I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I recently had a conversation with my Meta Ads trainer. We were talking about where things are heading online. The flood of AI-generated content. The feeds full of technically correct, emotionally hollow posts. The captions that say all the right things and land with a thud. The flyers that you can tell instantly are AI, with the weird gradient, the stock imagery that looks too polished, the copy that sounds so perfect and polished, that’s currated the same as every other post.
If you remember back to the time of Covid (I know it’s not a time many of us want to reminise over!) but the one thing that was so apparent in that time while we were all stuck inside and the world was eerily quiet. We were so so deseprate for contact, connection, real people, real faces, warmth (even if through a screen) but overwhelmingly it’s realness. As human’s we crave real people.
AI is great and being honest, it isn’t going anywhere. I dont think you should resist it, I certainly don’t and used wisely it’s genuinely useful. But what I am saying is this: the businesses that thrive over the next five years won’t be the ones with the most automated, frictionless content pipelines. The will be the ones who remembered they were human.
So, if you’re running a small business in the creative or wellness space, then you are already sitting on the single most valuable asset in modern marketing. You. Realness. Connection. Feeling.
You can spot it a mile off
I just want to be honest about what’s happening in our feeds right now.
The deep fake videos. The AI-generated headshots that look almost right but not quite. The flyers with the telltale stock font, the layout with the boxes at the bottom and the swirly font, the imagery that could belong to anyone and therefore belongs to no one. The captions that open with “It’s not X, it’s Y” or “You’re not broken, you just haven’t been shown how”, it’s all recycled so many times it starts to mean nothing.
People notice it and if your feed is full of it, they feel it too. It’s a kind of low-level unease, a slight distance, the sense that nobody is actually home and being brutually honest, it smacks of a business that wants to cut corners and is just ‘testing the water’ before they invest in software and proper business practises. Like the brand is a shell. So, when your entire business is built on trust, as a reflexologist’s is, as a photographer’s is, as an artist’s is, a shell is the most dangerous thing you can present to the world.
Dont’ get me wrong, AI is genuinely useful. As a tool. The keyword here is tool.
You wouldn’t ask a hammer to write your client welcome letter. You wouldn’t ask a spreadsheet to hold someone’s hand through a difficult session. AI, used wisely, can help you structure, draft, speed up the admin. But the voice, the story, the specific human perspective? That has to be yours. Because, as I always say, people are buying YOU.
The brief you write will only get you so far
I’ve written more briefs than I’ve had hot dinners in my 20 years working in marketing; agency side, client side, brand side, briefing designers, copywriters, photographers, strategists. I know what a good brief can do. But I also know the pitfalls of what a bad or incomplete brief can do! (I learnt that the hard way)
Ultimately what you get back from a brief is only ever as good as the lived experience, the cultural understanding, the education, the instinct of the person executing it.
When you employ a person, a designer, a copywriter, a brand strategist, you’re not just buying their output. You’re buying twenty years of things they’ve noticed, absorbed, reacted to. The designer who grew up going to art galleries with her mother. The copywriter who spent a decade in retail and understands exactly how people make decisions under pressure. The strategist who has worked across three industries and can see the pattern you’re too close to see yourself.
AI has read the internet. It has not lived in it. Which is the fundamental difference, that is the gap between pattern recognition and lived experience, which is exactly where creative work happens.
When AI took off a few years ago, copywriters were worried. Not now, now they are riding high. Because what the flood of AI content has done is make human writing, specific, voiced, a little imperfect, genuinely felt, is worth more than it has ever been. Creatives have never been in such demand. The market corrected itself faster than anyone expected.
What authenticity actually looks like, and why it works
Let’s talk about something I see in my ads work every single week.
When I’m running paid social for clients, I always test. Beautifully curated video. Polished carousel. Strong brand visuals. Against a photo of someone in the car, rough and ready, filmed on a phone, talking directly to camera with no script.
The car wins – literally every time!!
Not because production quality doesn’t matter. It does, at the right moment, for example, when someone lands on your website or your booking page, you want it to be clear and professional and easy to navigate. That’s where polish really earns its keep.
But in your social feed? People are looking for a reason to stop. And it’s the human face that stops them, every time. A real voice, a specific moment that feels like it wasn’t produced for consumption. The paradox of authenticity is that trying to perform it makes it disappear. You can’t manufacture the thing. You just have to be it.
What ‘being it’ looks like is simpler than most people think. It’s specificity. The detail that only you would notice. The sentence that only you would write. The observation from a Tuesday morning with a particular client that nobody else had, because nobody else was in that room.
That’s what stops a scroll. Not a perfect flatlay. A real moment, shared by a real person who actually cares.
It’s not just social media. It’s everything.
Here’s where the conversation gets really interesting, and where small businesses have an advantage they’re not fully using.
Human connection doesn’t live only on Instagram. It lives in every single touchpoint your business has with the world. And the opportunity to show up as real exists in all of them.
Your social media (yes, but differently)
Stop trying to look like a brand. You’re not a brand. You’re a person who does exceptional work and genuinely cares about the people you do it for. That’s what your feed should feel like.
The photo on your phone from this morning. The text message a client sent that made your week. The thing that nearly went wrong and what you learned from it. The specific detail about your craft that you know inside out and your clients are fascinated by.
That’s the content. And it takes fifteen minutes, not three hours in Canva.
Your business cards and printed materials
We are now entering a generation of business cards with personality! Gone are the days of boring bland white cards with logos, we are craving the personality. The one liner that gives the recipient something to remember you by. And sorry if you don’t like pictures on business cards – get used to it and snap away. How else will people remember you from a load of other boring bland white cards?
But here’s the thing about printed materials and your brand in general, think about the feelings your clients leave with. The reflexologist’s client who walks out feeling like she’s finally been heard, like her body was listened to for the first time in months. The interior designer’s client who finally feels at home in her own house. The artist’s collector who looks at the piece every morning and feels something shift.
Those feelings are your brand. Your card, your flyer, your website, they should carry that feeling before a single word is read. Not a tagline from a corporate handbook. The actual thing you give people when they leave.
The reflexologist whose card says: ‘Leave feeling like yourself again.’ The sound bath practitioner: ‘Come. Breathe. Leave different.’ The interior designer: ‘I help you love the room you’re already in.’ Even better – use a few lines of testimonial from your clients! These really are human, felt and remembered. These are the cards that get passed on.
And importantly, they are impossible for a generic AI flyer generator to produce. Because they come from knowing, specifically, intimately, what your clients feel when they work with you.
Your local presence and analogue marketing
Something is happening that I think is genuinely significant. The shift back to analogue, to print, to local, to physical presence, is already underway. And I think it’s going to accelerate.
When everyone is online, offline is where you stand out.
Your flyer in the yoga studio. Your leaflet in the osteopath’s waiting room. Your card on the noticeboard at the farm shop. These things work when they sound like a person left them there, not a marketing department. Your face. One honest sentence. A QR code to somewhere real.
Being the known and trusted person in your postcode is worth more than ten thousand Instagram followers who have never set foot in Tunbridge Wells. Local is not a consolation prize. Right now, local is a strategy.
Your client experience
This is where the reflexologist and the photographer and the artist are already miles ahead of any corporate competitor. Including a handwritten note in a parcel, or a little farewell gift as they leave your treatment room. The WhatsApp message the week after to check in. The way you remember what matters to them, their daughter’s GCSEs, the difficult month they mentioned, the thing they were hoping for.
These are the things that AI can’t automate. And it is the thing that makes clients come back, refer their friends, and write the kind of testimonial that actually converts new enquiries.
Your client experience is your marketing. It’s already working. Let more people see it.
Your email newsletter
Most small business newsletters read like they were written by a committee. Careful, correct, completely forgettable.
Write yours like you’re sending it to one person. One thing that happened this week. One thing you noticed. One thing that might be useful to them. Sign off with your name.
The photographer who emails her list about what she’s been shooting and what went wrong. The artist who writes about where the idea for the new collection came from. The reflexologist who shares what she’s been learning about the nervous system and how it connects to the work she does.
These emails get opened. They get replied to. They build the kind of relationship that Instagram, for all its reach, simply cannot.
In-person events
Here’s the one I want to talk about with real conviction. Because I genuinely believe we are about to see a revival of the in-person event that has nothing to do with trend and everything to do with what humans fundamentally need.
Right now, in-person events are in decline. The habit of going online for everything, the workshop via Zoom, the masterclass as a replay, the community as a WhatsApp group, has become the default. And a lot of it is brilliant. But I think we’re reaching the limit of what digital connection can do.
There is no substitute for being in a room with people who share your values, your curiosity, your questions. The conversation that happens over a cup of tea after. The thing you didn’t know you needed to hear until someone said it out loud across a table.
I think in-person events are coming back. As a genuine response to what people are craving. If you’ve been thinking about running a workshop, hosting an open studio, collaborating with another local business on an evening, this is the moment to start planning it.
Opinions. Stories. Points of view.
There’s something else AI cannot do, and I want to name it loudly. It cannot have an opinion.
It can generate a point of view that sounds like an opinion. It can produce content that performs as if it has a take. But it doesn’t actually believe anything. It hasn’t been changed by anything. It hasn’t sat with a client who was in tears and understood something new about the work it does.
Your opinion matters. Your story matters. Your specific take on what your work means, to you and to the people you do it for, is irreplaceable content. It’s the thing people will follow you for, come back for, share with friends who need exactly you.
Connection and community are built through the accumulation of shared perspective over time. That’s what a loyal audience actually is. It’s not your follower count on a platform that you rent. It’s a group of people who feel, after a year of reading your emails and seeing your posts, that they know who you are and what you stand for.
You can’t outsource that. But you absolutely can learn to do it with more confidence and less second-guessing.
What AI cannot do
AI can write a caption, draft a flyer, generate fifty social media ideas in four seconds. Produce a logo in three minutes that looks perfectly fine and says absolutely nothing about your specific business.
It cannot build a relationship, or remember your client’s name. It cannot feel genuinely proud when the piece sells, or genuinely worried when a shoot doesn’t go to plan. It cannot be you, in your specific town, with your specific story.
The businesses that will struggle are the ones who try to out-AI the AI. Who make their content more polished, more automated, more frictionless. They will produce more and connect with fewer people.
The businesses that win will lean into everything the algorithms can’t replicate. Their face. Their voice. Their community. Their kitchen table.
Your humanness isn’t a limitation. Right now, it’s the most competitive thing you have.
Want to work on this in person?
Knowing you should show up authentically and actually knowing how, what your voice is, what you truly stand for, how to communicate it without it feeling performed or uncomfortable, are two very different things.
This September, I’m running a live in-person workshop in Tunbridge Wells with Kathryn Allen, Emotional Intelligence Coach. We start with the inside: understanding your own emotional landscape, what drives you, what holds you back, what your real story is. Then we move to the outside: how to translate that into your marketing and communication in a way that actually feels like you.
Because the best way to learn how to be authentic in your marketing isn’t through a screen, it’s in a room. With other business owners. With a coach. With honest conversation.
Small group. In person. Tunbridge Wells. September. £35.
Details coming very soon, reply to this or drop me a message to be first on the list.