How to Use AI In Your Marketing Without Losing Your Voice

I love AI and use it constantly in my work. BUT....! I think many people are using it in a way that's quietly erasing the only thing that makes their content worth reading.

The question isn't whether you should use AI. The question is: who's doing the thinking?

Because there's a real difference between handing AI your ideas and asking it to help you shape them and asking AI to generate the ideas in the first place. 

One is collaboration. The other is outsourcing your voice. And because the result looks so polished, you might not even notice how far off the foundation is.

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, I'm sharing how I actually use AI in my business, the five specific jobs I give it, the jobs I'll never give it, and why your voice matters more right now than it ever has.

In this episode:

• The Real Question Isn't "Should I Use AI?"
• A Client Story: When AI Use Felt Like Cheating (And Why It Wasn't)
• Who's Providing the Thought Leadership?
• Why We're No Longer Competing on Information
• Why Voice Matters More Than Ever
• The 5 Jobs I Give AI in My Business
• The Jobs I Will Never Give AI
• My 80/20 Philosophy
• The People Who Will Win the Long Game

The more AI can write like everyone else, the more valuable it becomes to sound unmistakably like yourself. Use AI... just don't give it the one job that belongs to you!

Work With Me:

• If this episode resonated and you want more clarity in your marketing, book a 1:1 Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit! I’ll help you say what you actually mean in your voice so the right people can finally hear you!

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Book a Full-Scale Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast with deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal life. I'm public and a highly sensitive professional who spend years untangling patterns of overthinking people pleasing to be complaining to just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me to step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today I want to talk about something that is coming up with almost every personal branding client I'm working with right now. And it's one of the biggest questions I get in general in my work. Is using AI in your marketing okay? Is it cheating? Is it gross? Is it hurting my brand? A lot of my clients assume that because I'm a writer, I'm a content strategist, that I'm gonna tell them not to touch Chat GPT or Claude. But I love AI and I use it all the time. I use it to organize my thoughts, repurpose content, and just to get things out into the world faster. The right question isn't should I use AI in my marketing? I think the better question is who is presenting the thought leadership? Because that's a completely different conversation. I believe that the future of marketing is going to be surprisingly old school. There's a big distinction between using AI as a powerful assist and outsourcing the parts of your work that make it your own. So that's what we're diving into today. How to use AI to help you market your business or your personal brand without losing your voice. I just started working with a new client who's making a big shift in her business. She's really niching down. She's getting a lot more specific about who she helps and what she wants to help them do. When she first came to me, she wasn't really clear on her new direction yet. She could feel it, she knew something was there, she knew her work was evolving, but she was still trying a bunch of different ideas on for size when it comes to how to talk about it, how to present it. So we did a storyboarding session together to flesh it all out. We talked about her own personal experience. We wrapped words around the promise of what she does. We clarified the transformation that she provides people with. But when you're doing something really outside of the box and you don't have a playbook to go by, like there aren't other examples out there, it's easy to get sidetracked pretty quickly. We went back and forth on messaging, we tweaked things, we moved things around, she lived with it for a little bit. And then she emailed me last week with a note. Hey, I'm really sorry. I feel a little guilty. I got inspired over the weekend. I started putting some of our ideas into ChatGPT, and I got a few phrases back that really resonated with me. Great. But she felt icky using them. She felt like she was cheating that it wasn't her own authentic words anymore. And I immediately told her, no, this is completely different. You have already spent months thinking about it before, hey you even hired me. And then we spent weeks refining it together. So when she goes to ChatGPT, she's not starting at ground zero. She wasn't asking AI to tell her who she was. She had already done a ton of processing. She'd gone back through her experiences, figured out what mattered for the story she wanted to tell. She'd gotten super clear about the people she wants to help and the work that she wants to do with them. AI didn't create the foundation. It helped her play with the language sitting on top of the foundation. So she's not outsourcing her message. She was brainstorming. She brought the thought leadership to the table. AI is not making people sound generic. People are sounding generic because they're asking AI to do their thinking for them. There's a big difference between saying, here's what I believe, here's who I help, here's the story behind this, here's my rough draft, help me organize it. Versus, I own a nutrition business. Write me 10 Instagram captions with helpful tips. Those are not the same process. And the output is going to look very different. One is collaboration, the other is outsourcing your voice. And we understand why people do it, right? We're busy, we know we need to market ourselves. We sit down to write something and our brain goes blank. So we open Chat GPT, maybe Claude, we type in a sentence, and suddenly we have 10 polished captions sitting in front of us. It feels like magic, but if all you're doing is giving the brush strokes of your business, it can only give you back the average of what already exists in that category. So if we stay with that nutrition example, it doesn't know what you believe about nutrition. It doesn't know why you got into the work. It doesn't know about the client conversation that changed the way you approach your services. It doesn't know what common industry advice makes you want to throw your laptop out the window. It doesn't know you. So it fills in the gaps with what is statistically likely to sound appropriate. And statistically appropriate is not the same thing as memorable. We're not competing on information anymore. There's more information available to us than we could possibly consume in one lifetime. We've always had it, right? It's just harder to get. Back in the day, you'd go to the library, maybe you had to pull out the microfiche, maybe you were super lucky like me and had a full set of encyclopedias at home. Now, if your people want to know something, they'll find the answer immediately. They're not following you on social media or subscribing to your newsletter or YouTube channel because of generic information that you provide. There's something about your delivery, your perspective, your personal experiences that relate it back to them. They want the information from you. Think about why you follow people. I follow people because they make me laugh or they make me feel understood. They challenge the way I think. Maybe they tell a good story. They have a specific way of seeing the world. It's not just about information, it's perspective, it's personality, humanity. And the easier it becomes to generate information, the more valuable those things become. Your voice matters more than ever. Period. The people who will win the long game are going to hold tightly to their unique voice. And it's not just what you think, what you believe, your voice lives in the really tiny things too. Things that you might not even associate with being part of your voice. It's your rhythm, your cadence, the words you naturally choose. Those details seem really small and insignificant, but they're not. That's voice. It's how your brain moves from one thought to another. It's whether you make the point directly or circle it for a minute before landing. It's the phrases that you use all the time without even realizing that you use them. And when people know you, they notice when those things change or disappear. They might not be able to explain what's different. They just read something and think, huh, that doesn't sound quite like them. So if you've built and nurtured an audience, that gets to be a weird thing when your voice all of a sudden changes. I've noticed that over the last year or two with people that I've followed for a really long time, and you kind of get the ick. And when it comes to new people that you're trying to bring into your world, your content is creating an expectation of who they're going to meet. So if someone reads your website, if they fall in love with the language, they book a call, and then they meet a completely different person on that call, the experience you offer doesn't match the promise that your content did. People don't stay with you because your copy was impressive. They stay because the person they met felt like the person they had already gotten to know. That's branding, that's trust. So, no, I'm not afraid that AI is going to replace every writer, but I'm concerned that people are going to become so accustomed to letting it smooth out their language that they stop sounding like themselves. The little quirks will disappear, the rough edges disappear, maybe your opinions get softened. The specific nature of who you are and how you show up might get replaced with language that's polished and professional, but completely forgettable. So let's get tactical for a second. AI can be an incredible tool, but it helps to give it a specific job. I'm gonna share the jobs I regularly give AI in my business. Job number one, it is my brainstorming partner. A lot of times I'll have an inkling of an idea that I want to dive into or a rough podcast idea, and I use it to help me get deeper into the topic. So I might say, here's my opinion on this topic. What questions am I not answering? Or what assumptions am I making that my audience might not understand? Now, I don't always like or use what it comes back with, but it does help me think a little bigger on some of my ideas. Another thing I use it for, and this is probably the job that I use AI for the most, I let it help me organize my thoughts. I'll open up the voice memo app on my phone or I'll turn on dictation and just ramble. Sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes it's 30. I go off on tangents, I'll think I've finished an idea and then remember another story halfway through and then go down this whole wild thing. My notes from it always look messy. So then I'll take that transcript and put it in with a prompt like organize these ideas into a logical podcast flow. Keep my language, don't rewrite my personal stories, don't add new opinions. I'll also throw in there, you know, show me where I'm repeating myself and maybe identify any places where I need an example or a stronger transition. That's really helpful for me. I've already generated the substance. I'm using my own words, my own thoughts, but the organization is where I'm getting my assistance. Job number three, where AI has probably saved me the most time, is in repurposing my content. So I have a general flow for my podcast every week. And different parts of that get used in different ways. There's usually a personal story, there's a bigger idea I'm exploring, I might have some tactical, practical tips thrown in there. And once I record the episode, I will download the transcript and load it into Claude or chat, whichever I'm feeling that day. And I have some preset workflows set up to help me pull additional content from that one piece. So I'll ask it to pull out five quotes that I actually said. I might use them for pull quotes when I post my blog. And then I'll use the personal story to kick off my newsletter. I have it reformat the episode into a blog post, and I also have it create a YouTube description based on the actual content. So I'm asking it to mine my own content and then reformat those ideas so that they can live in more places. Now I will say it's never ready to publish as is, but it might get me about 70 to 75% of the way there. And then I go back in, move things around, change phrases, change the flow. And where it used to take me almost an entire day to record the podcast, edit, upload, write a newsletter, create social media, write a blog post. Now I can often do all of those things within just a couple of hours. And that's all my marketing for the week. So it's letting me get more mileage out of my ideas without requiring me to reinvent the wheel on every platform. And then finally, another way I use AI is for SEO, search engine optimization. Now we've got GEO, which is making our content easier for AI-powered search to find and understand. There's a lot of science behind both of these things. And there are people and agencies who deeply specialize in this work and truly know their shit and all the ins and outs that cannot be replaced. But if you're looking for a light lift, AI can help. An example is with my blog. So I'll write the blog post the way I want it to sound first. I write all of my ideas. And listen, I am a writer, I'm a content strategist, so I do naturally tend to write a little bit for SEO. But when I'm done, I'll go into Claude or ChatGPT and ask, what phrases might someone naturally search for if they needed this information? And then I go in and see if there are places I can include those phrases without disrupting the flow. I'll ask for help on the headline. Could this headline be clearer or more searchable? And then I might ask, you know, are there questions I should answer directly so this content is easier for search engines or AI tools to understand? But notice the order write first, optimize second. That's one of the most important principles in this entire conversation. When you have a personal brand and a specific voice that we are trying to nurture, we want to lead with the substance, the story, and what you actually want to say. Then we optimize the headline, then we find the search terms, then we make it easier for people to discover. Now, there are businesses where search strategy needs to be a part of the structure from the beginning. But when we're talking about a personal brand and we're trying to create clear messaging that sounds like a real human being, that being you, there is an art and science to it. Your voice is the art, optimization is the science. We need both, but for me personally, I don't want the science to flatten the art before I've even created it. Start with what you want to express. Lead with that always. Otherwise, I promise you, your art will get diluted. Your voice will get diluted. So those are the jobs I give AI. The jobs I will not give it, I don't let AI help me decide what I believe. I don't let it tell my stories. I don't ask it to create my core messaging from nothing. And I don't ask it to pretend that it's me. Because if AI is doing those jobs, I'm not building a brand. I am simply building content. And those are not the same thing, and those are not what I want for my business. You can very easily create an enormous amount of content without creating any real connection. You could publish every single day and still leave people with zero sense of who you are. You could have a polished website, a weekly newsletter, be active on multiple social platforms, but still not have a discernible point of view. That's the danger of AI when it comes to our voice. AI makes it incredibly easy to produce more before you've even figured out what you want to say. AI is the tool. It should not be your strategy. If you know your message, it can help you express and distribute that message. That's great. But if you don't know your message, if you don't know your voice, it will start inventing one for you. And because the result will sound so polished and so great, you might not even see how off track that foundation is. So the ratio I use in my work is probably about 80-20. I want the substance to come directly from me. The experiences, the stories, the opinions, that half-formed voice memo where I say the same thing four different ways. That's my work. And I want AI's role to be like 20% or less. Help me organize it, polish it, pressure test it, optimize it. I want AI handling the repetitive parts of my business so that I have more energy for the parts that only I can do. The long game is about trust and connection. It's someone reading three sentences of your content and knowing who wrote it before they see your name. It's building that consistent body of work that is undeniably yours and that matches the experience people will have of you offline. And you can't outsource that. The people who are going to stand out over the next decade are the people who are willing to sound more human, more opinionated, more personal, more specific. People are craving this. We already have enough information. We're looking for someone to help us understand why the information matters. We want people who have lived something and are willing to share that story. Someone who can say, here's what happened to me, here's what I learned, here's where I disagree, here's the part no one warned me about. Your own experiences, your point of view, the way that you show up. That's your source material. So should you use AI? Absolutely. Let it save you time, let it make your process more efficient, let it help you get your work into more places faster. But don't ask it to tell you who you are. And please don't let it become the voice that people meet before they meet you. Let AI be your assistant, not the author of your content. The more AI is used in writing, and we're seeing it everywhere, the more valuable it becomes to sound unmistakably like yourself. Don't give it the one job that belongs to you. Bring your own thought leadership to your content. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. If you're feeling like your messaging is close but not quite where you want it to be, I'd love to help you. Book a storyboarding session on my website. We'll uncover the ideas, experiences, perspective that only you can bring. And once we've built that foundation, everything else gets easier, including using AI. I'll share a link to that in my show notes below. You can also find me on Instagram at the.energy.exchange. All right, guys, thanks for listening. I will chat with you next week.