Should You Let AI Run Your Marketing? When to Use It and When to Keep Control

AI is everywhere. And honestly? It's getting hard to ignore.

Meta wants you to use Advantage+. Google's pushing Performance Max. ChatGPT is practically writing everyone's social captions at this point.

And look, I use AI too. But here's what's bothering me: everyone's being told to just hand everything over to automation. Trust it. Let AI handle it.

But nobody's asking the obvious question - should you?

The platforms have goals. Your business has goals. And those two things? They're not always the same.

In this episode, I'm sharing the three questions I ask before I let AI touch anything in my marketing, whether that's ads, content, or anything else. I'm also talking about why most business owners aren't actually ready for the AI automation they're being sold, and what happens when you hand over control too soon.

If you've ever wondered whether you should be using more AI in your business, or less, this episode is going to help you figure out where that line is for you.

AI isn't the enemy. It's also not the savior everyone's making it out to be. It's a tool. And like any tool, you need to know when to use it and when to keep control.

Resources mentioned: Daniel Murray's Marketing Millennials Newsletter for the AI guardrails framework.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Just because Meta is telling you to use Advantage+ or Google is pushing Performance Max doesn't mean it's right for your business. The platform's goal is to make their life easier. Your goal is to get better results. Those are not always in alignment.

Hey friend. Welcome back to In The EllaMents. I am Alishia Egenhoff, Digital Ads strategist, mentor, and the heart behind Social EllaMents Marketing. Around here we talk about marketing, motherhood, and what it really looks like to build a business while also being a human with limited time, energy, and capacity.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed that AI is literally everywhere, and I mean everywhere. If it's not Meta pushing their Advantage+ campaigns in your face, it's Google telling you to switch to Performance [00:01:00] Max, and then there's every single app, website, and software tool advertising their shiny new AI integration, like it's the answer to all your problems.

It's inescapable. And if I'm being completely honest with you, it can feel overwhelming. Because now you're being told to let AI optimize this and automate that and just trust it. And meanwhile, you're also playing around with ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, trying to write your social posts faster, figure out why your ads maybe aren't working, or just get through your to-do list without losing your mind.

So here's the question nobody's really asking. Just because you can use AI for something, does that mean that you should? Because here is what I am seeing. The platforms and the tools want you to be dependent on AI. They want you to hand over the control, and they want you to "set it and forget it", but that's not [00:02:00] always what's best for your business. Today, we're talking about when to use AI. And when to keep control, because there's a difference between using AI as a tool and letting AI run the show.

And if you don't know where that line is, it's going to cost you either in money, in your brand voice, or in results that look good on paper, but don't actually move your business forward. So let's get into it.

Before we dive into what to do about AI, I think it helps to just name what's happening because this isn't some future thing anymore. This is the right now, and it's not going anywhere. It's going to just continue to get more and more in our face. If you are currently running Facebook or Instagram ads, Meta has probably been relentlessly pushing Advantage+ campaigns towards you for the last couple years.

The pitch is super simple. Give us your [00:03:00] creative, your budget, your goal, and we'll handle everything else, targeting, placements, optimization, all of it, and you just get to sit back and let AI do the work. Not to mention, Google just announced that this September, as in a few months from now, they're completely going away from their Dynamic Search Ads and replacing them with Performance Max campaigns, which is basically Google's version of let our AI do everything.

And it's not just the ad platforms. If you are creating content, you've probably tried, you know, the usuals: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or one of the dozens of other AI writing tools out there, maybe to write your social captions, to draft your emails, or to help you brainstorm or even get unstuck when you're staring at a blank screen, or sometimes to research a topic.

And look, I get it. AI is fast, it's accessible, and it feels like magic. But here's what nobody is talking about. [00:04:00] AI optimizes for what the platform wants. Your job is to make sure that aligns with what you actually need. And a lot of times it doesn't always line up. Meta wants you to spend more money. Google wants more clicks, which is, in turn, more money.

ChatGPT wants to give you an answer, any answer, as fast as possible, but you, you need qualified leads. You need content that sounds like you, results that move your business forward, not just metrics that look pretty in the dashboard. So yeah, it's everywhere. The question is, what do we actually do with it?

Here's what I want you to do. Before you use AI for anything in your marketing, and I mean anything, ads, content, images, whatever, ask yourself these three questions.

Question one: Does this require context aI does not have? AI doesn't know your business. It doesn't know your brand voice. It [00:05:00] doesn't know your audience's specific pain points. It doesn't know what makes a good lead for your business versus someone else's. So if you are using AI to write your content and you just copy and paste what it gives you without editing, you're losing your voice. You're starting to sound like everyone else. I'm being honest with you.

And if you're using AI to target your ads and you let it choose the audience, you're giving up the ability to learn who actually converts for you. This is like the super important testing phase, which means you can't get smarter about your own marketing. Context matters, and AI doesn't have it unless you give it to them.

Question two: Will using AI here limit what I can learn? This is the one a lot of people miss. If AI is controlling your targeting, sure it might get you results, but can you [00:06:00] see who is converting? Can you identify patterns? Can you learn, oh, this type of person responds to this message, so you can do more of it. Or are you just feeding the machine and hoping it works?

If AI is writing all your content, are you learning what actually resonates with your audience? Are you building that muscle of understanding your people, or are you just outsourcing the thinking? Because if you're not learning from your marketing, you're not getting better at it. You're just staying dependent on the tool, and that's exactly what these platforms want. It makes it easy and accessible, and I get it, but that's also a downfall.

Question three: Am I choosing AI because it's easier or because it's actually better? And be honest with yourself here, sometimes AI is genuinely better. It's faster, and it can do stuff sometimes that would take you hours to do manually. But [00:07:00] we sometimes choose AI because it's easier. We don't want to think that hard because set it and forget. It sounds really appealing when you're juggling a business and kids and life, and I'm not judging that. I get it. We're all overwhelmed. But easier is not always better, especially when it's your brand voice or your ad spend on the line. So before you hand something over to AI, ask, is this actually going to give me better results, or am I just trying to save time? Because if it's the latter, you might be saving time now and costing yourself results later.

Let's talk about ads specifically for a minute, because this is where I see the most confusion. I've been digging into what some of the top ad managers are saying about AI automation, and I have to say, I agree with them. AI and ads can work, but only if you know what you're doing. [00:08:00] It works best when you have clean conversion data, a proven offer, tested messaging, enough volume for the AI to actually learn from. But the problem is that most small businesses don't have that yet. If you are still figuring out who your best customers are, if you're still testing messaging, your pixel tracking isn't dialed in, you're not ready to hand your ads over to AI because AI will optimize for whatever you tell it to. But if you don't know what "good" actually looks like yet, you're just letting AI guess with your money. And the platforms, they don't care if you're ready or not. They're going to push you toward automation anyway because it's easier for them.

AI will just amplify a bad strategy faster. If your strategy is unclear, if your offer isn't dialed in, if your messaging is off, AI is going to scale that fast, and you're going to spend a lot of money learning that the hard way. So here is my takeaway, and this comes [00:09:00] from working in mostly lead generation campaigns specifically.

There are three things I don't let AI control, especially in newer campaigns. Number one is budget allocation during testing. When I am testing, I need to see exactly where that money is going. AI might dump budget into an audience that's getting clicks, but terrible leads, and I need to catch that and adjust it in real time, and not just hand over control.

Number two is audience targeting when I'm trying to learn. AI loves broad targeting, and I love broad targeting too, and sometimes that works really well, but I need to know who is converting so I can double down on them. If AI is doing all the targeting for me, I'm losing that insight, and that insight is super important to dial in your advertising.

Number three is optimization settings for campaigns that need business context. What AI thinks is a good lead and what your business actually [00:10:00] needs might be completely different. If your sales cycle is long, if your qualification process is specific, if you care about lead quality and not just volume, AI does not know that. It just sees form submitted and calls it a win.

Now, where does AI help in ads? Bid adjustments in real time once you already know your targeting and messaging are working. Placement testing, letting AI figure out if your ad performs better in feed versus stories versus reels. Delivery, pacing, spreading your budget throughout the day so that you're not blowing it all at 8:00 AM, and notice what these have in common, they're tactical and their micro adjustments. AI handles the details. You still handle the strategy. Just because Meta is telling you to use Advantage+ or Google is pushing Performance Max doesn't mean it's right for your business. The platform's goal is to make their life [00:11:00] easier. Your goal is to get better results. Those are not always in alignment.

Okay, now let's talk about content because this is probably where most of you are actually utilizing AI right now. And I'm going to be really honest with you. I can spot, and I hear this from other people too, AI-written content from a mile away. You know, the signs. The em dashes, the "not this, but that" phrasing, the three bullet points that all sound identical, the questions that aren't really questions, they're just statements with question marks. And then there are the random adjectives thrown in that don't actually mean anything. "Innovative solutions", "seamless experiences", "robust platform". It all feels generic. And think about this, everyone has access to the same tool. Everyone is using ChatGPT to write their captions, which means everyone's content is starting to sound the same. So if you're just copying and pasting what AI gives you, you're not standing out, you're just blending in. And [00:12:00] your audience can tell they're scrolling past it, they're tuning it out because it doesn't sound like you. It sounds like everyone else.

Now, does this mean you shouldn't use AI for content at all? No. I use it myself, but here's how I use it. Sometimes I start with an idea, and I just need help getting it out of my head. Other times, I need help coming up with an idea in the first place. It's hard being creative all the time.

Either way, I'm using AI like a conversation. I'm not typing in one sentence and taking whatever it spits out. I'm pushing back. I'm asking those follow-up questions. I'm giving it details about what I actually want out of it. It's a "what you put in, you get out". It's back and forth.

And once I get something I like, I always review it. Sometimes I read it out loud to see if it sounds like me, and then I edit it. I almost never use exactly what it gives me. Maybe I'll keep a sentence or two, but most of the time it's a starting point. It helps me think [00:13:00] faster. It gets me unstuck, but it does not replace my voice, and it definitely doesn't replace my judgment. Your audience doesn't want to read content that sounds like everyone else's. They want to hear from you. So use AI to help you work faster, but don't let it strip away what makes you and your business unique.

Okay. Can we talk about AI-generated images for just a second? I know they're fun. I know they're fast. I know they're basically free, but they're also a little weird. The extra fingers, the missing limbs, eyes that look just slightly off, the text that's complete gibberish. And even when the image looks mostly normal, there's something about it that just feels fake.

It's too smooth, it's too polished, too, like it was designed by someone who's never actually seen a human. It makes me think of Instagram back in the day, when filters were super popular. And here's where I keep coming back to, and what I noticed just from content alone is that real photos actually [00:14:00] win every single time. The real photos, not just in your organic content, but even in ads, they have personality, they have imperfection, and they feel human. And if you're building a personal brand, if you're a coach, a service provider, anyone who's selling you, people want to see you. Not an AI-generated version of what you think you should look like.

So my take on this is use AI images sparingly, if at all, and definitely don't make them the main way people experience your brand visually. Because the more raw and real your photos are, the more your audience is going to connect with you. And connection is what builds trust, and trust is what builds businesses.

Here's what I think AI can't do, no matter how good it gets. It cannot set your strategy. It does not know your business goals, your audience's deepest pain points, or what actually makes you different from every other person [00:15:00] doing what you do. It cannot read context. It doesn't know that this week is a terrible time to push a sale because something heavy just happened in the news. It doesn't know your audience is tired of hearing about a certain topic right now. It cannot make judgment calls. It can give you data, but it can't tell you what that data actually means for your business specifically. And specifically in that moment, and it absolutely cannot build relationships. Your audience wants to connect with you, a real person, not a robot.

So when it comes to your marketing, the human element still matters, and it matters a lot. You are the one setting the strategy. You're the one reviewing the data and making decisions. You are the one making sure your messaging sounds like you and not everyone else. AI is a great tool that makes doing all of that easier and faster, but at the end of the day, you are still the strategist. You are the human behind it all, and that's what your audience is actually connecting with, not the AI, [00:16:00] you.

I want to share something I actually read recently that I think is brilliant. Uh, Daniel Murray writes the Marketing Millennials newsletter, and he shared a framework for setting up AI guardrails. Basically, three documents you create to help AI write more like you. And full transparency, I have not done this for my business yet, but I'm planning to because it just makes so much sense. Here's the framework he shared.

Your voice and tone guide for document one. This is how you actually speak. What words do you use all the time? What words would you never say in a million years? Do you write short, punchy sentences or longer flowing ones? Do you use contractions? This helps AI understand your style, so it's not starting from scratch every single time.

Document two is your FAQ document. This is where you write out the common questions your audience asks, and [00:17:00] exactly how you answer them. It's also includes specifics about your business, your pricing, your process, who you work with, what makes you unique and different. All that context that AI doesn't have unless you give it to them.

And then document three is your proof document. This is your best testimonials, your case studies, your content that performed really well, so that when AI is writing for you, it has real-life examples to pull from instead of just making stuff up.

If you want the full breakdown with specific prompts and exactly how to build these documents, go subscribe to the Marketing Millennials newsletter. It's totally worth it. I really enjoy, uh, getting those emails every week, but even just knowing these three things exist, voice and tone, FAQ, and proof, gives you a starting point for making AI more useful for you, and it will help it sound more like you and less [00:18:00] like AI.

All right. Here's what I want you to do after this episode. I want you to audit how you're currently using AI, and I want you to ask yourself one honest question. Is this making my marketing more effective, or is it just making it easier? Because easier isn't always better, especially when it's your brand or your money on the line.

Here are three specific things to check. First, go look at your last five social posts. Do they sound like you would someone who actually knows you, recognize your voice in them? If not, you need to edit more before you hit publish. Maybe even have someone you trust read them and tell you if they sound like you.

Second, if you're ready to level up, start building those AI guardrail documents. You don't have to do all three at once. Start with voice and tone. Write down how you actually speak, what words you use, what you avoid. That alone will make a huge difference in how AI writes for you.

And third, if you're using AI in your ads for [00:19:00] Advantage+ or Performance Max or whatever, make sure you can answer this. What is the AI actually optimizing for? Does that match my actual business goals? If you can't answer that confidently, dig into your campaign settings and figure it out, because you should always know what the AI is doing with your money.

Here's my bottom line on AI and marketing. AI is not the enemy, but it's also not the savior. It is a tool, and like any tool, it works best when you know how to use it, when to use it, and when to step in and take control yourself. Don't let it make you generic. Don't let it strip away your personality. Don't hand over your strategy just because a platform is pushing you to. Use AI to work faster, to brainstorm, for the tactical stuff that saves you time without costing you quality. But remember to keep your voice, your judgment, and your strategy at the center of everything you do because that's what your audience is actually connecting with, [00:20:00] not the AI, you, the human you.

If you want to stay connected, I'd love to have you on my email list. I send two to four emails a month with honest thoughts on marketing, motherhood, and building a business that fits your real life. You can join through the link in the show notes. Thank you for spending time with me In The EllaMents. Until next time, keep building with intention and give yourself grace as you grow.