5 Common Mistakes in AI Copywriting and How to Fix Them

Copywriting with AI has been a game-changer for hundreds of thousands of small business owners who started their business with a dream and a skill, and then realised along the way that they needed to learn marketing before they could grow it.

Being able to create interesting, engaging, and strategic marketing copy for your business in a fraction of the amount of time you would normally have spent on overthinking? Sign me up immediately.

But the downside of it being so easy is a wild west of AI-generated content that ultimately, without the context, nuance, and humanity of your business, is on a one-way ticket to getting flagged by Google’s SpamBrain algorithm.

In this article, I’m sharing the 5 mistakes I see small business owners making when it comes to copywriting with AI - and how you can address them in your own marketing processes.

You can enjoy the speed and momentum of AI-assisted marketing materials - and have the confidence to edit them into marketing assets that sound like your business and resonate with your audience.

Mistake #1 - Relying Too Heavily on Automation in Your AI Copywriting & Marketing

I get it… AI is super cool and can save a tonne of time. But here’s the kicker: if you lean too much on automation, your content might start feeling a bit… robotic.

AI tools are great at churning out text quickly, but even when they’re trained on your tone of voice (like Marketing Magic), they lack the human touch – the stories, the nuances, the wit, the charm.

My rule is that generative AI can get me 75-90% of the way there, but that final 10-25% is my editing process, and adding in the stories, references, and anecdotes that take it from being AI-generated information to it being genuinely interesting and helpful content.

You’re the Brita water filter, and AI content is the public body of water your audience might drink from.

AI should be your sidekick, not the star of the show.

How to balance automation & human touch in your marketing:

Focus on Relationships: Marketing is about communication. Much of that communication on the internet is functional and doesn’t need you to be directly involved - but it still comes back to building relationships. Keep in mind that you are running a business, talking to real human customers and potential customers - and automate in a way that maximises their positive experiences.

Retain Ownership of the End Result: You may have had AI give you a helping hand along the way, but remember that publishing that final piece of content reflects on you and your brand.

Segment & Personalise: If you’re setting up automations, it’s important to tailor your marketing messages as much as you can. Segment your audience based on behaviour, interests, and demographics, and add a personal touch to emails - Hey [Name] - to avoid them sounding generic.

Schedule Wisely: Automate your email marketing and your social media posts, but be ready to jump into conversations when a relevant trend or news story pops up.

Mistake #2 - Ignoring Your Brand Voice When Editing Your AI Copywriting

When you’re editing AI-generated content to sound consistently like your business, you need to know what your business should sound like.

What is a brand voice? And why does it matter?

Your brand’s voice is the unique personality and style your business uses to communicate with the world - and it’s made up of the words, tone, and attitude you use across all your content.

Think about building a relationship with a new friend - what was it that made you like talking to them? The way they listen? The funny quips they make? The interesting insights they share in your conversations? The shared interests you have?

When you’re communicating as your business, you want to use a consistent brand voice that enables you to build a relationship with your audience - so they know what to expect, how to recognise you, and feel comfortable trusting you.

How do you define your brand voice?

It’s an evolving process, but here are some places to get started:

1. Understand who your target audience is, their preferences, interests, and pain points. Your brand voice needs to resonate with them.

2. Know what you’re trying to do with your business: What are your values? Your mission? Your vision? These elements add to your business’s overall personality.

3. Identify your brand’s personality traits: Create a chart or mind map, and give your brand some personality traits. Add examples of language and phrases your brand would use, and words that reflect the tone and style you want your business to be associated with.

Once you’ve thought through these areas, document it into a set of guidelines - it will quickly become second nature to you when you’re editing.

Using your brand voice with AI

If you’re using Marketing Magic, I’ve created an algorithm that identifies your tone of voice and trains AI to sound more like you.

But if you’re sending prompts to a foundational AI model like GPT, Claude, or Gemini, you will need to brief it to mimic your style. Think of it like training a parrot to speak, but the parrot is hyperlexic.

Mistake #3 - Not Thinking About Your Ideal Customer in Your AI Copywriting

Who are you writing for? Who are you writing for?

If this question isn’t top-of-mind for you constantly, it doesn’t matter if you’re a world-class copywriter: even the best-written content won’t hit home.

Understanding your audience is crucial to crafting marketing content that resonates with people - because people are your audience, and people have unique tastes, needs, and preferences.

You’re aiming to send the right message to the right people at the right time.

… So that your customers and ideal customers connect with your content.

(Side note: This is why personalisation has been a marketing trend for a number of years, and continues to be a huge focus for brands as AI takes over more and more of the internet.)

Three quick ways to get to know your ideal customers better:

Create some Jobs to Be Done statements: A Jobs to Be Done statement is a great way to get insight into your customer’s current situation -

• When: I am preparing for a new product launch.

• I want to: Create a comprehensive marketing campaign using AI.

• So that: I can maximise reach and sales, and have a successful product launch.

Review what they’re thinking at each stage of the customer journey: You might have thought about content, what your customer is doing, or where you’re talking to them - but have you thought about what your customer is thinking during different parts of the customer journey?

Think about their core objections and goals: What are the main things they are sceptical about, concerned about, or trying to do? Refresh your memory for the key things that may be priorities for your customers.

Marketing Magic has tools that help you do each of these things super quickly, which I’ve linked above - but if you don’t have an account yet, you can get a 7-day free trial (no credit card required) and try out all three things for yourself.

Why does this make your AI-generated content better?

… Because as you’re creating and editing your AI-generated content, your filter has now got your brand voice AND your ideal customer in it - and you can make sure that the content you create only contains things that are relevant and valuable to your audience.

Marketing is communication.

Mistake #4 - Neglecting SEO Best Practices When Editing & Publishing Your AI Copywriting

SEO has always been a cornerstone of digital marketing, acting as the bridge between your content and the audience that needs it.

Historically, this involved a lot of manual work - keyword research, content creation, and constant tweaking to stay in line with Google’s ever-evolving algorithms. I cannot even tell you how many hours, days, weeks, months, of my life have been spent on keyword research and optimisation!

But here’s the good news: since Google rolled out its first machine learning algorithm a few years ago, SEO has been evolving in ways that make it less of a burden for small business owners.

Google’s algorithms focus more on the quality and relevance of a web page and the content on it rather than just keyword density, and you don’t need to use exact match keywords for your content to be found in search results.

Plus, you can use AI to help with getting keyword suggestions, optimising your content, and generating SEO meta-data.

When you’re optimising your AI-generated content, be mindful of…

1. Integrating Keywords and Staying Topically Focused: Naturally weave in relevant keywords without keyword stuffing, and make sure that you stay focused on one main topic or theme for a page.

2. Creating Relevant, Quality Content for Your Customers AND Your Business: Focus on creating valuable content that answers questions and solves problems for your ideal customers - don’t get distracted by things that won’t resonate with your customers, and aren’t connected to the things you’re trying to sell in your business

3. Optimising Your Meta Descriptions & Titles: These SEO fields in your website are crucial for getting click-through from people who see your content in the search engine results page, so make sure they are a clear, compelling summary of the page.

Mistake #5 - Failing to Review and Edit Your AI Copywriting so It Sounds Human

A really common mistake business owners make is thinking they can outsource the whole process of copywriting to AI, and they don’t need to edit it at all - or if they do need to edit it, that it’s a sign the AI tool has done a bad job.

This is not true at all.

You are outsourcing PART of the process of creating content - but you are still responsible for reviewing and editing, because you’re the business owner, and ultimately ownership of the content assets you’re creating falls to you.

AI detectors are a huge part of Google’s (and other search engines’) algorithms moving forwards - so if we’re churning out AI-generated copy without making any changes or edits, it will have a hugely negative impact on our brands in the long term.

Here are some key things to review and edit as you create copy using AI tools:

• Is it factually accurate? What needs researching, checking, or sources to be added?

• Is it too generic in areas? Is all of the content valuable and interesting to your ideal customer? Or does some of it sound like it’s trying to make up the word count in a school essay?

• Can you add any personal experience, insight, or language? Can you add in direct experiences, or reword some of the key points to make it sound more like you?

• How much can you delete before it stops making sense? What fluff can be removed so that the key points of your content are clear?

AI can produce drafts quickly but may miss context or subtle errors that only a human eye can catch.

Quick Tips to Help You Edit Efficiently:

1. Take Breaks: Step away from the text before editing - fresh eyes catch more mistakes.

2. Read It Aloud: This helps identify awkward phrasing or errors, so if you’re stuck on a section and not sure what to do with it, reading it aloud will usually give your brain another way to process the information.

3. Use Tools: Using Marketing Magic significantly cuts down on the amount of editing that needs to be done to your AI-generated content because it’s trained on your tone of voice. When it comes to spelling, structure, or grammar, tools like Grammarly or Hemingway App can be great assistants for catching mistakes.

Editing is where good becomes great, and where AI-detected becomes human-generated.

And that’s a wrap on the top 5 mistakes I see business owners making with their AI copywriting processes!

We’ve been on quite the winding journey with these 5 mistakes, and there is lots of actionable advice for you to take away. We’ve looked at…

1. Being too reliant on AI, and how depending too much on AI for copywriting can make content feel robotic and impersonal.

2. The importance of balancing automation with human editing: Use AI to generate initial drafts but add human stories, references, and anecdotes to make content engaging.

3. How to define your brand voice & use it as a filter for making sure your brand's unique personality and style is consistent across all your content.

4. What SEO best practices look like in the age of AI-generated content, and how to make sure your content doesn’t get excluded from search algorithms

5. The editing process for reviewing your content, including making sure it’s factually accurate, removing generic content, adding personal insights, and checking for readability.

Marketing Magic is the AI-powered tool I created to help small business owners like you save 40+ hours a month in their marketing. You can get a 7-day free trial of it here >>