I had a conversation with a fund manager last week that perfectly encapsulates the AI problem in financial services marketing.
He has a junior marketer on his team who’s been experimenting with AI tools, and he’s been producing more content than ever before: blog posts, social media updates, email campaigns – the output has tripled.
There’s just one problem: it all sounds exactly like what everyone else is saying. It’s generic, forgettable, and adds nothing to the conversation.
“Without a strategist doing the foundational work,” he told me, “He’s just churning out content we don’t need.”
He’s right. And he’s not alone.
Lots of marketing teams I speak to are experimenting with AI. Most of what they’re doing is rubbish. ChatGPT for blog posts isn’t a strategy – it’s just faster mediocrity.
The pattern is depressingly consistent: firms adopt AI tools, content volume increases, and absolutely nothing changes.
They’re producing more white papers that nobody reads, more social posts that get ignored, more emails that look identical to the fifteen others advisers received that morning.
AI was supposed to free up marketers’ time to do more strategic work. Instead, it’s enabled them to produce more of the same stuff that wasn’t working in the first place – just faster.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is that most firms are using AI to scale the wrong things.
If your marketing strategy is weak, if your positioning is generic, if you haven’t done the hard work of understanding what makes you different, AI will just help you produce more weak marketing, faster.
The firms that are genuinely winning with AI understand this. They’re not the ones shouting about it on LinkedIn – they’re the ones quietly using it to make their teams three times more efficient, but only after they’ve done the foundational work that can’t be automated.
The audience problem that nobody’s solving
The main issue I come across is that marketing teams tend to have very scant idea about who their audience really is.
They might know basic segmentation like advisers versus mortgage brokers, accumulators versus retirees when they think about end clients at a push. But that’s where it stops.
They don’t understand what an adviser in his mid-50s with a lifestyle business actually cares about vs a newly qualified planner chasing growth.
They can’t tell you what keeps different types of advisers up at night, what they’re trying to achieve in the next three years, or why they’d choose one platform over another.
If you don’t know your audience, AI will just help you produce more content that misses the mark
And the bigger problem is that if you don’t understand your adviser audience, you can’t possibly understand their clients either.
This isn’t just a marketing problem.
Firms are supposed to be understanding and meeting the needs of their end clients in line with Consumer Duty, but most of their end client understanding is filtered through advisers they don’t actually know.
They’re building products and services for client segments they’ve never spoken to, based on assumptions about what advisers want, when they don’t really understand advisers either.
AI makes this worse. If you don’t know your audience, AI will just help you produce more content that misses the mark. It’ll scale your misunderstanding.
The firms getting this right aren’t starting with AI. They’re starting with research, real conversations with advisers, and real conversations with advisers’ clients.
They’re understanding the nuances within their audience by actually speaking to them, and building actual insight into what different types of advisers need and why.
What AI transformation actually looks like
The fund manager agreed that what he needs is to get the strategic work done first. AKA: the hard bit. Define his unique message, develop his story, and understand exactly what differentiates him and why advisers should care.
Once that hard work is done, he can almost relax knowing that the rest will take care of itself.
Real AI transformation is when AI repurposes your strategically-sound content and doubles your output. It’s when campaign planning drops from two weeks to two days because AI handles the execution once you’ve nailed the strategy.
The firms getting it right understand AI is a tool for scaling good strategy, not a replacement for having one
I’ve seen marketing teams use AI to take one piece of well-researched, strategically-positioned content and adapt it for six different audience segments in an afternoon.
That’s powerful, but notice what comes first: the strategic insight about those different audience segments. The understanding of what resonates with each.
Most marketing teams skip this work because it’s difficult and time-consuming. They jump straight to execution because that feels like progress. Now they’re jumping straight to AI-powered execution, which feels like progress at three times the speed.
The real test
Here’s how you know if you’re using AI properly: has anything actually changed?
Not your content volume or how fast you can produce a blog post – has your actual engagement improved? Are advisers responding differently to your marketing?
If not, you’re not transforming anything, you’re AI-washing.
That fund manager’s junior marketer shouldn’t be using AI to churn out more content. He should be working with a strategist (hello) who can make sure the firm’s marketing is actually distinctive. Only then does AI become worth having.
The firms getting this right understand that AI is a tool for scaling good strategy, not a replacement for having one. They do the hard thinking first, get their positioning right and understand their audience deeply.
Then they use AI to do more of it, faster. Everyone else is just making the same mistakes quicker.
Faith Liversedge is a marketing consultant. Visit her website here
