AI is making marketing cheaper and easier. I’m not convinced it’s making it more effective.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to marketing when AI makes almost everything we do cheaper, faster, and easier. What concerns me is that many marketing organizations seem determined to use AI to do more of exactly what they’ve always done.
More articles, emails, social posts, campaigns, and personalized outreach. The assumption is that more activity will produce more leads and, eventually, more revenue.
We’re using AI extensively in our own business, and the productivity gains are remarkable. Work that once required a much larger team can now be handled by a few people. But everyone else has access to the same technology, and buyers haven’t suddenly developed more time or interest in consuming marketing messages.
I think this has some interesting implications for brand awareness and lead generation.
Being known for something that matters
For years, companies could generate leads without much brand recognition. They could buy search ads, optimize landing pages, gate content, and run outbound campaigns. Get enough people into the funnel, and some percentage would eventually become customers.
That approach still works, but I suspect it’s going to become less effective as buyers change how they research and evaluate companies.
I think this makes brand awareness much more important than it’s been in years, although we need to be clear about what awareness really means. There’s a considerable difference between someone recognizing a company’s name and thinking of that company when they have a problem to solve.
At Revwisely, for example, simply having heard of us isn’t enough. I want a CEO or CRO to think of us when they’re trying to figure out how AI can help their company grow faster and operate more efficiently. Ideally, they’ve also encountered enough of our work to believe we know what we’re doing.
That’s the kind of awareness that eventually creates business.
But how do we build it when everyone is competing for the same attention?
Getting our ideas in front of the right people
What AI hasn’t solved is getting our content in front of the right people. In fact, I think it’s making the problem worse because so much more material is competing for attention.
Imagine two companies. One publishes 100 AI-generated articles on its website. The other publishes ten articles based on original experience, but gets them distributed through respected industry experts, customers, partners, and professional communities.
I’d put my money on the second company.
This has me rethinking where marketing organizations should spend their time. Instead of concentrating so much effort on what content to produce, perhaps we should be spending more time figuring out how to get our ideas in front of people who might actually care.
Who already has the attention of the buyers we’re trying to reach? Which partners could introduce us to companies we couldn’t otherwise access? What do we know from experience that someone else might find worth sharing?
There’s also an interesting opportunity to turn the product itself into a way of reaching new customers.
Consider a product that generates useful reports, assessments, recommendations, or other information that customers naturally share. Every time one of those outputs reaches someone outside the customer’s organization, there’s an opportunity for another person to discover the company behind it.
Of course, putting a logo on a report doesn’t magically create demand. The output needs to be useful enough that someone wants to share it. But it’s worth thinking about how the value we deliver to existing customers might help introduce us to new ones.
Finding buyers who have a real problem
Sometimes marketing helps a buyer recognize a problem they haven’t yet made a priority. An article might help an executive see how much time their team loses coordinating work across disconnected systems. A customer story might show what that inefficiency costs and what becomes possible when it’s addressed. That’s useful work, even if the reader isn’t ready to buy.
Finding companies already dealing with a problem is a different job. Traditional marketing has relied heavily on engagement as an indication of buying interest. Someone downloads a white paper, attends a webinar, visits a pricing page, or clicks an email. Marketing assigns a score, and eventually sales gets involved.
I’ve downloaded plenty of material over the years without the slightest intention of purchasing anything. I suspect most of us have. AI gives us an opportunity to look beyond that engagement and identify companies experiencing problems we’re equipped to solve.
A new CRO joins a company. A business starts recruiting revenue operations professionals and AI engineers. An acquisition creates integration challenges. A company announces an aggressive growth initiative or begins replacing its CRM.
None of these events proves someone is ready to buy. But each provides a reason to investigate.
AI can help identify these signals, research the organizations, understand what’s happening, and determine whether there’s a good reason to start a conversation.
I’d much rather have 100 carefully researched accounts with identifiable business challenges than 10,000 names collected through generic marketing campaigns. That doesn’t mean abandoning inbound marketing or traditional lead generation. It means being more thoughtful about where we invest our effort.
There’s another wrinkle. Buyers are increasingly using AI to identify and evaluate potential suppliers.
Imagine a CEO asking an AI assistant which firms can help a $150 million company implement AI across sales and marketing. Will Revwisely appear in the answer? If it does, what will the AI say about us?
I don’t think anyone has completely figured out how to influence these recommendations, and the systems themselves continue to change. But the basic idea seems straightforward. We need to make sure buyers, and increasingly AI, understand what we do, who we help, and why we’re good at it.
That means clear positioning, original insights, customer evidence, and a presence beyond our own website. In many respects, it’s simply good brand building applied to another way buyers discover companies.
Doing more isn’t the same as accomplishing more
I see the balance shifting toward building awareness and trust before buyers are ready to talk. Lead generation still matters, but I’d put less effort into collecting names and more into finding companies with a reason to engage. Those conversations are easier when buyers already know and trust our work.
That should change how we judge marketing. I’d rather know whether we’re becoming known for solving a particular problem—and whether that reputation produces business—than how many articles we publish or emails we send.
I’ve spent much of my career improving sales and marketing. AI is the most powerful technology I’ve encountered for getting the work done. The risk is becoming so pleased with how much we produce that we stop asking whether it’s worth doing.
AI gives us more capacity. We need to decide how much to invest in building future demand and how much to devote to winning business today. Simply turning up the volume won’t resolve that decision.
If you’d like to discuss what this could mean for your sales and marketing organization, schedule a conversation. Schedule a Consultation