Stop Chasing AI Tools: How to Set Marketing Priorities That Actually Move the Needle
Rather listen than read? Catch the full conversation on the Growth-Minded Marketing Podcast.
If AI in marketing is feeling overwhelming right now, here’s the good news: you don’t have to do everything. You just need to do the right things in the right order.
This episode is the practical follow-up to our conversation about how AI has changed buyer behavior. Now that you understand what’s shifted, the question becomes: what do you actually do about it? And just as importantly, what can wait?
In Part 2 of this series, Steve Phipps and AnnieLaurie Walters get specific about priorities, process, and how to use AI without letting it lead you further down the wrong road faster.
Clarity First: Before Speed, Tools, or Automation
The most common mistake CEOs and marketing teams make right now is reaching for tools before they’ve established a foundation. It feels urgent to adopt AI quickly, to keep pace, and not fall behind. But speed without direction doesn’t move you forward. It just gets you to the wrong place faster.
Before your team invests time in any AI platform, you need to be able to answer three foundational questions with confidence:
- Who are we best for? Who are our ideal clients?
- What problems do we solve better than anyone else?
- Why do customers consistently choose us?
These aren’t marketing questions. They’re leadership questions. And if they haven’t been answered clearly, not just in someone’s head but as a shared, articulated strategy across sales, marketing, and leadership, AI won’t fix that. It will only magnify the confusion.
Three Priorities Before You Use AI for Content Creation
Once leadership alignment is in place, there are three areas that deserve immediate attention before you start using AI to generate blogs, social posts, or video scripts.
- Clarify your messaging. Your leadership team, sales team, marketing team, and customer service team should all be telling the same story. Not similar versions of it, but the same clear, consistent message about who you serve and why it matters. Inconsistency across teams is one of the clearest signals that the foundation isn’t solid yet.
- Create internal alignment. Sales and marketing frequently operate in silos with different priorities and unclear handoffs. AI can actually help here. Use it to document processes, define expectations, and close gaps between teams before they show up in your external messaging.
- Understand your buyers’ current expectations. Don’t assume you know how your buyers are making decisions today. Some things haven’t changed, but some have. Buyers may now be arriving at conversations having already gathered information through AI that they previously would have gotten directly from a salesperson. Dig into that. Use AI to pressure-test your assumptions by asking it to respond from your customer’s perspective.
What It Really Means to “Train Your AI”
There’s a common myth that AI will produce great content right out of the box. It won’t, at least not great content for your company.
Think about it this way: if you hired a new employee on day one and immediately asked them to write a compelling article for your buyers, you’d get something generic. They don’t know your company, your customers, your voice, or the nuances that make you different. AI is the same.
Training your AI means feeding it the strategic foundation you’ve built: your messaging framework, buyer personas, product and service descriptions, your positioning, your voice. When your AI tools have that context, the output shifts from generic to genuinely useful. You spend your time fine-tuning rather than starting over.
Skipping this step is one of the main reasons so much AI-generated content feels flat. More output, but not better thinking behind it.
AI Marketing in 2026: What Can Wait (And What Can’t)
Not everything needs to happen at once, and trying to do it all is a fast path to burnout with inconsistent results. Here’s a practical way to think about it:
What can wait: Advanced automations, custom AI tools, AI agents, and replacing staff roles with AI functions. These things may make sense later, but only once you have a solid foundation to build on.
What can’t wait: Getting clear on who you serve, what you say, and whether your website and messaging are building trust or quietly breaking it. These are the things that AI is evaluating on behalf of your buyers right now.
A useful framework is the 90-day planning cadence. Ask what my team can realistically accomplish in the next 90 days. Pick a focused set of priorities (your “rocks” if you use EOS) and execute on those before adding more. At the end of the quarter, reassess and set the next 90 days. This rhythm keeps you moving without the chaos of trying to do everything simultaneously.
Don’t Benchmark Against Your Competitors’ AI Tools
It’s tempting to look at what competitors are doing with AI and feel like you’re falling behind. But the wrong question to ask is what tools are they using? The right questions are: Do they have a clear strategy? Does their website do a better job of building trust? Are they showing up consistently where buyers are asking questions?
Tools are a means to an end. You don’t need to be the most technically sophisticated company in your space. You need to be the most trustworthy one. Companies that focus on trust, answer buyers’ questions honestly, demonstrate real expertise, and show up consistently will outperform companies that simply use more tools.
What 2026 Will Actually Reward
As Steve puts it, CEOs often want a “sexy answer,” some new platform or strategy that changes the game. But the answer for 2026 is the same one that’s always mattered: focus, clarity, and consistency.
The companies that will win are those that know exactly who their customers are, communicate that clearly, and reinforce it everywhere their buyers show up. AI is still looking for the fundamentals: Can I trust you? Are you clear about what you do? If I commit to you, can I trust that you’ll deliver?
One practical tool worth knowing about: Google’s EEAT framework (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness) hasn’t changed. It’s been the standard for meaningful content for years, and it’s even more relevant now. A useful AI prompt tip: instruct your AI tools to follow the EEAT framework and flag places in the content where you should insert a case study, testimonial, or real-world example. Let it prompt you to bring the human expertise that makes the content worth reading.
The Bottom Line: Slow Down to Speed Up
The pressure to move fast with AI is real. But pressure isn’t a reason to panic. It’s an invitation to lead with clarity rather than chaos.
As Steve shared: “Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.” The leaders who take the time to get aligned, get clear, and build a real foundation before accelerating are the ones who will have a meaningful advantage. Not because they avoided AI, but because they used it to support better decisions, clearer communication, and stronger teams.
Not sure where your marketing stands? Wayfind Marketing’s free B2B marketing assessment takes about five minutes and gives you a clear picture of what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus first.
Missed Part 1? Start with How AI Is Quietly Eliminating Your Business From Buyer Shortlists.
