How to Use AI in Your Marketing Without Losing Your Brand Voice
I use AI in my business pretty much every week, so I’m definitely not about to sit here and pretend I think we should all throw ChatGPT in the bin and go back to doing everything the slow way.
I love it for loads of things. It helps me organise messy thoughts, structure ideas, summarise information and generally make sense of the 400 things floating around my brain at any given time.
Buuuut I also think a LOT of the internet currently looks like it has been put through exactly the same boring little AI blender. You can feel it. The LinkedIn post with the suspiciously dramatic opening and fifteen perfectly tidy one-line paragraphs. The website copy that sounds polished and professional but could belong to literally anybody in the same industry. The email saying all the technically correct things without ever making you feel like there’s an actual person on the other side.
It’s all perfectly fine. But I think fine is becoming the problem.
AI has made it unbelievably easy for all of us to create more content, faster than ever before. But when everyone has access to the same tools, similar prompts, and increasingly polished outputs, sounding like an actual human has become a VERY good way to stand out.
That matters even more if you’re a coach, consultant, therapist or service provider, because people aren’t only buying information from you, they aren’t only buying your knowledge. They’re buying your perspective, judgement, personality, experience, and the feeling they get from being in your world.
So for me, the interesting question isn’t really whether we should use AI in our marketing. It’s how much of our own thinking we’re willing to hand over to a robot.
AI isn’t the problem. Generic thinking is.
I’m very much not in the “AI is terrible and nobody should use it” camp. Do I think there are loads of completely valid concerns around it? absooooolutely. There are parts of AI that I feel uncomfortable with too, and I completely understand why some people choose not to use it at all.
But I also think telling everyone to simply “never use AI” is a little unrealistic, especially for coaches + service providers who are often running the whole darn business themselves. You can absolutely choose tools that align more closely with your values, use AI in a more limited way, or decide it isn’t for you at all.
For me personally, I do use it, and I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t made certain parts of my work much easier. The bit I’m much more cautious about is letting AI become the source of the idea rather than something that helps me organise and shape what’s already in my head.
Say you’re a leadership coach. There’s a HUGE difference between opening ChatGPT and asking:
“Write me a LinkedIn post about leadership.”
...then copy-pasting whatever comes back, and starting with something YOU have actually noticed through doing your work.
Maybe three clients have mentioned recently that they feel responsible for having all the answers. Maybe one of them realised during a session that constantly jumping in to solve problems was actually stopping her team from becoming more confident. Maybe after years of working with senior leaders, you’ve noticed that some of the people who look the most self-assured externally are privately questioning themselves all the time.
THAT is the interesting bit. You’ve got an observation, experience + point of view that came from actually doing the work.
AI is very good at producing a competent average answer based on a massive amount of existing information. That can be useful, but I don’t think your marketing should be aiming for average.
Give AI your thoughts first... then take the writing back
When I say I use AI to help with content, I do not mean I brain dump into ChatGPT, ask it to write the post, and then copy + paste whatever comes back. I genuinely never do that.
My brain dump is usually the starting point. I might give AI a load of messy thoughts and ask it to help me spot themes, work out how they fit into my content strategy, decide which idea is strongest, or give me a rough structure to work from. And honestly, that part is REALLY useful for me. It saves a lot of staring-at-a-blank-Notion-page time
But once it starts becoming actual content, I’m back in it. I rewrite things in the way I’d actually say them. I read sentences out loud and if I can hear that I would never naturally say something like that, it’s gone. Sometimes I like the idea but hate the structure, so I completely rearrange it. Sometimes I rewrite half the post. Sometimes the AI version is so polished and AI-ish that I keep the underlying thought and write the whole thing myself.
And honestly, you can spend soooo long engineering the “perfect” prompt to make AI imitate your tone of voice that at some point you’ve written four paragraphs explaining exactly how you would write the post... you may as well just write it.
For me, the value is much more in helping me make sense of the mess before I start. It helps me get the raw thoughts out of my head, see patterns and make a plan. Then I still have to put me back into it. Yes, that takes more time than pressing a button and copying the response. But personally, I think it’s time well spent.
Your imperfect parts are often the parts people remember
One of the strangest things about using AI for writing is how quickly it tries to make everything “better”. Cleaner grammar, stronger hooks, neater sentences, more polished wording, perfect structure.
And sometimes the things it wants to clean up are exactly the things that make you sound like you. I use elongated words all the time. I’ll write “reaaaally” or “buuuut”. I use far too many dots at the end of sentences... Sometimes I start bullet points with lowercase letters because that’s just how I naturally type them out.
Could AI make all of that tidier? obviously it could.
But do I want it to? mmmm not really.
Those little quirks build familiarity over time. They show there’s an actual person behind the words, and when someone reads enough of your writing, they start to hear you in it. That’s part of a brand voice too!
Imagine our leadership coach naturally uses phrases like “stop trying to be the smartest person in the room” and constantly jokes about recovering perfectionists. Maybe she’s direct, a little dry, very warm, and has a way of explaining leadership that makes something complicated feel really normal and human. If every post gets put through AI until it sounds polished and “professional”, a lot of that disappears.
Your brand voice isn’t choosing three words like “warm, confident and approachable”, sticking them into a prompt and expecting unique content to magically come out the other end. It’s the patterns in how you naturally communicate, the things you notice, the phrases you repeat, the opinions you have and the way you explain something when you’re not consciously trying to sound impressive.
If AI smooths all of that away, the writing might technically become better while the brand becomes a lot less interesting and personal.
Be especially careful with AI on your website
I think websites are one of the places where coaches + service providers need to be particularly picky about how much AI they let in. Your website isn’t just somewhere you store information about your business. It’s one of the main places somebody goes when they’re deciding whether they trust you enough to take the next step.
Imagine somebody has been following our leadership coach on LinkedIn for a while. They like her posts, maybe they’ve listened to a podcast interview she did, and then something happens at work that makes them think, “actually... I might need some help with this.”
They land on her website and start trying to work out whether she understands the problem they’re struggling with, whether she has the experience to help, how her approach is different, what working together actually looks like, whether she’s helped somebody like them before, and whether the investment feels worth it.
They’re also getting a feel for HER…
Would I actually like talking to this person every other week for six months?
Would she challenge me?
Would she understand me?
Does the way she thinks resonate with me?
Generic AI copy makes all of that harder because the specificity + personality gets ironed out. You end up with phrases like “step into your fullest potential”, “unlock the next level of your leadership” or “create lasting transformation”. They sound fine... they could also be written about almost anybody.
If you’re using AI to help with website copy, give it proper material to work with. Feed it your client language, testimonials, actual questions people ask you, the way you explain your process on calls, patterns you see in your work, opinions, stories and what your clients actually say changed for them.
Maybe clients constantly tell our leadership coach that they feel like they should already know all the answers because they’re senior. Maybe she has a strong belief that good leadership is less about becoming more authoritative and more about building enough self-trust that you stop second-guessing every decision. Maybe clients repeatedly tell her they feel calmer in difficult conversations after working together.
That gives you something specific to talk about!! “Write professional website copy for a leadership coach” really doesn’t…
People are buying more than your knowledge
This matters A LOT in personal service businesses. If I’m choosing a therapist, coach, consultant or service provider, of course I care whether that person is qualified and whether they can actually help me. But I’m also trying to work out what it would feel like to work with THEM.
Are they warm? Direct? Funny? Very structured? Do they understand the reality of my situation? Will they challenge me? Do I agree with the way they see the problem? Would I actually feel comfortable opening up to them?
Those things affect the buying decision too.
You can’t communicate all of that through a perfectly polished paragraph about your “unique holistic methodology”. Your personality is doing part of the selling whether you realise it or not, so show it!!
And I think the more AI-generated content we see, the more those human details are going to matter. When so much of the internet starts feeling weirdly interchangeable, businesses that feel like there’s a real person behind them become a lot more interesting.
Use AI for the bits it’s genuinely good at
There are loads of things I’m VERY happy to let AI help me with. I use it to organise messy thoughts, pull themes out of notes, structure longer ideas, summarise information, look at different angles on something I already have an opinion about, and help me turn a huge brain dump into an actual content plan.
That last one is probably one of the biggest ways I use it. I can give it a load of things I’ve been thinking about that week, something a client said, something that happened in my own life, an idea I had, an offer I need to sell, a thought I can’t quite get my head around… and use it to help me see what belongs together and where the strongest ideas are.
Our leadership coach could do exactly the same. Maybe she finishes a week of client sessions with five voice notes full of things she noticed, and AI helps her spot that three of those conversations were actually circling the same issue around confidence + decision-making. Great, there’s probably a content idea in there.
Maybe she has ten testimonials and wants to see what language clients repeatedly use when describing the transformation. Also useful. Maybe she has a brain dump for a long article and wants some help organising it into something coherent. Perfect.
I love AI for helping me think with something. I’m much more cautious about asking it to think for me.
Read it out loud before you publish it
This is genuinely one of the most useful things I do. If AI has helped me shape something, I read it out loud because I can normally hear immediately when something doesn’t sound like me. There’ll be a sentence that is perfectly grammatically correct, but I would never say it like that. A paragraph will feel too neat. The structure technically works, but it isn’t how I would naturally tell the story. So I rewrite it.
For our leadership coach, maybe she would naturally say:
“you don’t need to walk into every meeting knowing exactly what you’re going to say.”
But AI turns that into:
“effective leadership requires embracing uncertainty and cultivating adaptive decision-making skills.”
Please for the love of god put it back!! The first sounds like a person. The second sounds like it belongs in an essay. Put your personality back in. Keep the weird phrases only you would say. Keep the joke. Change the structure if it doesn’t feel right. You do not have to be loyal to whatever AI gave you simply because it looks polished. It’s a draft. Treat it like one!
Your stories are the bit AI can’t manufacture
AI can write another perfectly decent post about difficult conversations. It cannot have your conversation with a client on Tuesday afternoon who admitted she’d been avoiding giving feedback because she was terrified of being disliked.
It can write another article about confidence at work. It doesn’t know that after coaching hundreds of senior women, you’ve noticed that some of the most outwardly confident ones are privately second-guessing themselves CONSTANTLY.
It can explain psychological safety. It wasn’t in the room when a client said something that completely changed the way you think about leadership, and it doesn’t have the story about the mistake you made earlier in your career that shaped the way you coach people now.
Those things are YOURS. That doesn’t mean every post needs to become an emotional diary entry or that you suddenly need to share things that should stay private. It just means you already have raw material no other person in your industry has exactly the same access to.
Your stories, observations, conversations, mistakes, client patterns, opinions + weird little thoughts are what make your marketing harder to copy. That’s where the good stuff lives!!!
AI can help. It just shouldn’t become you.
I think AI is going to become a completely normal part of how most of us work, if it isn’t already. But please don’t mistake “AI helped me make sense of this” for “AI should now speak to my audience for me”.
For me, there is always another layer afterwards. I rewrite it, say it out loud, move things around, put my own phrases back in and delete the bits that sound generic until the finished thing actually feels like something I would have written.
And when you’re selling expertise, trust + a personal service, your content, emails and website are part of how people decide whether they want YOU. So pleaaaaase be careful what you outsource to AI. People can tell when something has had zero human thought put into it and has just been copied + pasted straight out of ChatGPT or Claude.
And if you’re wondering whether your own website actually makes your expertise, personality, proof + what makes your approach worth choosing obvious enough, my free website audit will help. It’ll show you where your website is already helping people understand, trust + choose you, and where there may still be gaps making that decision harder than it needs to be.
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