“Uh oh… yet another AI-generated flyer that looks like the rest!”
Building a brand is a unique and special process that requires time, dedication, and often times – a lot of money. I sympathize with my fellow business owners that marketing in 2026 is certainly a challenge, what with the noise on the internet, and all of the quick posters and flyers that you see popping up on social media. To be frank though, using generative AI for your marketing is a disaster waiting to happen. (And no, this isn’t an article talking about data centers and their consequences – don’t worry)
Humans vote with their money, and more and more we’re seeing a kickback from consumers that they’re tired of seeing the same thing over and over, and it got me thinking: “How many lifetime customers does a business lose every time they post an AI flyer, and is the marketing savings really worth losing that revenue?”
Think about that. Say you have a customer who decides to boycott your business over AI use that spent on average $20 every time they came in. If they came in once a week, that’s $5200 over five-years of loyal revenue that you forfeit right out of the gate. Now multiply that by 50 or 100 customers… and you start to see the picture come together.
If we take that 5-year figure, and break it down over 12 months, it comes out to $1040 dollars per year. Multiplied by 50, we’re looking at $52,000 in lost revenue per year. Revenue that you could have spent hiring a marketer to get MORE customers, not lose them.
Let’s take a step back from the above, and look at marketing and it’s root purpose: Expanding a business’s customer base. It’s an expenditure that’s part of the cost-of-ownership of a business, and something that businesses have relied on as long as they have existed in the modern world. Your marketing strategies are supposed to connect with people, compel them to investigate your brand further, and tell a story of who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Without those things, you’re just shouting into the abyss, or worse, shouting at an audience that doesn’t want to hear what you have to say.
When you step into the public eye with AI-generated content, you immediately set yourself at the benchmark of ‘every other business’. When everyone’s flyer, or event poster looks the same, businesses lose their individual identity and the ‘thing’ that sets them apart from their competitors. Customers become frustrated because they can no longer figure out what your mission is, what your goals are, or in some cases – how you can even ‘help’ that customer with their purchase.
The point of marketing and a good business brand kit is to stand out, stand apart, and show your full skill set. A great example is restaurants. When a restaurant posts an AI-generated flyer with photos of their food, that’s not photos of THEIR food, it is an AI-touched-up version of what they are actually selling. Right out of the gate, you’re setting a prescient that you are not confident in how your food looks as it is, that you need it touched up, and you lose the ‘voice’ of your business with every single AI-printed word on that page. It’s not YOU. It’s not natural. It’s borderline uncanny-valley material.
I’m not here to shame you, I am here to help.
Now that we’ve gotten the nitty gritty out of the way above, let’s talk about how businesses can utilize the free resources in your community, or how to find local artists to help support your marketing efforts. Everyone knows that marketing is expensive, but with the right tools, and a little bit of elbow grease, business owners and staff can easily market their business, especially if the quality of their product or service is as good as they say it is.
Humans would much rather see a crappy photo of your products taken on a cell phone cam, with a two-sentence description of what you’re providing, than look at an AI flyer – full stop. A great example is the ads you see that say something along the lines of ‘Our graphic designer is on vacation, please buy our products’ on a Microsoft Paint canvas. It’s funny, it’s eye catching, and it probably took 3-5 minutes MAX to create.
So how do we solve this?
Glad you asked. There are many different resources out there that can help you get started. The most obvious of which, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Paint. Break out that word art, throw in some millennial humor, speak from the heart. And before you say “I don’t know what to write!” – don’t stress! It doesn’t have to be perfect, and that’s the misconception about marketing.
To effectively market, you have to show the world how your brand is independent. Free tools like Canva can be a great start to help you get a structure put together, and just swap out some words and images, and maybe a few colors. If you fall in love with Canva, a one-person plan starts at only $18 dollars a month, $2 dollars less than a Claude.ai subscription. It comes with pre-built templates, hundreds of different document types, and they add features every day that help you create new types of content, from printing a design on a mug, to designing that human-made flyer we’ve been talking about.
Another important part of marketing is SHOWING UP. Show up on social media! Post pictures of your products, celebrate successful projects, engage with your local community. Show the HUMAN side of who you are. Even two posts a week proves you have a heartbeat, and that you’re trying your best.
“But Ryan, I just don’t have time to do this myself!”
Understandable! Running a business is hard work, and very time consuming – I’ll absolutely give you that. I can empathize with that stance, which is where my next topic comes in: Local Artists. One of the things that’s often overlooked in the business community is service exchanges. Some businesses like doing this, others don’t – it really depends. Reaching out to local artists and offering an exchange is a great way to give those artists some exposure, fuel for their portfolios, and beautiful content for your business. Do you run an Apothecary? Exchange some products for services! Do you run a restaurant? Offer a tab, or a week of meals! Do you clean duct work for a living? Offer to do an inspection! If you never ask, you’ll never receive, and asking for help or for a fair trade is never a bad thing.
“I just can’t see myself doing any of this, it’s too much work”
I hate to be blunt here, but if it’s too much work, I would seriously self-analyze to determine whether being in business is right for you. I do not mean that disrespectfully, but marketing is a critical pillar of owning a business, and it’s something EVERYONE needs to make time for. There are two costs to every task in business – Money, and Time. Money is a bit more free-flowing. You can work harder, bring in more cash, and change that value as you desire with the right strategies. Time, on the other hand – is certainly a finite resource. Marketing does not have to be overly time-consuming if you are smart about how you execute.
One of the things I mentioned above was humans desiring authenticity over perfection. As someone who’s worked in marketing for a decade now, I absolutely understand the urge to spend four hours making sure everything on a flyer is *just right*, but in the end – it made no difference. A little mis-aligned text here, maybe rough phrasing there, or a crappy picture that was all I had to get something done still did the job, still conveyed the message, and showed the human authenticity and human error that our business has, and before you say ‘human error!?’ – yes, that is a genuine marketing strategy. Think back to the statement i made prior about the Microsoft Paint ads!
The Bottom Line
This article isn’t perfect (because it was written by me, a human!), nor is it a 100% solution for everyone. Marketing is hard, and can be time-consuming if you let it, and expensive if you go the wrong route. It is, however, imperative to put yourself out there, and engage with your community. Be funny, show your character, make that crappy ad, and put it out there!
Let me also be clear – I am not against using AI to help boilerplate or prototype things if you are stuck on inspiration, but it is also not a replacement for the genuine human experience you provide to your customers that they come back day after day to be a part of.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself one question:
“Are the products or services I provide deserving of a lazy AI poster that’ll make people question my quality – or are they more deserving of a thrown together ad that makes your customers laugh, and your name stick in their head forever?”
I’ll leave you to decide. Thanks for reading.
