How to Use Less AI Than Your Competitors and Still Keep Up With Them for Content Generation

A marketing strategist I know recently posted on LinkedIn, in the context of digital marketing content creation:

Completely ignoring AI is going to leave you behind — while your competitors move ahead.

While I agree that testing, if not fully vetting and using, at least one AI solution for content generation is a good idea to save time, this stance can lead AI newbies down a slippery slope.

Specifically, the more they see FOMO warnings like the one above — and the more AI solutions they see in the marketplace, and their friends and competitors using them — the more they might think that a primary longterm goal for content generation is to remove people from the equation to the maximum extent possible.

The drawbacks of heavy AI usage for content creation

The daydream of entering a topic into an AI tool and having it spit out a truly authentic video, blog post, email draft, and a week’s worth of social media posts (with images) is an understandably entrancing fantasy — particularly for time-strapped solopreneurs and micro business owners who just want marketing to be out there doing something.

However, there are significant costs with relying heavily on AI in this way (beyond a subscription fee for a solution tier above the free level). These include:

• Privacy concerns — especially as your business grows and you have more risk of employees or contractors entering your proprietary information into a chatbot.

• Energy costs. As I shared in this recent post, generating a single image in ChatGPT can consume 2 liters of water. I’ve also seen this stat making the rounds on LinkedIn: generating a 5-second video uses the amount of energy it takes to run a microwave for over 3 hours.

• Land use and environmental impact. In the U.S., data centers currently use 12 million square feet, and Arizton Advisory & Intelligence projects that additional data center construction will result in over 35 million square feet by 2030 (a 191% increase in only 5 years!).

• And let’s not forget about your additional time commitment associated with follow-up prompts (when the first one doesn’t give you the result you wanted) and with finding and correcting errors.

Now, granted, when it comes to energy and land use, a single business using AI to generate several emails and social media posts per week represents a tiny, tiny fraction of being “part of the problem.”

But when you add up all the businesses, across many industries, that are using AI solutions for 1% to 100% of content production — and ever more jumping on the bandwagon every day — it balloons from a problem to a serious, all-encompassing issue.

And there’s another emerging concern I didn’t mention above: AI models increasingly showing signs of failing as more of the data that’s inputted into them is AI generated.

How to get the most out of your human experience-driven content while using minimal AI

Given that the first three bullets in the list above are big concerns for me, here’s how I balance posting as many days of the week as I can — to maximize reach — with a focus on building up a library of authentic content (mostly video; here’s why) and clipping out and repurposing that content.

With the following focus, the only thing that I use AI for is to generate an image for my new-every-two-weeks blog post (yep, the image at the top of this post was made in Gemini). That’s incredibly minimal reliance on AI compared with my competitors and others in the digital marketing space.

Here’s my weekly social media calendar:

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Here are the key features of my plan:

1. I vary the content type — text, text + image, video, carousel, etc. — from one day to the next to mix it up for the algorithms.

2. I publish a new blog post every other Sunday, and I pull from my blogs for some posts on Tuesday.

3. As I mentioned above, I have a heavy focus on video because it’s the best format for people who don’t know me; it’s proven to build trust faster than other types of content. The green days are video content days. I further build repurposing into this by using my third party-verified subject matter expert videos on a rotating schedule for Monday’s and Friday’s content; thus, those cells say “SME vid clip.”

4. For Wednesday’s video content, I find blocks of 2+ hours every 3-4 weeks to shoot and edit new, direct-to-camera videos where I share tips that help my audience make better use of their digital marketing platforms and feel better about using Google Analytics, the main platform that I improve for my clients through customization. I alternate that content with videos where I jam out to popular songs and share marketing-themed advice — a key way to show that I’m a real person who my clients and prospects can trust because, like them, I’m focused on growing my skills and continual learning.

5. If I’m currently running an offer, I share it on Thursday. Some Thursdays, I also spend time to update a Canva image template I created to share my latest client testimonial. A longterm goal here is to create enough testimonial images to switch between them most weeks, and pop in new ones as they come in.

6. On Thursday mornings, I run live Zoom events on marketing topics within a rotating schedule of four topics (one per week most weeks). I publish these events on LinkedIn, my biggest and most active social media platform. I use Saturday as my day to publish a new event in the same series as the one I ran the previous Thursday.

If you adapt from my plan, here’s the most important thing to use as the foundation:

For every day’s piece of content, you want to tie it back to how it benefits your business. (Otherwise, what’s the point, right?) For example, in my Google sheet where I screenshotted the table above, below the “Campaign” cell that you can see, I have a cell (start of the row) that literally says “How it benefits my biz.” An example of this tied to a specific day’s focus is that for Wednesday (see #4 above), my goal is to: “Increase social media followers, please the algorithm, and send traffic to my site depending on the video.”

If you’re interested in reducing your AI footprint and staff time tied to using AI tools, here’s my challenge to you:

As my example shows, it’s possible to maintain human authenticity while maximizing automation and repurposing in order to avoid being beholden to one (or many) AI content solutions. I challenge you to use my plan as a starting place to brainstorm how you can emphasize, day after day, what you do and how it helps your ideal customer or client — while saving big money that’s not being sent to AI solutions through subscriptions, which are only going one way over time.