How I Use AI in Marketing (Without Relying On It Too Much)

The biggest misuse I see with AI in marketing is:

The level of expectation marketers have for how perfectly it should work.

It’s often an unhealthy amount of expectation that leads to frustration and disappointment when AI doesn't meet these unrealistic standards.

Using AI in marketing isn’t about letting it take over, it’s about figuring out where it adds real value and where you need a human touch.

That’s the topic I’m addressing with Kristen van Laren, Head of Marketing at Peridio — a platform for building, shipping, and scaling embedded products without compromise.

Let’s get into it!

Where marketers go wrong with AI

Q: Where do most marketers often go wrong with AI? Can you walk us through a time you saw AI overused or misused, and what the fallout looked like?

A: What happens with marketers is we're using AI every day, probably a dozen times per day.

But we're using it in a way that is not incredibly efficient.

What I mean by that is we're often distracted. We're getting Slack pings. We've got multiple tabs open. So we're using AI while we're also in the process of task switching.

And because AI gives these outputs that feel really good, structured, and logical, we just sort of trust it verbatim.

That’s where the problem is: trusting AI blindly without putting enough focus and thought into it.

But if you think back to a time when we didn't have AI, marketers would sit down and minimize distractions.

You had true think time, and that think time was what produced highly creative and impactful work.

And so right now, I think what we're doing is we're rushed and chaotic, and we're giving these like half-baked prompts, expecting to get groundbreaking outputs.

And that's just not how it works.

Best use case for AI in marketing

Q: What are some of the best use cases or examples of AI in marketing you’ve seen in the wild?

A: Some of the best use cases or examples of AI that I've seen are when marketers still understand the fundamentals, doing the best thing that a marketer has always been able to do.

And that is to stay as close to the customer as possible, using transcripts from real human conversations that are happening, and then using that to amplify the impact of their marketing efforts outwardly with AI.

When I think of the best campaigns that I have produced with the help of AI…

… the common denominator is often that I have analyzed transcripts from real conversations with customers, partners, prospects, and our co-founders.

I've used those transcripts as the basis for putting together whatever campaign it is that I've done.

And so, whether that's:

social content,
an email campaign,
our newsletter,
website content,
landing page content, or
outbound outreach.

All of those things are better, more impactful, more original when we're using the words and the language of our customers, partners, and prospects in actual sales calls.

Strike a balance between human storytelling and efficiency

Q: How do you recommend marketers and teams strike a balance between AI-driven efficiency and the authentic, human storytelling that builds trust and brand loyalty?

What are some specific tasks or moments in the marketing journey where you think human input is absolutely non-negotiable?

A: The way I see it is, AI has democratized content.

And there's a blessing and a curse with that.

What that means is, it has effectively given everybody a low barrier to entry, where every marketer can use AI for free or very cheaply to produce content that “looks good.”

In other words:

it follows a good structure
it's written confidently
it's more or less factually correct.

But the downstream effect of that is that now there's a lot of sameness that we're starting to see, and people are really craving more authentic human storytelling and trust building.

Part of striking that balance is, again, using AI to surface the best parts of human interactions. That’s what fixes the downstream effect.

Where AI can drive efficiency, without losing authenticity

Q: In what specific areas do you think marketers should definitely be using AI to drive efficiency and amplify their impact without sacrificing quality?

A: Everything feels shiny and new, and I think we’re in this space where some people are just trying to use everything and trying to establish a predictable workflow.

For me, what I'm trying to do is get a little bit more settled with AI.

So I try to stay away from shiny object syndrome and try to really focus on a few core AIs and almost build a scorecard for myself for which AI is good for what.

And so, for example, when I'm doing strategy building or I want to pressure test a strategy, I really like Gemini.

I find that it does a really good job. I like that it shows the thinking process. It’s very thorough in its analysis and reasoning.

When I'm writing or doing social content, and I know I want that content to be short and snappy, I usually use ChatGPT. It remembers context very well, and so it's good for doing things that are repeatable.

When I'm trying to write thought leadership content, I like to use Claude.

Those might not be the same AI tools for everybody, but I think starting to get comfortable with understanding your own workflow and the marketing work you’re doing is important.

I like doing an internal scorecard and then really thinking about how I can use AI to do the things that feel mundane, so that I have more time to do the creative, thoughtful work.

Because amplifying your impact with AI is about using it to take over the mundane, so that you can focus on the bigger picture, more strategic imperatives that you have for yourself and the company that you work for.

And so that's how I group and think about AI.

Essentially, I want AI to be a copilot. I also really like to use speech to text in chat to:

share my thoughts,
share my insights,
talk about the things that have happened on calls that week to really start to refine my own thinking and pressure test strategy.

And then I use AI projects for things that are repeatable.

So, for example, in Claude, I have a podcast project that is just for building YouTube descriptions and LinkedIn posts for our Beyond the Bench podcast that we publish every Wednesday.

So that for me is something that started with a lot of creative work, and now it's a little bit more on autopilot.

And it's something where I can then just go into that Claude project and basically say to Claude, here's this week's version of the podcast. Here's the transcript. Get me that LinkedIn post. Get me that YouTube description.

And it knows now what I'm expecting and what the formula is and the format. And so I don't have to spend a lot of time.

So, again, think about the areas where you can make things repeatable and scalable.

Integrate AI without losing your brand's soul

Q: For marketers building long-term brand strategy (not just running short-term campaigns), how should they think about integrating AI without letting it shape their brand voice or values too much?

Can you share any frameworks or principles that help to keep the brand identity intact?

A: Yeah, I think this is a really great question.

Great content, great marketing campaigns come from a deep understanding of:

who you are,
what you do,
the value that you bring.

And so things like core messaging, pillars, and strategic imperatives can be shaped and refined by AI, but that is the work that first comes from the executive leadership team and the founders.

So when I think about marketers who are building a long-term brand strategy, there's this balance of needing to think about:

What are we doing in the immediate near term?
What are we doing for the quarter?
What are we doing this week?
How does our use of AI impact everything we’re doing?

At Peridio, for instance, we do quarterly planning. We meet in person, even though we're a fully distributed remote company.

We do meet quarterly to talk about these things, and go back to our one-year, five-year business strategy. We reevaluate our core rocks every quarter to make sure that those ladder up to the more long-term strategy of what we're trying to build.

That is a team collective effort that is done completely outside the realm of AI, that has people in a room talking and hashing that out. And I think that that's an important thing to maintain or do internally as an organization.

And so those are some of the foundational frameworks and principles that we use to make sure we stay on track, and that helps to guide our use of AI, ensuring our brand’s soul doesn’t get lost along the way.

The future of AI in marketing

Q: Imagine five years from now, AI in marketing is far more advanced and ubiquitous.

What skills should marketers and founders be building today to stay relevant and irreplaceable in that kind of future? What will still set human marketers apart when AI is everywhere?

A: Yeah. This is a biggie.

I think the skills that marketers and founders should be building today is to continue to build their domain expertise — because your ability to excel with AI as a marketer is completely contingent on your breadth of experience and knowledge within marketing itself.

A new, inexperienced marketer is not going to be able to do deep, deep strategic work with AI without understanding how to bend and yield the AI effectively.

So, really understanding how to prompt effectively comes from your ability to tap into real world experience.

I would say that marketers who are further along in their careers, who are in director and above roles, are in some ways at an advantage because they've built up that domain expertise.

They've done things, battle tested, tried and true.

They've worked across multiple channels. They have probably focused on multiple areas of marketing, whether they've worked in performance-based marketing or brand, or demand.

They understand the channels very well and they understand, at least holistically, what works, what doesn't, and they've probably done stuff with other facets of marketing like CRO and A/B testing.

So they're at an advantage because they're able to tap into that knowledge when they are prompting.

In general, I would say:

keep exploring AI tools,
start to learn what works and what doesn't
establish really turnkey workflows that you can then market for either fractional services or use that to sell yourself into an organization

The coupling of deep experience in the field and deep experience with various AI tools and various AI use cases is going to be paramount.

Conclusion

Using AI effectively comes down to understanding its role in your overall marketing ecosystem.

It’s not about outsourcing creativity or letting a tool (AI or not) dictate your voice, it’s about adding a powerful co-pilot to help you do more of what matters.

Kristen’s main message to marketers?

Let AI handle the busywork and scale what you already know works, while you stay in the driver’s seat, shaping a story that feels human, purposeful, and distinctly your own.

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