43. How to Talk About AI Use In Your Sales Copy

In this episode, Samantha discusses how and where to disclose AI use in your business' copy. The episode was sparked by a conversation with an attorney who assumed she had nothing to disclose because she wasn't using AI. But after a copy kickoff call, she realized she should probably mention it to stand out from the competition, and Sam realized she should start including AI Disclosure statements in her clients' copy!

Samantha walks through how to write AI disclosures as trust-building sales copy that  sets expectations and helps you convert!

What You'll Learn:

• Why buyers are reading more carefully than ever and what they're looking for in your copy
• Where to put AI disclosures on your website and sales pages (hint: probably fewer places than you think)
• How to write a disclosure that sounds like you, not a terms-of-service page
• Why disclosing that you DON'T use AI can be just as powerful as disclosing that you do
• The SEO opportunity hiding inside your AI transparency statement

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Transcript

0:00

Hello friends, and welcome back to Copy the marketing podcast where I show you and teach you how to write copy that sounds like you but converts better. My name is Sam. I'm the founder and lead copywriter at Nomad Copy Agency, and today I wanna talk about something that's been coming up a lot in conversations with my clients, and that is where and how to disclose if you are using AI in your business. And here's the origin story here, is that I had a client a couple of months ago. She is an attorney, and she has many sales pages on her website. And as I was redoing her sales pages, we were going through our intro call and I asked her, "How are you using AI in delivering your course?" And she was like, "I'm not, so I don't need to say anything." But we got to talking and she realized, "You know what? I may need to disclose because my competition is using AI to deliver their courses, so people are curious. Are the templates being created by me or are they AI-generated? Is there some sort of help bot so that when I say that you have access to my team, it's my human team that's answering questions, or is it my team of AI bots?" Through that conversation, she realized that she probably should disclose how she is using AI, which in her case was not at all. And I realized that I should also be providing my clients with some copy and some feedback on how to disclose if, when, and how they're using AI in their businesses, whether that is in creating client deliverables or if that's simply just how they're using it to run their business on the back end. So by the time this episode is done, you're gonna know exactly why you should add an AI disclosure to your copy And you're gonna know how to do it without making it sound like legalese. We're gonna talk about it as if it is sales copy, because that is what you are here to learn is about copywriting. So I'm gonna start again with another story. I bought a course at the beginning of this year, and I think I've mentioned it on the podcast before. It's kind of a buyer's regret or buyer's remorse kind of situation. But even as I was reading the sales page, I was like, "AI wrote this sales page. Why do I think that if they didn't put time into writing the sales page, that they're gonna put time and effort into the relationship for the course that I bought?" And yeah, I got into the course. It is very much AI-generated. The business owner is not quite as responsive as I would like, and that just is what it is. So I was ignoring trust signals right away before I ever purchased. This person was signaling to me that they don't put a lot into their work, and I purchased anyway. So I can't really say if that course was generated by AI or if the course collateral and the spreadsheets and things that came with the course were created by AI. Maybe it was just bad writing. But there was something off in the process, and there was something off in the deliverables that I received with this course. So I think regardless of if there was AI used, there are still these trust signals being sent on a sales page that let people know what they can expect from you down the road. I had a boss when I was younger say that how you do anything is how you do everything, and I think that this is one of those cases. If the sales page is a little bit off, the deliverables will be, too. So why does disclosing if you're using AI matter? The first reason is trust. We've talked about the trust recession on this show before. You can scroll back to that episode if you missed it, and I will make sure that it is linked in the show notes as well. But the short version is that buyers are doing more due diligence than ever. They're reading more carefully. Whether that's because of the recession or the economy or whatever you wanna call it, or just because there is a trust recession, too, which I know is kind of becoming an overused buzzword, people are paying attention to what you say and how you say it. So being upfront about your AI use tells people that they can take you at your word. If you're saying, "Yeah, I do have a team that's available twenty-four/seven to ask questions. They're the bots that I programmed, and they're a virtual team or a digital team," you're disclosing. You're telling people very transparently what they can expect from you. They know what they're buying, and you can walk into that relationship more confident that they are going to be satisfied with what they get because they knew what they were getting right out of the gate. So being honest about using AI does not turn people off. For some buyers, it doesn't matter at all. For others, it does, and those are not your ideal clients. So you will repel people if you're disclosing your AI use and that you're using it a lot. But a disclosure lets each of those people make an informed decision, which is always going to serve you better than a refund request later on. Second reason after trust is that you're setting expectations. Some of your clients are absolutely fine with AI-assisted work. Some of them are paying you specifically because they want your human brain. A disclosure makes that super crystal clear, so that nobody ends up disappointed later, and you don't have to have an awkward conversation about what they did or didn't pay for. Finally, the third reason, and this one is very debatable, is SEO. So you wanna use a disclosure to build trust. You wanna use a disclosure to set expectations. If you are adding an AI disclosure onto your website, you have an additional opportunity for a headline to say, "This is how we use AI." Now, there is not proof that I could find after talking to a few SEO experts and doing some Googling, there's nothing reliable that I can find that says that AEO, which is AI searching, or SEO, which is search engine optimization, is crawling for AI policies specifically. However, there is a growing conversation about AI transparency as a potential ranking signal. So at minimum, you get an additional section that you can add a heading to that helps your SEO. You have more opportunity to write great copy. And potentially someday, you're gonna be ahead of the curve when AI or Google are looking for keyword-rich copy regarding AI usage. So if you're already going to disclose, you might as well get the SEO benefit while you're at it, that may or may not be a deeper SEO benefit in the future. So we understand why disclosing your AI use is important. Let's talk about where to put these AI disclosures. And my short answer is probably not as many places as you think. You do not need to make your entire website and all of your sales pages all about how you do or don't use AI. What I recommend is finding out where your AI use or non-use directly affects what a client is receiving and what they might be looking for, and then put your AI disclosures right there. So couple of my favorite places to put this is, one, your FAQ. This could be your FAQ on your sales page or on your website, but this is where people go when they already have questions or when they may have objections that they're looking for you to handle for them. So this is a super natural place to put an AI disclosure. It's not making a big deal out of it. You're already being able to put a heading. So again, this is great for SEO as it's an additional heading where you can answer a question before they have to ask. So if you don't use AI, you can say something like, "Who creates the copy inside Copy on Demand?" And the response would be something like, "A human. I give a hundred percent of my feedback directly. None of it is automated by bots." So it gives me an opportunity to be super specific and super transparent about how I'm using AI. And by the way, as I go through this, I have created an AI disclosures template. So everything that I'm saying today, I have several swipes and templates that you can borrow. I will make sure that it's at the link in the show notes. It's also on my website inside of my copy shop. But this template and swipe file has examples that you can pull and use directly on your sales pages, on your website, in your emails, in your FAQs. I have dozens and dozens of examples, and it's less than fifty dollars. So again, I'll make sure that the AI disclosures template is listed in the show notes. But first place, FAQs. Second place, we wanna put this on your sales page. If your offer involves any AI-powered delivery, depends on what you're selling, right? It could be anything from a low-ticket offer like a template to something bigger that's like a course that has multiple pieces working inside of it. I work with a lot of personal trainers. Sometimes there's AI involved in the apps that they're using that they may or may not use. So if there is any AI-powered delivery in your offer, it's wise to just put it on your sales page and let people know how and to what degree. I have friends who are offering digital products that are entirely created by and delivered by AI automations and, GPTs. So there's a spectrum here, and sometimes people know that they're getting something that's entirely AI-made, or they wanna know the degree to which AI is delivering. So for example, if you're a coach and your AI bot is the one doing intake or follow-up or some of the coaching, you definitely wanna put that on your sales page. Inversely, if your competition is doing that and you are not, you might wanna put on your sales page that you are a one hundred percent human-powered business, a hundred percent of your coaching is done directly by you, that it's not your team, and it's certainly not a team of AI bots. Again, there's no right or wrong way to deliver. It's more so about disclosing how you deliver, and that's why my templates that I created is called AI disclosures. So again, using the sales page example, if AI is just something you use in the background for your own admin work and it doesn't touch the client experience, you probably don't need to include that on the sales page. They do not care if you're using Claude to produce your podcast, right? They care if you are delivering things to them using AI or a series of bots So something that's in my templates that would be a good use case for a sales page is a headline that says, "A quick note about our process," and then body text that says, "We occasionally use AI tools to help us organize ideas and support research. All of the course content, frameworks, and recommendations are reviewed, edited, and approved by a human expert before publication. You're purchasing our expertise and judgment. AI just helps us spend more time teaching and less time formatting." So that's an example of how you could use that on your sales page So we talked about FAQs on your sales page. Now on your website, if you have a process page, an about page, or an FAQ section, either on your homepage or in your services page, you don't need to create an entire big section that's a legal disclaimer about all the little ways that you use AI. You have a couple of options here. You can make a couple sentences and then link that out to your privacy policy on your website that then has its own AI clause, which I cannot write because I am not an attorney, so I did not include a privacy policy or any legal information in the templates. But what you can do here is not write a legal disclaimer, but you could either link out to a legal disclaimer, like your privacy policy, or create some fun on-brand copy that reflects your values. So an example that you could use here is, "Around here, you always get a human," as your headline with body text that says, "We believe that you hire us for your skills and not the kind that Claude uses. All of our work is a hundred percent human-created. We're not anti-AI, just committed to practicing our craft." And in fact, this is something that I'm probably gonna add to my website. When I templated that out, I was like, "Yeah, that's good. I'm gonna use it." So, another example, because that's an example if you don't use AI, because I don't in my client-facing work. If you do use AI, you could say something like, "We use AI tools behind the scenes to handle research, organization, and even drafting. Every client-facing deliverable is reviewed by a human professional before it reaches you. AI helps us work efficiently, but does not replace our expertise or judgment." So there's a couple of examples for you that you could use. Final place that you may want to put an AI disclosure is in your emails, and I started seeing this a couple weeks ago. I follow this is kind of meta, but a podcasting coach, and he writes really great emails. He writes them on Thursdays, and he always puts at the top of his emails, "This email was written at eight thirty-seven AM," in whatever city he's in, "by a human. Forgive any, like, typos 'cause I'm a, a real person," or something like that, right? He makes it kind of fun and clever. Other people I've seen add an AI disclosure in their PS that says, "This email was written with the help of," and then insert ChatGPT or Claude or whatever there. So again, you don't have to add it to every single email. Some people I see do it because they wanna make a point that they're writing their own emails, or they wanna make a point that AI is really reliable. So you can choose to add 'em anywhere. None of them are legally necessary yet, but I think it does add a, an air of transparency to disclose where and how you're using AI in your business. Couple of things when it comes to writing your disclosures that I see, and this is more so just habits that I see in writing in general, is that one, I see people writing a ton. Like they'll write paragraphs and paragraphs about how they're using AI and give a ton of details. I think you only really need as much as what your clients are looking for. It's simply meant to be a reassurance statement, and anything more than that likely needs to go into more of a legal document, which I'm not an expert on. So the sweet spot here is to be just brief and honest. And that's how I modeled all of the templates inside my AI disclosures template. I organized it so that you could go through it section by section and grab what you need for each section of your website or sales page. They're meant to be a little bit fun, a little bit light, and certainly brief so that you can add them to your website. Hopefully, eventually, it'll help you with SEO, but it will help to keep you transparent with your clients. Because the problem isn't that people don't wanna disclose, it's probably that you simply haven't thought about disclosing your AI use yet, or you feel that it's already really obvious, and it might not be. So people don't tend to care if you're using AI or not. They wanna know how they're using it and how it impacts them. So when you sit down to write some sort of AI disclosure or tell your people how you're using it, keep that in mind, keep it brief, and if you need help writing it, grab the template that'll be in the show notes. So I'll leave you with this. Whether you use AI a lot, a little, or not at all, a disclosure is simply a trust signal to your people. They say that we're in a trust recession, and the best way to build trust is through transparency. Give them this transparency, and you will show that you are already on their side of the table. You're thinking about the same things that they are, and it will help people feel more confident when they hand over their credit card. It's basically telling people that you're not trying to slip something past your buyers, but rather that you respect the people who are choosing to spend money with you. That's good business, period. So go add a disclosure to your website. If you wanna run yours by me, shoot me an email, and thanks for listening to Copy&. If this episode was super helpful for you, I'd love if you share it with another service provider who is using AI in their business but may be confused about how to position that to their clients as a benefit, that's the tough part, is how do you position AI as a benefit to your people? Because that's why you're in business, is to make a difference and to make money. And if you're making a difference and making money and using AI to do it, your people simply wanna know. I'll see you next week in Copy&, where I will continue to help you write copy that sounds like you but converts better. Have a great week.