by David Meyer
Last month I promised we’d talk about one of the biggest (and most frustrating) challenges of AI marketing: how to keep your brand’s voice intact when the robots are doing some of the typing. Spoiler alert: AI will happily write you a “professional” blog post. The problem? It’ll sound like every other “professional” blog post on the internet.
Here’s why: AI is built to predict the safest, most common version of language. Which means if you take its first draft and run with it, you’ll end up sounding like your competitors – and probably your competitors’ competitors too.
The Professional Trap
Small businesses often think sounding professional is the goal. But nine times out of ten, “professional” is just code for “boring.” And AI is a master at boring – polished, polite, perfectly forgettable. The fastest way to erase your brand personality is to let AI do all the talking.
The Weird Advantage
What makes people lean in isn’t your professionalism. It’s your quirks. The little things that make you, well, you. Maybe it’s a founder who quotes baseball stats in sales pitches. Maybe it’s your team’s unhealthy obsession with movie lines. Maybe it’s just writing like an actual human instead of a LinkedIn bot. (Some of our best material – that sometimes even turns into a bright idea for our clients – comes out of the opening banter of our Monday morning status meetings.)
Those are the things customers remember, and AI can’t make them up for you.
But it can help amplify them, if you give it direction.
How We’re Handling It
At Spoke, we’ve started building what I’ll call “voice hacks” into our AI workflows.
A few examples:
- Write how you talk. We feed AI real client emails and presentations, not just brand guidelines. That’s where the personality lives.
- Prompt the weird. We literally tell AI: “Write this in the voice of a company that hates buzzwords and loves underdog stories.” It helps keep the edges sharp.
- Always, always human last pass. AI is the draft. The edit is where the soul comes back in. (We live by this mantra,)
Bottom Line
AI isn’t here to erase your voice; it’s here to give you more opportunities to use it. But only if you protect what makes you different. The small businesses that win won’t be the ones that sound the most polished. They’ll be the ones brave enough to sound unmistakably like themselves.
Because at the end of the day, your customers don’t want “professional.” They want you.
Content Authenticity Statement: 95% of this content was written by a human. GPT-5 was used for idea shaping and final editing support.