Ask AI to write a social media post and you'll have one in seconds.
Ask it for 10 marketing ideas and you'll probably get 10.
Need an email campaign, blog outline, advertisement or landing page? AI can produce those too.
It's extraordinary technology.
But there's a problem.
AI can give you a very polished answer to the wrong marketing question.
And because it can produce that answer so quickly, businesses can end up doing more marketing without necessarily doing better marketing.
That's the AI marketing trap.
Much of the conversation around AI and marketing has focused on prompting.
What's the perfect prompt?
Which AI tool should I use?
How do I get ChatGPT to write better social posts?
Those are useful questions. But they're not necessarily the most important ones.
Before asking AI to create your marketing, there are bigger questions:
Who are you trying to attract?
What are they really trying to achieve?
Why would they choose you?
Is your offer actually compelling?
What should you be saying that matters to them?
What needs to happen before they're ready to buy?
AI doesn't automatically know the answers.
Give it very little business context and it will fill in the gaps. The result can sound remarkably professional while still being generic, predictable or simply wrong for your business.
Or, as we say in our AIM AI Marketing Workshop:
Garbage in. AI. Polished garbage out.
This is one of the most important shifts businesses can make when using AI for marketing.
Customers don't necessarily buy the thing you sell.
They buy what they believe that thing will do for them.
Someone looking for an accountant isn't simply buying accounting services. They might be looking for greater financial confidence.
Someone visiting a dentist isn't simply buying a dental procedure. They may want to stop worrying about a problem or feel confident about their smile again.
A business engaging a marketing company isn't buying blogs, social posts or advertisements. Ultimately, it may be looking for more predictable growth and greater confidence about where its next customers will come from.
The product is what you provide.
The outcome is what your customer cares about.
That's an important distinction when working with AI.
Instead of immediately asking:
“Write an advertisement for my product.”
We need to do some thinking first.
What does the customer want to move away from?
Frustration? Risk? Cost? Uncertainty? Wasted time? Stress?
And what do they want to move towards?
Confidence? Growth? Convenience? Security? Freedom? Recognition? A better result?
Suddenly, the marketing conversation becomes much more interesting.
And AI becomes considerably more useful.
This is where we believe the real opportunity lies.
AI is an extraordinary production tool, but it can also be a very capable thinking partner.
Give it the right business context and you can use it to explore possibilities, identify assumptions, examine customer motivations, test an offer, consider alternative positioning and question your marketing decisions.
The important word is explore.
AI isn't your customer.
It doesn't replace customer conversations, market knowledge, business experience, data or human judgement.
It can generate hypotheses extraordinarily quickly.
Your market tells you whether they're true.
That's a much more useful relationship with AI than simply asking it to produce another Facebook post.
There's another uncomfortable possibility when marketing isn't working.
Sometimes the marketing isn't the problem.
The offer is.
A business can respond to poor results by producing more content, spending more on advertising or launching another campaign.
AI makes all of that easier.
But making a weak offer more visible doesn't necessarily make it more desirable.
Before asking:
“How can I market this more?”
It can be much more valuable to ask:
“How could I make this more valuable to the customer?”
Could the outcome be stronger?
Could the perceived risk be lower?
Could it be easier to understand?
Could customers achieve the result faster or with less effort?
Could something be added, removed, packaged or explained differently?
This is where AI and experienced human judgement can work particularly well together.
AI can help generate possibilities at speed.
You decide which possibilities make commercial sense.
There's also a bigger reason why generating individual pieces of content isn't enough.
Most customers don't:
See an ad → Buy.
They discover you.
They try to understand you.
They look for reasons to trust you.
They consider whether you're right for them.
Then, perhaps, they act.
And the relationship shouldn't end there. Great businesses continue delivering value, delighting customers and creating reasons for people to return, review, refer and advocate.
That's why at Vermilion Pinstripes we think about marketing as a connected growth engine:
ATTRACT → ENGAGE → CONVERT → DELIVER → DELIGHT → AMPLIFY
AI can play a role throughout that engine.
But AI isn't the engine.
Your strategy, customer understanding, offer, message, experience, systems, people and technology all have to work together.
There is one AI habit almost every business owner can adopt immediately.
Stop asking AI only to agree with you.
If you tell AI:
“This is my marketing strategy. Tell me why it's good.”
don't be surprised when it finds reasons to tell you it's good.
Instead, ask it to challenge you.
Try questions such as:
“What am I missing?”
“What assumptions am I making?”
“What would make this offer less compelling to my target customer?”
“Argue against this marketing strategy.”
“What would a sceptical customer question?”
You haven't handed responsibility for the decision to AI.
You've used AI to broaden your thinking before you make the decision.
That distinction matters.
AI gives small and growing businesses access to capabilities that would have been extraordinarily expensive or time-consuming only a few years ago.
But access to more technology doesn't remove the need for good strategy.
It makes good strategy more important.
The competitive advantage isn't going to come from producing the most content or knowing the cleverest prompts.
It will come from knowing what deserves to be accelerated.
At Vermilion Pinstripes, that's the thinking behind our AIM approach: Analyse. Improve. Market.
Understand the opportunity before rushing to market.
Improve what you're offering and how you're communicating its value.
Then use AI, modern marketing and technology to take it to market more effectively.
Because AI doesn't replace marketing strategy.
AI accelerates execution. Strategy gives it direction.
And when the two work together, that's when things get interesting.
Is AI helping you do more marketing, or helping you make better marketing decisions?
Vermilion Pinstripes helps businesses combine modern marketing strategy, AI and technology to build connected growth engines designed around the customer and commercial outcomes.
Talk to us about AIM and the Modern Marketing Growth Engine.