I’ve been using AI to write my content. There I said it. In a feed where 90% of the posts are “why you shouldn’t use AI to write content” it’s pretty hard to admit. (Even to myself).
My instinct is for efficiency. What’s the most efficient route from A to B is a lot of what I do. When a tool comes along that could make me infinitely more efficient, I’m on it. How could I not be?
And AI clearly has to be part of my offering. I couldn’t not learn it. So I was killing two birds with one stone. I was writing more efficiently, and honing AI skills for use in serving my clients.
Well done me.
But it wasn’t well done me.
I fell into the trap. The trap that I help my clients climb out of every single day, and I hadn’t even seen that I’d fallen in.
The first thing I always do with any project, with any client, is work out what the actual goal is. Not the thing we think is the goal, but the actual, underneath it all, at the bottom, goal. We need to understand and articulate that, and it’s never the most obvious thing.
I went for the most obvious thing - efficiency gains. That’s not why I’m doing content though.
I’m doing it to hold my own thinking, to articulate the patterns I see so I can use them. To build a ‘personal brand’ and become known as systems for agencies, human first, profit backwards. And as a commercial endeavour to generate interest in what I do.
I wasn’t achieving any of that.
So here I am, holding my hands up. Both of them - one to doing the thing that they all say we shouldn’t be doing, and the other to not taking my own medicine.
I can achieve the goals now I’ve named them. I’ve redesigned the process. It doesn’t do the writing anymore at all, it tutors and advises. I iterate.
Many agency founders admit they are their own worst client. Marketing agencies who aren’t on top of their marketing.
Are you taking your own medicine often enough?