Using AI in marketing without sounding like everyone else

Most organisations are already using AI to write things. Not as a policy, usually. Someone tried it, it saved an afternoon, and now it is part of how the newsletter gets written.

The risk is not that the output is bad. It is that the output is fine. Fine, fluent, and indistinguishable from what every other organisation in your sector published that week. If your audience cannot tell your writing from a competitor’s, you have lost something you were not tracking.

What these tools are actually good at

Be specific about the jobs, and the value gets much clearer.

• Getting past a blank page. Producing a rough structure you then argue with is faster than staring at nothing.
• Reformatting what you already wrote. Turning a finished article into five social posts, or a long email into a short one.
• Repetitive variations. Twelve versions of an ad headline, product descriptions in a consistent pattern, alt text for a batch of images.
• Editing your own draft. Ask what is unclear, what a sceptical reader would object to, what could be cut. It is often better as a critic than as an author.
• Summarising input. Two hundred survey comments into recurring themes, which you then read yourself.
• Translation drafts. A useful starting point for a bilingual site, never the final text for anything public-facing.

What it is bad at, and will stay bad at

It does not know anything about your organisation that you did not tell it. So it cannot supply the things that make writing worth reading: the objection your customers actually raise on the phone, the thing you got wrong in your second year, the reason you price the way you do, the phrase your longest-serving colleague always uses.

It will also produce facts that are not facts. Statistics, studies, quotes, dates. They read plausibly, which is exactly the problem. Anything numeric or attributed has to be checked against a source you can see, or removed.

And it defaults to a register: balanced, enthusiastic, slightly corporate, fond of tricolons and of telling you what it is about to tell you. Readers have learned to recognise it.

Write down your voice before you automate it

You cannot protect something you have never described. A voice guide does not need to be long. One page is enough if it is concrete.

• Words you use. Do you say clients, customers, members, partners? Pick one.
• Words you never use. Ours bans synergy, best-in-class and passionate, among others. Yours will have its own list. Writing the ban down is what makes it enforceable.
• Person and tense. Do you address the reader as “you”? Do you say “we” or the organisation’s name?
• Sentence length. Short and plain, or longer and more formal. Both are defensible. Drifting between them is not.
• Three paragraphs you are proud of. Real ones, from your own material. This is the most useful part of the whole document, both for people and for a tool.

Paste that guide in every time. Generic instructions produce generic output; a tool given your banned-word list and three samples of your real writing produces something noticeably closer to yours.

A workflow that holds up

The order matters more than the tool.

• Decide the point yourself. One sentence: what the reader should know or do afterwards. A human decides this, always.
• Supply the raw material. Your notes, the real questions customers ask, the actual details. This is where the substance comes from.
• Draft. With the tool, with the voice guide attached.
• Cut hard. Delete every sentence that could appear in any organisation’s article. Usually the opening paragraph goes first.
• Add what only you know. A specific, a caveat, an example, a limitation. This is the step people skip, and it is the whole job.
• Check every fact. Numbers, names, dates, links. If you cannot verify it, cut it and make the point without it.
• Read it aloud. If it does not sound like a person in your organisation talking, it is not finished.

Where to draw a hard line

Some material should not be generated at all. Anything written in a named person’s voice without their sign-off. Testimonials and case studies, always. Statements about safety, eligibility, legal or medical matters. Apologies. Condolences. Anything a regulator or a funder might read closely.

Also be careful what you paste in. Client data, unpublished financials, personal information about staff or service users. Many tools retain what you send them. If you would not email it to a supplier, do not put it in a prompt.

Judge it on the same numbers as everything else

Producing four times as much content is not a result. If output tripled and enquiries did not move, you have made more work for your audience and none for yourself.

Watch the same things you watched before: enquiries, replies, sign-ups, the questions people ask you. Speeding up production does not change which numbers count.

A reasonable position

Use it for the mechanical parts. Keep the judgement, the specifics and the final read for a person. Write your voice down this month, even roughly, and the rest of the decisions get much easier to make.