I have to admit that I have struggled articulating my marketing philosophy lately. You may have noticed when I was talking with Jay Schwedelson on my podcast. I asked him about the difference between the required content needed for “feeding the beast” of a modern marketing plan and the inspired “big swings” that go viral and really move the needle for our business. His answer confirmed something I’ve been feeling in myself, my clients, and the AI marketing industry.

Every business needs both required and inspired content to continue to grow.
(Hat tip to AI expert Shelly Palmer for this inspiration.)

Confusing the two is why many marketing teams are burning out, burning cash, and/or burning bridges with their audience. So, I wanted to take a minute to explain the differences and how you can use a Human-First AI Marketing® approach to market with the clarity, confidence, and capability of a big brand on a small business budget of time, money, and resources.

What’s Required Marketing Content?

Required content is the steady drumbeat that keeps your brand alive in the market. Blogs, newsletters, nurture emails, and social posts are the branding signals that build trust and keep your name showing up in front of buyers. Required content ensures that when someone is looking for your offering, you are top-of-mind, and they can find you.

It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s framing your latest email blast in a museum. However, it’s necessary. Skip it, and your business becomes invisible very quickly. If someone looks you up and you haven’t posted in years, they start to doubt if you are even in business.

The problem with required content is that most teams make one of three mistakes:

1. They treat daily and weekly content like it has to be hand-crafted with the same energy they’d pour into a major campaign. That’s exhausting, they run out of ideas, and stop posting.
   
2. They expect every post to get engagement, convert, and generate ROI. This can lead to frustration, cutting budgets, or burning out your audience with too many “offers.”
   
3. They give up and treat these channels like garbage. They post junk, get no response, and continue spiraling into despair that “marketing doesn’t work in their business.”
   

For these reasons, AI is a powerful tool here. Social media and other regular marketing activities that fill your marketing calendar are a marathon, not a sprint. When the job is scale, speed, and consistency, AI is built for the task. With an effective AI marketing system, you can map out your required content, map it to your channels, set up the conversion path for leads, and then automate the content engine to let AI do the heavy lifting.

If you clarify your brand voice first, you can scale your required content without settling for AI slop. With our A9Factor, you can get 9X the content for the same investment.

What’s Inspired Marketing Content?

Inspired content is a different animal. It’s the keynote people quote years later. It’s the founder story that gives your business a soul. The creative big swing that suddenly makes everyone in your industry pay attention. It may be an event, product launch, book, course, or community. Inspired content is about resonance, not repetition. It’s not about filling the calendar; it’s about filling the room with energy, connection, and momentum.

The problem with inspired content for most businesses comes from a few common challenges:

1. Knowledge gaps – The people who know about the product don’t know marketing. The people who know marketing don’t understand the product. Leaders don’t get enough time with clients, and CS teams don’t get enough time with leadership.
   
2. Blind Spots – For similar reasons, it is hard to get inspiration for new marketing ideas for your own company. If you had a brilliant idea for a marketing campaign, you would have already used it. My dad says, “It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.” Generating marketing for yourself takes a rare talent, but doing it for others is a skill you can learn.
   
3. Trust Gaps – You have been in your business for too long and know too much. It’s like you have been married to your business for years, and your customers are going on a blind date. Most companies assume buyers are ready to move faster than they are, and they make their offers too big or ask for too much too soon.
   

These are the kind of problems you can’t outsource to a machine. It takes an experienced marketer to understand the context and connect the dots. At Avenue9, we interview your founder, best clients, top salespeople, product specialists, vendors, or partners to capture the inspired insights into why you do what you do. Creativity, connection, and culture are still, and always will be, human.

AI can remix these insights, but it can’t originate them. ChatGPT can help you with brainstorming, prompt you with interesting questions, or distill leadership conversations into a clear and focused message. However, AI is fast, and trust is slow. Figuring out what actually moves buyers is still the job of your team.

In our A9^Factor Framework, we clarify the audience, codify your brand voice, and craft a compelling offer to connect the two in a way that sets you apart from the competition. We use our human marketing experts with big brand experience on a fractional basis to get you 9X the inspiration on a small business budget.

Why Most Marketing and AI Projects Fail

Here’s the real trap of using AI in marketing:

• Some companies hire massive agencies, create an avalanche of AI slop, or have simply given up chasing the inspired stuff, hoping lightning strikes. But it rarely does, making marketing an expensive overhead for the business.
  
• Others throw everything at the wall, hoping something sticks. They try to do the required content as cheaply as possible, but they don’t have the marketing strategy in place for a real audience connection that builds trust over time. They check the boxes with templated blogs, generic posts, and “SEO filler,” but they never rise above the noise.
  
• With AI tools, a similar thing happens. Most companies use AI to do the hard part for them. They ask AI for inspiration or to do the required content without giving it the context. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t outsource your success to AI.

All these approaches miss the balance of a human-first strategy, where you leverage humans for inspiration and AI for execution. Finding the correct balance is where growth lives.

Authenticity X Automation = Exponential Advantage

At Avenue9, our A9^Factor Framework is built on this equation.

• Human-First Strategy – Start with clarity and connection with real buyers, not bots.
• AI Marketing Systems – Make marketing easier to execute, maintain, and scale.
• Scalable Storytelling – Tell the stories that build trust and scale them to reach new buyers.

We work with you to uncover the stories, strategies, and inspired creative swings that make your brand worth remembering. Then, we set up systems that make sure your required content gets created, published, and distributed consistently without burning out your people or blowing up your budget. It’s not about one or the other. It’s about multiplying the results of both through humans and AI working together. With the right mix, small and mid-sized businesses can finally punch above their weight.

In the battle to grow your business, you need steady air cover from drones to keep your brand front and center, and you need hand-to-hand combat from the sales and marketing teams to make sure buyers choose you over the competition.

Why It Matters Now

AI has made the required side of marketing easier and cheaper than ever. That’s good news if you know how to use it. But it also means required content is no longer your differentiator. Everyone can produce it, and standing out will only become harder.

The inspired side of your brand voice, culture-changing moments, and bold creative swings will separate you. The trick is setting up the right strategy so your team actually has the time, budget, and energy to do it. That’s the gap Avenue9 fills.

We use artificial intelligence to amplify your unique voice, empower your marketing team, and enable your scaling business to achieve big-brand success. If you believe in the human-first philosophy, let’s chat.