Using AI for Better Marketing, Not Faster Marketing

Get More Done In Less Time?

Every article, webinar, and LinkedIn hot take about AI in marketing seems to circle back to the same promise: getting more done in less time. Write a blog post in 20 minutes. Build a month of social content in an afternoon. Cut your agency retainer in half. Save, save, save.

I’m not here to say AI can’t help you do things faster or automate tedious, repetitive tasks, since it clearly can. But what excites me most about AI in content marketing has nothing to do with the clock.

For me, AI’s true power is in helping me do better work, not faster work. With AI, I can create better quality content that is more relevant and connected to what the people I’m trying to reach actually care about.

Quality is the goal. AI can help you get there but only if you’re the one calling the shots.

The Efficiency Conversation Is Dominating

To be fair, the efficiency case for AI is a reasonable one. Many businesses are stretched thin with small marketing teams and big budget constraints. If a tool can help produce a solid first draft faster, why not?

But the conversation has gotten pretty one-dimensional. Most of what you’ll read about AI in content marketing treats it as a production tool, like a faster typewriter. 

That framing makes sense for operations, but it doesn’t always make sense for marketing – or any task where quality output is critical.

Related: What People Are Getting Wrong About AI in Content Marketing

The Risk Of Optimizing For Efficiency

When efficiency becomes your number one goal, you run the risk of creating content that doesn’t add anything new or valuable for customers. It just rehashes what’s already out there or what can be answered by Google’s AI overviews.

When AI is used primarily to produce faster, the content is just… fine. It might rank for a while, but it doesn’t build trust, and it doesn’t differentiate.

There’s also a subtler problem. When you’re optimizing for speed and volume, the human judgment steps, the ones that actually make content good, are the first things to get tossed. Fewer strategic questions asked, less time spent on audience research, and more reliance on AI to handle tasks that shouldn’t be outsourced to a machine.

The irony is that the more everyone uses AI to go faster, the more valuable it becomes to use AI to go deeper. If your competitors are producing volume, they’re all going to end up sounding the same. Meanwhile, you can produce something worth reading by going against the grain and giving readers fresh perspectives.

The Moment That Shifted My Perspective on Creating With AI

Andy Crestodina is the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios and one of the more thoughtful voices on content marketing and SEO. He’s a firm believer in the power of AI and uses it constantly. But his framing of why he uses it is different from most. At a recent conference I attended he said the following:

That was a mic drop moment for me. I paused and wrote it down. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

Speed isn’t bad, but making speed your primary metric of success in content production leads you to produce slop. And you and I both know there’s already too much AI slop out there.. 

If the benchmark is hours saved, you’ll use AI to shorten the process. If the benchmark is winning, you’ll use AI to make the output better than it would have been without it. Those are two very different applications of the same tool.

Andy’s approach, as I understand it, leans toward using AI to go deeper on research, to stress-test ideas, to find angles that a human alone might miss. 

What “Winning” Actually Looks Like In Marketing

Let’s define what winning means in this context. Because it’s not just closing more deals (though that’s part of it).

Winning in marketing looks like:

• A potential customer reading your content and thinking, “this is exactly my situation.”
• It’s your messaging cutting through where a competitor’s doesn’t, because it better resonates with potential customers. 
• A piece of content that is genuinely valuable and actually helps someone make a decision, rather than adding to the noise.
• Showing up in the right search results for the right reasons.

None of those things happen because you published faster. They’re the result of understanding your audience better, asking the right strategic questions, and writing with more precision.

That’s where AI becomes genuinely interesting to me.

How I Use AI To Create Better Content

I use AI across a range of marketing tasks, and the times it has made the biggest difference have been when it’s helped me go deeper. 

Finding Content Gaps Before Choosing A Topic

One of my favorite uses of AI is auditing content opportunities. Instead of going with my gut on what to write next, I’ll ask:

“Here are the top 10 articles ranking for [keyword]. Analyze our website and blog to find gaps in our content. Define areas where we could a) make simple edits to a post to fill the gap or b) suggest blog post subjects that we need to cover in detail.”

This is where LLMs shine, and from personal experience, I can tell you that it’s a tedious task to do manually. Besides, AI is much better at gap analysis than a human. Flagging these content opportunities ensures you’re choosing topics grounded in what’s missing. 

Optimizing for speed would be to simply use AI to fill a content calendar, but optimizing for output means creating a content calendar that fills gaps.

Understanding Your Audience Before Writing A Word

Before drafting content, I like to use AI to give me a fuller picture of the audience I want to reach. I like prompting with something more like:

I’m writing a piece for marketing managers at mission-driven organizations who are being asked to justify their AI investments to leadership. What are the most common objections they face, and what evidence-based arguments would resonate most with a skeptical CFO?

That prompt doesn’t produce the article, but it helps understand what might be going through my target audience’s mind when they start reading my article. That understanding leads to content that actually speaks to the person reading it.

Sharpening Positioning And Messaging

When I’m working on messaging for a campaign or landing page, I’ll run a prompt like:

Here’s the value proposition we’re working with. Play devil’s advocate. What would a skeptical potential customer push back on, and what would make this more credible to someone who has been burned by marketing before?

This doesn’t help me go faster. If anything it adds a step I wasn’t taking before. But getting a second opinion on my messaging consistently surfaces blind spots worth addressing. It’s still on me to decide what’s relevant, but AI gives me better input before I make that call.

Related: 10 AI Prompts to Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy 

Using Your Experience And Expertise To Iterate

All of these tips and prompts are great but you still don’t want to incorporate AI output into your marketing without running it through your own judgment. A quick vibe check is essential. 

So before anything AI helps you write goes out the door, ask yourself:

1. What do I know that no LLM could? Pull from client conversations, sales calls, patterns you’ve noticed over years that nobody’s bothered to write down. If your content could have been written by any competitor running the same prompt, you haven’t added enough of yourself yet.
2. Was this written in the right voice? Even with the most complete voice and tone instructions, AI can still draft in a generic voice that repeats word choice and sentence structure. Be sure to rewrite anything that doesn’t quite sound right.  
3. Is this actually true? AI still hallucinates and states things with total confidence even when it’s a complete lie. Check every stat and claim before publishing anything. 

Take the time to have conversations with your LLM of choice. Heck, have conversations with your human team!

The best ideas I’ve gotten from AI weren’t ideas it gave me, but ideas that the output made me think of. I’ll ask Claude for three suggestions of how to word something, and I won’t like any of them. But reading them sparks a fourth angle I hadn’t considered. 

That’s the difference between using AI to go faster and using AI to win. Going faster means shipping the first AI draft, while going deeper means using that first draft as a starting point for your own judgement.

That’s where the magic is.

A Different Question To Ask About AI

So here’s the reframe (thank you, Andy!). Instead of asking “how can AI save me time on this?”, try asking “how can AI help me do this better than I could before?”

Those questions lead to very different tool use.

“Save me time” leads to AI as a first-draft machine. “Help me do better” leads to AI as a research partner, a devil’s advocate, a gap-finder, a pressure-tester of your own assumptions.

The second version takes more intention. It requires you to actually engage with what AI is producing rather than accepting it at face value. But the outputs are worth it.

FAQ

Is it bad to use AI to save time on marketing?

No. Using AI to work more efficiently is completely reasonable. The issue comes when speed becomes the only goal, and quality, audience understanding, and strategic thinking get left behind. Used well, AI can make both your process faster and your output better.

How do I use AI to improve content quality rather than just speed?

Start by using AI earlier in the process, before you write. Use it for audience research, content gap analysis, and messaging pressure-testing. The goal is better inputs so you produce better outputs, not just faster ones. The prompt examples in this article are a good starting point.

Does using AI mean my content is less original?

Not if you’re using it to produce deeper content that resonates with your audience. AI is a tool. What makes content original is the perspective and the depth of understanding, not whether AI was involved in the process.

I Use AI Every Day

But the reason I use it isn’t to get through tasks faster. The goal is better marketing. That means thoughtfully using every tool available, including AI, in service of understanding people more clearly and communicating with them more effectively.

Read More: Digital Marketing in the Age of AI 

Sources