We have all felt that wave of “meh” after reading a bland AI-generated draft.
You attach your content brief and enter a detailed prompt into the box, hit enter, and wait. Seconds later, you get back 500 words and 100 of them are marketing clichés and buzzwords. The grammar is perfect. Too perfect. The structure is clean. The piece overall is … well, it says absolutely nothing.
When our teams use AI without strict brand guardrails, it defaults to the harmless average. It gives us marketing soup because nobody taught it what to add and what to leave out.
How to Prevent Mediocre AI
If we want AI tools to produce usable first drafts or even outline and ideate better, we have to give them clear dos and don’ts. Here are just a few tips to prevent mediocracy from creeping in.
Ban the buzzwords. Tell the tool in your prompt that it cannot use words like delve, pivotal, revolutionize, or fast-paced world.
Use concrete nouns and verbs. The writing should be able to stand on its own without excess adjectives and adverbs.
Give clear instructions. Tell the model who to write like. Provide examples of your brand voice that wasn’t AI generated. Ask it to write like how your brand speaks.
AI is a powerful drafting tool, but it doesn’t have taste. It doesn’t know if something is good or bad. When we give our tools strict editorial rules and brand guidelines, we stop spending our afternoons fixing mediocre AI drafts and can spend more time to the creative and strategy work that we do best.
Stakeholders are important. They own the budgets, sign off on ideas, manage teams, and carry accountability for business results. We often treat stakeholders as obstacles who slow down deadlines, but ignoring them almost always leads to scrapped drafts, unmet expectations, and wasted time. As important as they are, creativity and execution doesn’t come from stakeholders. That’s why they hired us.
I’ve done a lot of B2B website launches. Some went smoothly. Others didn’t. Some were planned, written, designed and launched within a month. Some took six months. The website projects that dragged on the longest were the ones without a true North Star. They were designed to please stakeholders first and for the buyer second.
Everyone in B2B tech has an opinion on marketing because, unlike other roles, marketing is something everyone thinks they can do. As long as every idea is considered and the stakeholder signs off, we get to keep our jobs and go home. We launch the website. We high-five over Slack. And prospects bounce without filling out a demo request form.
The Cost of Content by Committee
When messaging is designed to keep internal teams happy rather than solve a customer’s headache, we create holes across our entire pipeline.
Demo calls turn into free feature walkthroughs. Our AEs spend forty minutes sharing their screen, clicking through tabs, and explaining how the every tab works. The prospect nods and ends the call with a promise to “review this with the team.” When that prospect tries to justify the purchase to their boss, they can’t explain what problem the software solves.
Discovery calls move backward. Instead of using a thirty-minute introductory call to qualify budget or learn who makes the buying decision, our sales reps follows a script regardless of who is on the meeting. Sometimes clarifying product confusion before they can even start selling.
Simpler, inferior products win your accounts. A competitor with half our engineering clout and a fraction of our features walks away with the contract. Their homepage makes the business outcome obvious in eight seconds. In the demo, they show the buyer how their life gets easier rather than an exhaustive feature list.
How to Pull Your Positioning Out of Revision Hell
If you want messaging that moves deals, stop brainstorming in a vacuum and start listening to your prospects.
1. Mine your call recordings for friction. Pull the last ten discovery calls or demo conversations. Listen for the moments where the prospect sighs, pauses, or leans in to vent. Note the language they use when describing their daily issues. Notice their frustration with spreadsheets they hate updating. That emotion is your messaging foundation.
2. Translate features into pain relief. Take your current product sheets and strike out every sentence that just describes how the solution works. Replace it with examples of why (qualitative data) and what (quantitative data). Show them that team will be more efficient when they eliminate six hours of weekly spreadsheet edits. Give the buyer a concrete business case that shows why your thing makes their life better.
3. The “Can anyone else say this?” test. Pull up your homepage. Copy your headline and subhead into a blank document. Swap your company name for your closest competitor’s name. If the sentence still makes sense for their offering, your positioning is DOA. You wrote safe copy that bleeds into the category cacophony. Rewrite messaging around the specific, stubborn problem only your product solves.
Clear positioning does not happen by consensus. Stakeholders are crucial to its success. But it shouldn’t happen by committee either. Create the discipline to set aside egos, cut out the jargon, and speak directly to the person who needs what you have.
Curious how your current site or sales collateral reads to an outside buyer? Contact me, and I will take a look and send back two or three observations on where your content is ignoring your customer.
Content Disclaimer: The ideas and life experiences you read here are 100% my own. However, I use LLMs to outline, revise, or format drafts. I heavily edit the final product, but sometimes there is AI residue.
I have 20+ years of experience performing live improvisational theater. If you have done something similar like acting, public speaking, or competitive sports you know the feeling, the rush, of performance. It’s a combo of excitement and panic.
Once you step under hot stage lights without a script, there is no going back. The other performers don’t know what you’re going to say, and you don’t know what they will give you either.
The thrill is that you have to be ready for anything, including the moment the brilliant idea you’re dreaming up won’t work. Because your scene partner could say something that takes the scene in a whoIe new direction. And you have to be ready for anything.
You can choose to force your witty idea in anyway, instead of listening and making their idea work. But if you do, the scene dies. The audience cringes. You can feel the air (and joy) leave the room.
The only true way to make a scene work in improv, is to drop your ego, listen to your scene partner, and build your dialogue and actions on top of what they offered. Improv forces engaged presence. You must react to what’s in front of you, not the plans in your head.
The B2B Echo Chamber
When I look at B2B content marketing today, I see companies forcing their pre-planned lines onto a buyer that is trying to tell them they need something else.
Marketing teams can get isolated in corporate echo chambers. They write copy for internal approval instead of for the buyer’s pains. They cram landing pages with buzzwords and jargon that excites the stakeholder, but means nothing to a person trying to solve a problem.
Teams often do the business equivalent of ignoring their scene partner. Just like in improv, buyers turn to someone else the second they realize you can’t be trusted to listen.
Five Lessons From the Improv Stage
Here are five things that improv taught me about how to lead content strategy:
The buyer sets the scene. Your strategy doesn’t matter if it fails to address the specific problem your customer is experiencing right now. Solve a pain with content or it will collect dust.
Intelligence loses to clarity every time. On stage or on a landing page, trying to sound smart creates distance. Stating clear, obvious truths about a solution builds immediate trust.
Drop the pre-written script. If data and customer feedback contradict your brilliant campaign idea, collaborate and come up with something that supports the metrics.
Respect the audience’s time. Nobody visits a website to admire your corporate buzzwords. If they can’t see that you understand their pain in under 30 seconds, they’re gone.
Trust is built on listening, not a pitch. Real connection happens when a buyer reads your content and realizes you understand their day-to-day reality.
When I build a content strategy, I start by listening. I talk to the marketing, sales, product, and CX teams. I get into the customer feedback, both the good and the bad. I review sales demo recordings. I look at search intent and lead behavior.
Once I know the goal of each internal stakeholder and the need of the buying persona, and I write content that meets the customer where they are. When you treat your audience like a person in the room, they stick around for the rest of the story. More importantly, they trust you enough to buy.
Content transparency note: This was my original idea. I used Gemini used to help me outline and format this post. I wrote the final piece myself using my idea and the LLM outline.
Over the last decade working as a marketing director and content manager, I watched brilliant engineers, visionary founders, and dedicated product teams build incredible things, only to hand the messaging reins over to corporate committees, timid PMs, or sycophantic agencies. And, with all the valid help AI has given us, content quality has gotten even worse.
The result? PDFs full of buzzwords, blog posts that read like user manuals, homogenous LinkedIn posts, and zero connection with buyers and users.
I’m here to help. Swift Creative is a content marketing consultancy built on a simple principle: creating content marketing with a soul in a world where soulless content has become the standard.
I work directly with founders, marketing leads, and creative teams to turn messy ideas, products, and services into clear, readable writing that people genuinely want to engage with.
I do not believe in fluff, jargon, or treating writing like a commodity. I believe in clear words, honest craft, and solving real problems for real people.
If your team is trying to fix its messaging or build a content engine that feels human-centered, please comment. And you can see what I’ve built for brands here.
