Marketing Has Never Been Easier to Do… Or Harder to Get Right.

AI and automation have put incredibly powerful marketing tools in everyone’s hands. But having access to the tools and knowing how to use them well are still two very different things.

Marketing has never been more accessible.

A business owner can build a website without knowing how to code, create graphics without being a designer, write content without being a copywriter and launch an advertising campaign without ever having worked in marketing.

Google and Meta actively guide people through campaign creation. Canva makes professional-looking design accessible to almost anyone. ChatGPT and Claude can produce ideas, strategies and content in seconds.

The tools have become easier.

The problem is that marketing hasn’t become easier to get right.

In fact, across almost every area of digital marketing, we’re seeing a growing gap between being able to do something and understanding how to do it effectively.

A website can look great and still not be doing its job

This isn’t actually a new problem.

For years we’ve seen websites built by friends, family members or someone on the client side who knows enough to get something online.

The problem often comes later.

The business needs to change something. A technical issue appears. A plugin stops working. Tracking isn’t quite right. The site gets slower. Nobody knows how to update certain areas and the person who originally built it no longer has the time to help.

Little by little, the site becomes stagnant.

AI has introduced another version of the same thing.

We’ve now seen businesses move away from professionally built websites because AI means they can create something themselves. And often, what they create looks absolutely fine.

But what a website looks like is only one part of what makes it work.

There is a lot going on underneath:

• Technical SEO
• Site structure
• Tracking and analytics
• Page speed
• Redirects
• User journeys
• Conversion points
• Integrations
• Accessibility
• Security
• Ongoing maintenance

If the person building the website doesn’t know that those things need considering, they’re unlikely to make it into the brief or the AI prompt.

And that’s the important bit.

AI can be incredibly capable when it has the right information, direction and context. But it still relies heavily on the person using it to know what to ask for, what to check, and what good looks like.

Running an ad has become easy. Running the right ad hasn’t.

Google Ads and Meta are another perfect example.

Both platforms have spent years making advertising easier to access. Campaign setup is increasingly automated and both will happily recommend audiences, keywords, budgets, campaign types and ongoing changes.

For someone new to advertising, that can be incredibly useful.

It can also create problems.

Automated recommendations are based on the data and objectives available to the platform. They don’t necessarily understand all the nuances sitting behind the business.

They may not know that:

• One type of lead is worth substantially more than another
• A search that looks relevant has completely the wrong intent
• More traffic isn’t useful if it’s the wrong traffic
• A broader audience might generate more conversions but poorer quality enquiries
• A business only wants a very specific type of customer
• Something that improves one headline metric could make the overall campaign worse

We see recommendations all the time that are useful.

We also see recommendations that we wouldn’t touch.

That isn’t because Google or Meta automation is bad. We use automation extensively ourselves. It’s because knowing whether to accept a recommendation requires something the platform doesn’t always have...Context.

A system can recognise that broadening the targeting might generate more conversions. A person with an understanding of the business can recognise that those extra conversions may be exactly the ones the client doesn’t want.

Which recommendations do you implement, and which do you steer well clear of?!

SEO is perhaps where this is becoming most obvious

SEO has always been an area where businesses can find it difficult to judge the quality of the work they’re receiving.

AI has made that even more interesting.

Ask an AI platform to analyse a website and suggest ways to improve its SEO and it can produce a very impressive list in seconds.

You’ll probably get recommendations around:

• Page titles and metadata
• Internal linking
• Schema
• Content clusters
• FAQs
• Page speed
• Backlinks
• New landing pages
• Technical improvements
• E-E-A-T

And plenty of those suggestions may be completely valid.

But a long list of technically correct SEO tasks isn’t the same thing as an SEO strategy.

The more important questions are usually:

What does this particular business actually need?

What are its customers searching for? What is their intent? Which services or products matter commercially? Where are the realistic opportunities? What is already performing and shouldn’t be disrupted? Who are the genuine competitors in search?

And, crucially, what is actually going to make a meaningful difference?

We’re increasingly seeing businesses being given generic lists of SEO activity that could, technically, be done. Sometimes those recommendations have clearly originated from AI.

The problem isn’t necessarily that the recommendations are wrong.

It’s that they’re too broad.

There is a huge difference between saying:

“Here are 50 things you could do to improve your SEO.”

and:

“These are the three things we should do next, in this order, and this is why.”

That second bit requires judgement.

The engineer, the hammer and the £10,000 bill

There’s an old story that feels increasingly relevant to marketing.

A huge ship’s engine breaks down completely. The crew try to fix it. Other experts are brought in. Nobody can work out what is wrong.

Eventually, an experienced engineer is called.

He carefully inspects the engine, looking over the different parts and listening to how everything is behaving.

Then he reaches into his bag, takes out a small hammer and taps one particular spot.

The engine immediately starts.

A few days later, the ship owner receives the engineer’s invoice.

£10,000.

Understandably, the owner isn’t impressed.

Ten thousand smackers for one tap with a hammer?!

They ask for an itemised bill.

The engineer sends one back:

(Image generated successfully enough using ChatGPT!)

There are lots of versions of the story, but the point behind it has probably never been more relevant to digital marketing.

Everyone has access to the hammer now.

AI has given businesses access to tools that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years ago.

Google and Meta have made sophisticated advertising far more accessible. Canva has done much the same for design, while AI can write, analyse, research, plan, code and create

That is a huge opportunity.

But having the hammer isn’t the same as knowing where to tap.

(Yes, this image was also created using AI. It only took several prompts, a few questionable hammers and someone knowing what they wanted. )

We’re using the same tools

This isn’t an argument against AI or automation.

Far from it.

At Beyond Your Brand we use AI and automation every day. They’ve become part of how we work.

We use multiple AI tools, including:

• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Canva
• Google Ads automation and recommendations
• Meta Advantage and Meta’s automated tools
• Data and analytics tools
• AI to help with ideas, research, analysis and first drafts

Used properly, these tools save time, helping us work more efficiently and achieve more for our clients..

But the phrase “save time” is important.

They don’t remove the need for work.

• An AI-generated article still needs checking, editing and adapting.
• An automatically generated campaign still needs monitoring.
• An AI-generated website still needs testing.
• An SEO audit still needs interpreting.
• A recommendation still needs somebody to decide whether it makes sense.
• And anyone who has spent far longer than expected trying to persuade an AI tool to produce exactly what they had in mind will know that “just use AI” isn’t always quite as quick as it sounds.

The more knowledge the person using these tools has, the better the outcome tends to be.

Because they can give better instructions.

They can ask better questions.

And, perhaps most importantly, they can recognise when the answer they’ve been given isn’t right.

What clients should expect from an agency has changed

There’s another side to all of this.

Agencies can’t simply carry on doing things exactly as they always have and insist that expertise makes them valuable.

Some tasks genuinely are quicker now.

Some things that businesses once needed an agency to do can now be handled internally.

And some of the technical barriers that once made digital marketing difficult have disappeared.

That means an agency’s value has to sit somewhere different too.

It shouldn’t simply be about knowing where a particular setting lives in Google Ads or being able to produce something that AI can now create in seconds.

The value increasingly sits in things like:

• Understanding the business behind the marketing
• Knowing the customer and their intent
• Spotting opportunities that aren’t immediately obvious
• Recognising when the data is misleading
• Knowing which metrics actually matter
• Connecting SEO, paid advertising, content, social and the website
• Understanding what has been tried before
• Knowing when automation is useful
• Knowing when automation is taking things in the wrong direction
• Prioritising what will make the biggest difference
• Knowing when not to do something

Ironically, some of that value is now less visible than it used to be.

A lot of the visible work has become easier.

The thinking behind it hasn’t.

The difference doesn’t always show up on day one

The tricky part is that expertise doesn’t always look impressive from the outside.

A professionally built website and an AI-generated website might look very similar on day one.

An expertly managed advertising account and an automatically managed one might both appear to be running perfectly happily.

A detailed SEO strategy and a generic AI-generated list might both contain plenty of sensible-sounding recommendations.

The difference often becomes apparent further down the line.

• When the website needs maintaining.
• When rankings don’t improve.
• When leads increase but lead quality falls.
• When advertising spend starts drifting into areas that aren’t commercially useful.
• When someone has a list of 50 SEO tasks and no idea which one actually matters.
• Or simply when the person trying to manage everything themselves discovers that AI may have made some of the work quicker, but it hasn’t removed the work.

That’s often the point when the value of experience becomes much easier to see.

So has marketing become easier?

In many ways, yes, and that should be embraced.

Businesses can create more, test more and learn more than ever before. Smaller companies have access to technology that once belonged almost exclusively to large organisations with big marketing budgets.

But there’s a danger in confusing easy to access with easy to master.

AI can provide an answer.

Google can make a recommendation.

Meta can make a change.

Canva can make something look great.

What they don’t automatically bring is an understanding of the business, its customers, its history, its commercial priorities and all the experience gained from seeing what works and what doesn’t.

As the tools continue to get better, simply knowing how to use them will probably become less valuable.

Knowing why, when and whether to use them will become more important.