Everyone Has AI. Now the Differentiator is Human.
It’s true. Everyone has AI. You have it, your competitors have it, your teenage kid has it. And it happened FAST. The rise of what we lovingly call “AI slop” seemed to happen overnight. LinkedIn posts, blogs, emails, ads, webinars, captions, and even case studies all started sounding strangely similar.
Now, we are absolutely not being critical of AI. It’s an amazing tool that we should all learn and embrace to keep up with the times and to unlock efficiency. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool to support your strategy and becoming over-reliant on it to do all the thinking (we’re not saying you are, but I bet you know someone who is).
It can be exhausting to see an awesome clickable headline, only to open the article and realize you got had by the solid AI headline that hid the generic, low-value content. It kinda makes you lose trust in the internet, am I right? Well, lose more trust in the internet. And therein lies the foundation of this article: trust.
Sure, your AI-generated content probably reads better than this stream-of-consciousness blog (although you’re reading it, aren’t you?). But do people trust it?
As Carrie Bradshaw would say, “Are we trading authenticity for perfect, polished words? I couldn’t help but wonder when did differentiation stop being the focus of marketers?”
For B2B animal health marketers, trust has always been crucial to earning business. Evidence and education remain essential starting points in the buyer journey, and something generic won’t cut it for this discerning group.
Stand Out from the Sameness Epidemic
With AI simplifying copywriting, brands are producing more than ever, but as with most things, more doesn’t equal better. Creating content is one of the most costly tasks in marketing. Because it requires subject matter expertise, especially in animal health.
Here are some ways to stand out in the crowd:
Included referenced content.
Make sure your referenced content doesn’t have ChatGPT UTMs in the links. Oh, you didn’t notice they do that?
Replace generic words like ‘solution,’ ‘optimized,’ or ‘workflow’ with more specific terms that have more teeth.
AI killed the em dash—and nobody is more upset than us. If you don’t want to look like AI, unfortunately (as of today at least), ditch the em dash.
Include infographics to break up large blocks of copy. They take effort and can indicate to viewers that what you’re telling them doesn’t fall into the slop category.
Re-read what you wrote and ask yourself, “If this didn’t exist…would anyone miss it?” If nobody would miss it, it might benefit from a human touch.
Does it read “real”? We all have a gauge now for what’s real and what’s not. If you use a tool like Grammarly, it will even call you out on how much you sound like AI.
Use AI as a brainstorming and editing partner, but take the first pass at the content yourself. You know what you want to say in a real-human way. Brain-dump it, then let the AI help refine your thoughts into a more user-friendly read. Often, marketers start with the AI version and then edit, but it’s easy to read the AI first draft and think, “huh, that sounds pretty good!” and settle for ‘fine’ when your amazing human brain could have made it ‘fab’.
It’s also important to note that if you are churning out tons of generic content because your boss told you to improve SEO, so you don’t care what goes up as long as the post is the right length and it’s keyword-packed, the generic AI content is not where it’s at. Google devalues content that is repetitive, generic, lacks original insights, or fails to offer firsthand insights. Yikes. To achieve your goals, you’ll want to keep a critical eye on quality, not just quantity.
Veterinarians can sniff out generic marketing. Pun intended.
In clinical environments, trust is paramount. Additionally, clinical content is, by nature, more complicated than a generic blog post like “5 Instagram Post Formats Your Brand is Missing”. If animal health content is missing references, it’s missing real-world relatability; it’s written like a textbook instead of a skimmable bullet list (because we know veterinarians are too busy for long-format like this), then you run the risk of losing trust.
Real-world case studies complete with before and after pictures, full patient history, and multimodal treatment protocols can go a long way in boosting the authority of your B2B veterinary content.
Use the language they use in the clinic, rather than the overly polished style of AI, to improve authenticity.
Reiterating: AI isn’t the problem. Like at all. But humans now offer the competitive edge brands are seeking.
So let’s go back to the setup of this blog. We love AI. We use AI. We would tell other people to use AI. Shhhh, we even brainstormed with AI on the outline of this blog. Why would we ask AI to talk trash on itself? That would be rude.
The problem is that AI is a great tool for tactical execution, but it requires oversight and subject-matter expertise. AI is not the solution to all your strategic problems. Your human-led strategy is your differentiator. If you caught yourself thinking, “Claude could do Jason’s job, we don’t need him”. Recall that…
Jason has 10 years of experience marketing your product.
Jason knows why previous campaigns succeeded and failed.
Jason has heard veterinarians talk; he speaks their language.
Jason understands your big picture and how everything you’re tactically executing fits into it.
The humans at your company should be the brains behind crafting strategic initiatives.
These human-centric strategies can then account for all the nuances of messaging and tactical execution that the AI can’t know because it lacks the real-world experience the team has. Everyone can ask AI to write a blog post on how to implement x, y, or z technology, but humans know what the secret sauce is. They’ve been on the tradeshow floor and watched the “ah-ha” moment lightbulb go off in a prospect’s head. They have the real-world stories. They can package emotional impact into a narrative that hits.
SEO and AEO are increasingly valuing first-party research, arguably more than any other type of content. Why’s that? Because it is difficult to replicate, it’s original, and it shows that your brand is the expert.
Here are some ways to use the humans:
Establishing strategic direction
Identifying differentiators
Fielding first-party research/ surveys
First pass at creating long-form content with all the authentic good stuff
Interviews and firsthand stories
Here’s where the AI should come in:
Editing copy/ grammar
Summarizing long-form content/ repackaging content into promotional text, which is then edited by a human
Brainstorming
Finding references for claims
Generating outlines or visual frameworks for content
Executing your vision (turning your cool content into an interactive quiz, or coding a beautiful landing page to bring your message to life)
Doing tasks like data normalization, capitalization corrections, transcribing, etc. You know all the ‘busy work’ things that need to be done but are mindless and shouldn‘t demand your time.
Re-Energize Your Strategic Approach
As a B2B marketer, you yourself may be suffering from some AI fatigue. We hope this article has rejuvenated your passion and bolstered your confidence that you are the competitive advantage. A major risk we face right now is becoming complacent and relying too heavily on the AI, even though we are, in fact, the subject matter experts.
If you need help with a content strategy targeted at veterinary professionals but are leaning on the AI because you lack marketing experience, contact us! Red Brick has been in the industry for over 16 years and can help you fill in the gaps that the AI just can’t.