tell when content has been created using the same tools and prompts as everyone else.
That doesn’t mean AI-generated content is bad, far from it.
It’s that as it gets easier to create content, the things that make a business different become more important.
AI can help create content but it can’t replicate the experiences, opinions and quirks that make a person or business genuinely different.
The businesses that stand out will be the ones that still feel human
I don’t think this is just a marketing challenge, either. It’s an overall business challenge.
If products, services and content all start looking increasingly similar, customers will look for other signals when deciding who to buy from:
Who do they trust?
Who feels credible?
Who feels different from everyone else?
The things that are the hardest to fake.
So what should businesses do?
Before using AI to create content, ask:
- What can we bring to this that AI can’t? Your own experiences, customer questions, opinions, expertise and personality.
- Are you giving AI enough of our own material to work with? The more generic the input, the more generic the output is likely to be.
- Would someone recognise your business without seeing the logo? If not, there’s probably an opportunity to make it more distinctive.
The differentiator won’t be having access to AI, because everyone does. It’ll be what you do with it.