Connecting with your audience (readers or potential clients – choose the word you’re most comfortable with) is easier than you think. You just need to write and talk to them using your own voice.

I’ve seen a lot of social media posts that fall into one of two broad topics:

• People wanting to learn to use generative AI to write (or to teach you to do so)
• People who want to make genuine connections with their audience

When I read the posts promoting the use of generative AI or talk to people who use it, this is what goes through my head:

• Your audience wants to hear from you. If they want to know what a bot thinks, they'll ask one.
• Your voice matters, and it helps people connect with you and what you do, even if you make the occasional grammatical error.
• People buy from people. You are your USP.

If you're finding my use of 'USP' a bit jarring - you're not alone. I don't love marketing jargon but finding your 'unique selling point' or your voice and purpose are key to attracting clients.

They’ll ask a bot if that’s what they’re looking for

If your audience want to know what a bot thinks, trust that they’re able to ask one themselves. There’s no real advantage for them when you just give them the answers a bot gives you.

If you’re thinking, ‘but I rewrite what the bot tells me’, you may not be personalising the output as much as you think you are.

Changing writing from one voice to another (whether the first voice is that of a bot or a human) requires extensive training in writing and copy editing. If you’ve spent years learning what differentiates one authorial voice from another, you might be successful in making AI output sound like you. If not, ...

If you have the requisite training, is it worth the time and effort?

Judging by the discussions I’ve seen in the groups for copy editors that I’m in, the answer is no. Many editors now either won’t edit text produced by generative AI (I’m in this camp) or they charge at least double when they do.

Why? Because, ethical issues aside, making AI output sound human and read naturally takes much more time than simply fixing human errors.

You may think AI is saving you time, but studies show it’s not. Between trying to humanise the output and having to rigorously check it for accuracy – it hallucinates (lies) all the time – you’re spending at least as much time trying to make it work as it would have taken you to write it yourself.

Your audience want to hear from you

People read your books, blog posts, and other content because they want to hear from you in your voice. Without your voice, there's nothing to differentiate you from all the other people who do what you do.

Your marketing, and all of your content is part of your marketing (not just your sales posts), needs to give your potential clients a reason to buy from you instead of someone else. Writing content that does that requires

• Using and developing your voice
• Understanding your particular processes and expertise
• Explaining how you can help from your unique perspective

Generative AI can spit out a lot of words very quickly, but it will never (no matter how much time you spend ‘training’ it) develop your voice. Nor will it truly understand what you do or why you do it that way.

Why? Because it’s a machine. Generative AI works by aggregating everything it can find on a particular topic and looking for patterns. Then, it suggests words that fit the pattern.

In other words, it gives you bog-standard text that makes you sound like a bog-standard business owner. Surely, that’s not what you’re looking for.

What do you do instead? Write your own content. Even (especially) if your writing isn’t perfect, it will connect with your readers.

Getting to know your voice through your written content is often the first step in learning to trust you. If you don’t write your own content, the first time you speak to a potential client, you’ll erode some of that trust. Most people won’t be able to articulate why, but they’ll feel the disconnect between the voice on the page and the one that comes out of your mouth.

You don’t want that, and neither do they.

Humans are social creatures looking for connection

Though people are (worryingly) starting to turn to bots for emotional connection (and I'm not going to try to unpack that here), they still want to connect with people just like you.

Humans are social creatures. They want to see you for who you are and, this is crucial for your marketing, they want you to see them.

Think about the last piece of content by someone else that you had an emotional reaction to. I’m not a gambler, but I’d be willing to bet that you reacted to that piece because it made you feel seen. You felt like the writer really understood what you’ve been going through.

That’s what you want from your writing. Not everyone who reads it is going to feel that connection. But you’re not trying to connect with everyone.

Instead, you’re trying to connect with the people who need your help. Those people will connect with your writing whether you understand the difference between a colon and a semicolon or not.

They want your human voice.

That said, don’t go around announcing the humanity of your writing as someone did in my dms recently – if you tell your audience you're a human, and especially if you tell them repeatedly, they'll doubt you and, if they're anything like me they'll have Hamlet in their head saying, 'Thou doth protest too much.'

Your humanity will announce itself through the originality of your thought and the individual quirks of your writing.

People buy from people

When I started my business, it was commonplace in networking meetings for people to say 'people buy from people' – this usually signalled the group focused more on relationship building than sales pitches.

That statement is still true. Your people want to buy from you, so don't put a bot between yourself and your audience.

They're bored of the cookie-cutter content.

If you want to learn to write quickly in your own voice, the best place to start is in my mini course Write Engaging Blog Posts the Easy Way (I’m currently offering this for free; from late October 2025, it will sell for £50). The technique I teach in the mini course works for longer form content like books, too.

If you’re starting your book soon, you should also check out First Steps to Becoming an Author (£75). It’s the first module in my six-month course, There’s a Book in Every Expert. I sell it separately so you can try the course before you commit to the whole thing.