7 AI Myths Setting You Up for Marketing Frustration
As I’ve interacted with advisors, I’ve noticed a common perception about AI. Many of them think it’s so magical that we don’t need much human involvement to make your marketing work.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here’s the reality: AI is not a magic solution to all your problems with marketing for financial advisors. And it certainly doesn’t replace human expertise.
What drives real results is the combination of your unique voice and our decades of marketing expertise, leveraged through automated marketing systems.
Without our expertise creating the strategy and your personal involvement in transferring your knowledge to us, AI is worthless.
That’s the difference most people miss. And that’s where the myths begin.
Let’s clear up the seven most common myths I encounter.
Myth #1: AI Is a Magic Wand
AI isn’t magic. But it does accelerate and amplify.
It amplifies whatever you put into it. Your clarity or your confusion, your strategy or your guesswork.
If you feed it generic prompts and vague messaging, it will generate exactly that: content that sounds generic, vague, and irrelevant.
If you’re going nowhere because you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, AI will get you there fast.
The power of AI lies in the hands of the person guiding it. It works well for us because we bring clarity, strategy, psychology, persuasive structure, and inbound marketing expertise to the table.
AI helps us execute our expertise more quickly, but it only goes where we tell it to go.
Myth #2: AI Replaces Human Input and Expertise
Some people seem to think that AI means you can finally go hands-off with your financial advisor marketing. That the system will handle everything, start to finish.
But the opposite is true. AI amplifies human input. It doesn’t replace it.
If we don’t have your perspective, your voice, your analogies, your way of explaining financial ideas, we can’t build the kind of content that actually connects.
We need written content, interviews, recordings—anything and everything to get inside your mind and understand what you want to say and how you want to say it.
You don’t need to be involved every day. But you do need to contribute. AI can’t work with nothing.
Myth #3: AI Is a Good Writer
The truth is that, left to its own devices, AI is a terrible writer.
The only way I get good writing out of it is because 1) I understand the outcome I’m trying to achieve, so I’m able to prompt good writing out of it, and 2) I edit heavily on the back end.
AI writes like a person who has read a lot about writing but hasn’t actually mastered the craft over twenty years, as I have.
It can’t get inside the minds and hearts of your prospects to understand their core motivations. It doesn’t understand context and nuance.
(Not to mention it will clutter your page with emojis, random mid-paragraph bolding, horizontal lines, and excessive em dashes.)
I’m the one who knows great writing. I’m the one shaping the message, identifying the hook, and polishing the draft to ensure it connects with real human beings.
To get good output from AI, I have to start with great framing. I prompt it with psychology, structure, logic, voice, and clear objectives. I cut out all the AI crap. Then I work with the output through multiple detailed rounds of editing to bring it to life.
So yes, AI accelerates the process of getting my knowledge and expertise onto the page. But it’s not the writer. I am.
AI does not replace the need for human writers who have mastered the craft. In fact, it makes them that much more necessary.
And if you're not a good writer, AI won’t make you one. Garbage in, garbage out.
Myth #4: AI Connects with Clients Automatically
Connection is never automatic. It’s intentional.
The only way to create content that actually builds trust is to speak to real people with real needs, fears, and goals.
That’s why we take great pains to develop four distinct personas for your brand, based on your experience with real clients. We dig deep to understand their pain points and problems, fears and concerns, questions and objections, hopes and dreams.
We view the world through their lens so we can write to them on their terms, in language that resonates with them.
We then embed your personas into your content creator GPT and train it to speak directly to those personas with every piece of content.
That’s how we create marketing that doesn’t just sound like “you,” but also feels like a conversation with someone who gets them.
But that is a human process, not an AI process.
Myth #5: AI Replaces Your Marketing Team
AI does increase the efficiency of a high-performing team.
It’s like giving your marketing crew power tools instead of hand tools. The job still requires skill, strategy, and coordination. But now it can be done faster and better.
In our world, that means a single expert writer can oversee and guide multiple AI workflows that used to take a full team. It’s still human-led, but AI-accelerated.
It means we can crank out written content in your brand voice and in a personal, connected way to your personas at incredible speed and volume.
However, we still need a team of project managers, graphic designers, and developers to integrate all that written content into your marketing system.
We recently completed a full marketing system for Garda Insurance. In one month, our team wrote and built:
A 15,288-word website.
Three complete lead magnets with full funnels totaling 15,746 words.
Twenty-five long-form blog articles totaling 41,047 words.
That’s 72,081 words of on-brand, fully-integrated, persona-driven content.
Not only written, it was also fully built out on the site, in the funnels, and into the automation systems. And we turned the entire project around in one month.
To put that in context: I’ve authored, co-authored, ghostwritten, or edited 43 books in my career. Pre-AI, a 72,000-word project would have taken a year or even longer. This one took about a week to write, and only a month to build from top to bottom.
It is nothing less than miraculous. Staggering. Jaw-dropping. Mind-blowing. Earth-shattering.
But here’s what you need to understand about this. There are two reasons why this was possible:
Ryan O’Shea and Dale Clarke have been producing content for years. That gave us tons of content in their own voices to feed into their custom content creator GPT.
I brought two decades of messaging, inbound marketing, and content strategy expertise to the system. Their GPT wasn’t just pulling from their writing. It was layered with a full brand voice style guide, defined personas, and the strategic architecture behind effective inbound content. And I as the human writer ran the entire message prompting and editing process.
Yes, AI helped us produce that content faster. But without Ryan and Dale’s voices, and without my expertise shaping the system and message, it never would have been possible.
The words only matter because they’re theirs. And they only connect because I wrote them to real people, with real needs, based on 20 years of expertise in human psychology and marketing.
Myth #6: AI Removes the Burden of Marketing
This is one of the most common sources of frustration.
Unfortunately, having AI in your corner doesn’t mean you can just hand everything over to us and expect us to work magic for you without your involvement.
We still need your active involvement to help us get inside your head.
What we’re doing with AI isn’t creating content out of thin air, or pulling generic content from Google searches. We are actually writing for you, in your voice, about the things you talk about most with your prospects and clients.
This means we need your active involvement to get inside your head.
You’ll hear me say this over and over: The hardest part of what we do is the knowledge transfer from your mind to our team.
And while AI can facilitate and accelerate that process, it cannot replace it.
Can ChatGPT write an article on whole life versus term life insurance by pulling from Google searches?
Of course.
But does it know your personal philosophy on the subject? Does it know your stories and analogies, your unique way of explaining it? Does it know your client case studies and have your client testimonials?
Of course not.
Having said this, if you work with us, our AI systems do eliminate most of the burden of marketing for you.
It means that all you have to do is give us content in any form, written, audio, or video. You can spend 5 minutes a day recording notes on an article you want us to write, and send us your recording.
We’ll take it from there and turn your time into money by putting your content into automated marketing systems.
But you still need to show up consistently and give us content.
AI can’t do your thinking for you. It can’t know your priorities or philosophies unless you tell it.
What we do is make that process as painless as possible. But it’s still your mind powering the machine.
Myth #7: AI Alone Will Grow Your Business
AI won’t grow your business. Relationships will.
AI is an amazing tool. But it can’t build trust, create emotional resonance, or position you as the authority your clients need. That’s your job.
What we do with AI is help you build more relationships in less time by generating massive amounts of content in your voice to your personas. We help you stay top-of-mind, build credibility and authority, deepen client loyalty, and attract new leads without you having to do all the heavy lifting.
But the engine of growth is still you. Your ideas. Your stories. Your leadership. Your emotional connection with prospects and clients.
The Ghost in the Machine is You and Me
Make no mistake: You’re not being replaced in your digital marketing for financial advisors. Neither am I.
Your voice is being amplified and our expertise is being accelerated.
But without your unique voice and our expertise, none of this works.
So the bad news is that you still have to contribute to your marketing if you want it to work.
The good news is that, with AI, we can amplify and accelerate your marketing at mind-blowing volume and speed.
So if you’re ready to do your part, we’re ready to do ours. Together, we can build something extraordinary.
