Talk to anyone about AI in marketing and you quickly end up discussing how AI supports production. AI can write a blog, draft an email, or create an image. Essentially, it lets you create more. But the challenge is that everyone can create more.
The result is predictable. Busy feeds filled with AI slop.
Your clients and candidates are getting more bombarded than ever. Their inboxes, their feeds, their browsers are filling up with content that was cheap to produce and, more often than not, cheap to read. AI has given every marketer the same tool, at roughly the same quality, at roughly the same time.
So if everyone can produce, what’s the edge?
The edge is storytelling. It always has been. But now, more than ever.
Why is storytelling so important?
Information has never been the bottleneck in marketing. Attention has.
And attention doesn’t respond to volume, it responds to story.
A good story gives a buyer a reason to care. It tells them who it’s for, what’s at stake, and why now. It puts the reader inside a situation they recognise and offers them a way out of it. That’s the thing that turns content from noise into meaning.
For years we’ve heard experts talk about the importance of more posts, more assets, and more volume to feed the funnel. That advice made sense when producing content was expensive, because every piece had a cost and you had to think about what went in it.
That cost has dropped massively. Which means the old habit of only focusing on producing more is now actively working against you.
What storytelling looks like
Storytelling is a discipline. It’s the ability to take a mountain of information — market trends, candidate behaviour, client wins, salary data, internal opinions, research — and decide what the one thing worth saying is. Then say it in a way that lands.
To make your story resonate and land with impact, you need to do three things well.
Understand hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the foundation of good design. On any page, there should be one thing the eye goes to first, one thing second, one thing third. It should be intentional. AI isn’t great at being concise, so with AI-assisted content this gets ignored. Which is why understanding hierarchy — what leads, what supports, what gets cut — matters more than ever. Get the hierarchy right and your reader knows where to land. Get it wrong and they’re gone.
Point of view
Story needs a stance. AI-generated content is weak not because it’s grammatically wrong but because it has no opinion. A piece of marketing with a clear point of view is worth ten that don’t. If your marketing could be published by any of your competitors with the logo swapped, you haven’t got a point of view — you’ve got content.
Less is more
Every extra sentence you leave in is one your audience has to wade through. AI makes it easier than ever to write long. The discipline is to cut until the message is sharp. Make every word earn its place. I always think of the quote, by Mark Twain I think, that says “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Less is more. Put in that effort to create less.
What this means for you on a Monday morning
- Look at your last five pieces of content. If you had to describe the story each one was telling in one sentence, could you?
- When you start a piece of work, think about who the one person it needs to land with, and what’s the one thing they need to walk away with. Your story flows from that.
- Look at your homepage, your pitch deck, your sales email template. How many messages are in there? If it’s more than three, you’ve got a hierarchy problem, not a content problem.
Why this matters commercially
If your marketing is volume without story, you’re spending money to add to the noise your buyers are already drowning in.
Every piece of content that doesn’t earn attention is time, money, and a little bit of brand credibility you don’t get back.
Storytelling has always been the thing that separated great marketing from average marketing. AI has turned it into the thing that separates marketing that works from marketing that doesn’t.
