A few years ago, the hardest part of advisor marketing was getting anything published at all. Writing took time, compliance took longer, and most advisors simply didn’t have the hours.
That problem is solved. Any advisor can now produce a polished LinkedIn post, a market update or a blog article in minutes. Most of them are doing exactly that.
Which has created a new problem, and it’s a bigger one.
Everyone got the same ghostwriter
AI tools learn from what already exists. Ask one to write a post about market volatility for financial advisors, and it will give you the most reasonable, most average version of everything that has ever been written about market volatility for financial advisors. That’s what it’s designed to do.
Now picture thousands of advisors asking the same question in the same week. They get slightly different wording of the same ideas, in the same tone, with the same structure. Stay the course. Focus on the long term. Diversification matters. Talk to your advisor.
None of it is wrong. All of it is interchangeable.
Advisors were already fighting this before AI arrived. Large firms hand every rep the same approved content. Compliance pushes language toward the safest possible phrasing. AI takes that sameness and speeds it up. The result is an industry where more advisors are publishing more than ever, and prospects can tell them apart less than ever.
What sameness costs you
The obvious cost is that people ignore generic content. The real cost is subtler.
When your posts sound like every other advisor’s, prospects don’t just skip them. They conclude they already know you. They’ve read this before. They know what you’re going to say. So they never look closer, and looking closer is where trust gets built.
Trust is the entire business. Nobody hands their life savings to someone they don’t feel they know. Every polished, generic post quietly teaches the people reading it that there’s nothing more to learn about you.
What AI can’t reach
The stories that would make someone look closer don’t exist anywhere AI can find them.
They’re in the conversation you had with a client the week her husband died, and what you did in the following month. They’re in the reason you left a big firm, and what you almost didn’t say to your manager on the way out. They’re in the investment you talked a client out of, the mistake that changed how you build portfolios, and the question every new client asks that tells you whether the relationship will work.
None of that is on the internet. It’s in your head, and often you don’t realize it’s worth telling.
AI can help you shape a story once you have one. It can’t find the story for you, because it wasn’t there.
Why finding stories is the hard part
Most advisors assume they don’t have interesting stories. Almost all of them are wrong.
The problem isn’t a shortage of material. It’s that you’re too close to it. The things that would fascinate a prospect feel ordinary to you because you’ve lived them. Ask an advisor to write about their approach, and you get a description of a process. Ask the right follow-up questions, and you get the moment that process was born.
That’s what journalists do. When I was reporting, the first answer to a question was almost never the story. The story came from the second or third question: “What happened next?” “Why did that bother you?” “What did you say to them?” Good interviews dig past the polished version people tell about themselves and find the real one underneath.
AI doesn’t ask follow-up questions about your life. It answers the question you asked, with the average of everyone else’s answers.
How to use AI without disappearing
This isn’t an argument against AI. Used well, it saves time. The key is the order you do things in.
Find the story first. Before you open any tool, write down the moment, the decision or the conversation you want to share. A few sentences in your own words, however rough.
Use AI to shape, not to source. Once the raw story exists, AI can help tighten it, suggest a structure or adapt it for a different format. It works best on material only you could have provided.
Read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d actually say to a client across the table, it isn’t done. Polish that erases your voice defeats the purpose.
Keep a running list. Every week, note one client question, one decision or one moment that stuck with you. In a few months, you’ll have more real material than any tool could ever generate.
The advisors who will stand out
Over the next few years, generic content is going to become nearly free and nearly worthless. Every advisor will be able to produce it, so it will stop meaning anything.
The advisors who earn trust will be the ones whose marketing couldn’t have come from anyone else. They’ll have a clear point of view, a sense of who they’re talking to, and real stories that prove it. That isn’t a writing problem. It’s a strategy problem first and a storytelling problem second.
AI made writing easy. It made finding something worth saying more valuable than ever.
At Layup, I help established advisors and fund managers build a strategy for earning trust, and find the stories that make it work. If your marketing sounds like everyone else’s and you can’t quite say why, start a conversation.