Keeping a Human-in-the-Loop in Your AI-Assisted Marketing

You may consider yourself among those MSPs who many vendors still refer to as being “lousy at marketing.” That’s okay. Stay with me here…

You may consider yourself among those MSPs who many vendors still refer to as being “lousy at marketing.” That’s okay. Stay with me here…

First of all, I’m not someone who gives much of a shit what vendors say about you. During my 40 years as an MSP, I was very selective about who I partnered with, and mutual respect was among the top criteria in that selection process. But I worked in companies that saw the value of having me drive their marketing, so I may not have been among their targets.

Marketing is Not About You – But it Requires You!

Take a look at your own website. Just read the first few words of every paragraph and keep count of how many of them start with “We”, “Our”, “I”, “Me”, or the name of your company. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it always; that’s just upside down and backward. Your messaging is not about you. It’s about your customer.

Take some of those paragraphs and flip them around. Instead of saying, “Our company provides the best network security services available and that’s what you need,” try, “You need the best network security around, and that’s what we provide.” I use a weak example to show you how even the simplest statement is stronger when it starts with your customers. They’ll react much more strongly to it, and you can feel that immediately.

How Does AI Impact This?

Many of the marketing clowns who want to soak you for money to market for you will tell you to have AI write your emails for you, and all your marketing content. Tell them what you want to say and let them say it for you.

Okay. As a professional writer for the past 16 years since I left “active duty” in the channel, I’m naturally predisposed to not accept that. But the fact is that most of the content I’ve read that was produced by an AI model is flat, commercial, filled with bullets, and not very impactful. The model was trained by programmers, not by writers. And there are plenty of reviews around to bear this out, so don’t just trust me.

Human-in-the-Loop

But even more to the point is the concept of keeping a “human-in-the-loop.” This is actually a common phrase among the scientists who are developing AI models and tools. They all advise that you must keep a human in the production loop of any AI undertaking. The most popular story is about Air Canada being sued because of something released in their corporate bereavement policy, which ended up being completely written by an AI model and never reviewed or otherwise checked by any human.

The same is true for your messaging to your customers and prospects. The goal of any marketing is to increase the customer or potential customer’s interest in your products and/or services. AI-generated content just doesn’t do it. It really does come out as the “same-old, same-old.” Your content doesn’t look any different from anyone else’s. There’s simply no YOU in it.

You can call it the “human element” or whatever you like, but there is a quality a human writer can bring to their writing. Not all people do. It’s very self-serving to say that professional writers do, but we do it for a living, so we have to, or we won’t get any business. I refer to myself as a “creator of compelling content” because years of selling and marketing have taught me that my job is to compel customers to take the next step in the sales motion, and the next step, and the next, until the close. And even then, some more steps.

So How Does AI Help with Marketing Content?

To answer that, I’m going to tell you how I’ve been using AI. I work with ChatGPT 5, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro, so I’m not going to be any help in choosing which you prefer. The only hint I’ll give you is that I prefer the one that gives me each and every source it consults along with whatever else it produces for me.

And that’s the trick!!!

AI is my research partner. I used to pore over website after website, Google search after Google search, looking for articles that contained the information and the insights I needed to inform my articles. For some projects that research alone could take days. Then I extracted what I needed from each article and wove it together in my prose.

Your reaction keeping me in business all these years suggests that I was doing an okay job at the very least.

Now, I start by telling my research team about the story I’m writing. I give it as much detail as I possibly can. Who I’m writing for. What I’m writing about. What I want my audience to learn from it and, for me most importantly, what actionable advice I want to leave them with so they can finish reading me and go do something really productive with what I’ve just told them. The more detail the better.

Each model handles it differently, but they all return a briefing of some form along with links to the resources they consulted to create that briefing.

I then kick into high gear visiting all those resources by clicking those links. I scrub through each website just the same way I ever did when I was hunting them down manually myself. This deep dive into the content of these resources makes me the human deep in the loop and I always find more interesting material in most of the sites.

If I think about it, I’d say the AI stops at the hunt for valuable websites, which in and of itself saves me days. And that’s more than enough value for me to rave about it.

But if I’m being totally honest, the models often uncover observations I had not thought of myself which send me along very useful paths where I can be even more valuable in providing insights to my readers.

Bottom Line: Make your AI model your partner, your assistant. Don’t expect it to rival what you can bring to your work by having it do it without you.

Keep YOU in Your Marketing

Beyond compelling readers to become customers, the other thing you need to accomplish with all your content is to clearly differentiate yourself from your competition. You cannot depend upon any AI model to do this for you, no matter how well trained they are. In fact, most of us find that differentiator to be very, very elusive and hard to define. You MUST define it. And once you do, you will find your “hockey-stick” moment in sales.

I hope you’re walking away from this article ready to sit down with your favorite AI model or models and chat with them about how you want to excite your markets and compel them to learn more about you so they can quickly convert into customers. Here are a few requests:

1) When you find success doing this, please tell me more about it!!!

2) If you’re having trouble, please reach out to hmc@howardmcohen.com

3) If you have any valuable advice, or questions you’d like to share with other readers please comment below. My biggest goal is to foster an ongoing and growing conversation among all my fellow members of the channel community.

4) Please be sure to read http://techchannelresults.blog to follow what I’m following in our world.