AI is Not Your New Marketing Employee
- Dylan von Rambow
- Jun 25
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 20
Sorry not sorry! The marketing Millennial in your office cannot be replaced by AI.
There has been a click-baity trend going through the advertising circuits on social media and YouTube stating that X or Y major company is so successful because AI does all of their content creation, or that you can have your content look exactly like X or Y's content simply by using AI. And if it were that simple, everyone would do it and all the problems of marketing would be solved already. I'm still waiting.
The trouble here is that small business owners genuinely do not have the time to become marketing specialists. We're too busy losing sleep over payroll, rent, utilities, licenses, insurance, zoning, taxes, and other BS to have any time during the day to be creative. The worst people for this are people who own marketing firms themselves (guilty as charged!), who spend time making every other business look good while neglecting their own image (ouch).
AI is not your new marketing hire, but it is a fantastic tool - you just need a competent person behind it to actually make good use of it. Keep reading to learn how to leverage AI, and why marketing professionals are so valuable.
Why AI Won't Replace Your Marketing Employee
It's a devilishly intoxicating thought; Save $60,000 a year by axing that one marketing employee and just have a cheap AI do it all. The problem is that it's simply not going to happen (at least not at the time of this blog post).
All commercially available AI's require prompts. This may sound simple - just tell it to write something and it will. But every marketing person can tell you that simply asking AI to do something is going to yield the same results as anyone else who does it. That result is usually pretty mundane. If you want marketing that is identical to your competition, does not make you stand out in any way, and in many cases makes incorrect assumptions about your business, then go ahead - hire the AI.
So here's the big one: AI is never going to come up with a strategy and execute that strategy on its own. This is the biggest flex that marketers have over AI right now, and the number one reason that your marketing employee isn't completely replaceable by AI. Your marketing employee is going to wake up and come in to the office (or work remotely, whatever), and is going to spend their time analyzing data, creating content, implementing strategies, keeping an eye on competitors, adjusting campaigns, etc etc etc all unprompted. That's their JOB. When your marketing professional monitors conversions, compares progress to KPIs, selects different marketing mediums and campaign lengths, creates content, and makes countless adjustments to your Google Ads or Meta boosted posts, they do it without you specifically asking them to do it (I hope!). AI will never do that unprompted. As a business owner, you will spend more time asking AI to do those things than you will on your actual role as the CEO or ED or Owner/Operator.
AI is Generating Content for Everyone - Including Your Competition
I promise I'm not an AI hater! I just need you to understand that AI is a tool, not a replacement for your marketing hire.
One thing I teach in my copywriting classes is that AI will not give you completely new content ever. I demonstrate this by posing as two completely different small business owners - both in the same industry - and asking AI to write an ad or a social media post for me. To the untrained eye it does exactly that - I get two different social posts or ads written up so... success! Right? Wrong.
Both posts generated almost identical content (!), which means "Dave's Tires Inc." and "Alberta TireLand" are getting almost identical assets even though they are competitors! Imagine if your marketing employee was also making content for your competitor, and using the same templates and wording and everything. That would be grounds to dismiss them.
Worse, AI is meant to generate content and be convincing, so sometimes it just makes stuff up to sound good. Recently this phenomenon has been given the name "AI hallucination". One AI wrote and ad for my fictional tire company that claimed that we do a money back guarantee and a 14-Day return window... I never once gave it any information remotely close to that. Can you imagine if I actually owned a tire shop and posted that? That's policy-level decision making being generated by AI, and could negatively affect my business!
AI Branding Tools - Slick When Used Correctly... by a Marketing Professional!
I have played around with a number of AI tools that are on the market, and they can be pretty slick. But I also have formal education and a decade of experience in marketing and communications. Therefore, altering AI-generated content to better suit my needs is a little easier for me than it is for the Owner/Operator of a small engine repair shop. I can't tell you how to repair a small engine, and that Owner/Operator probably can't create a brand package for their business.
Some apps will take your prompts and some data, and churn out a "brand" with a bunch of different iterations that can be theoretically published across a number of other apps and websites. But remember, it is doing that for everyone, and at some point you will stumble across another brand that looks almost identical to yours, with similar placements. Even if it is a shoe company, and you own a small engine repair company, you don't want your businesses to look identical or similar.
If you have already put time and money into a quality brand package, then these tools are actually pretty useful. They take your assets and recombine them in ways that you may not have imagined before. Google does this all the time with it's Google Ads software; It takes headlines, prompts, graphic and video assets, sitelinks, and jumbles them all together to publish digital ads without you needing to do anything more. And it works! But if you don't already have a strong understanding of your brand, your positioning, your tone, or if you don't have good graphics, it will not be nearly as effective, and you will fail to drive conversions or sales. So yes, these tools are super useful - to marketing professionals.
But What if I don't Have a Marketing Professional in my Office?
If you don't have a marketing professional in your office, hire a consultant! Often consultants are cheaper in the short term and can get you off the ground while you find a full-time hire. All AI iterations and content mashups start with good content up front. Quality input, quality output. A good consultant or marketing professional makes everything look easy because you're seeing the end result, not the grind it took to get there.
Using AI tools to help bolster your marketing and branding isn't a bad idea - you just need well thought out content going in first! Focus on developing a brand first, and creating a few solid images to go along with your copy. With a few quality assets up-front, you can leverage AI to make it all go a little further. Asking AI to come up with the initial content will give you the same content that everyone else is making - but spending time and money on actually creating a strong, well-researched brand up front will ultimately save you money and will help generate leads and sales before AI even enters the chat.
And if you're looking for help in that area, Rambow Consulting Group has got you covered! We specialize in content creation, branding, web design, copywriting, ad writing and more! Click here to contact us today and get a free quote. We will help you get to a place where you actually CAN use AI to help create content for you. We will even sit with your existing marketing team and create guides and planning materials to help your team grow.
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