Why a Content First strategy built on human insight is the most durable competitive moat in ecommerce right now.
How Has Chasing More AI Content Instead of More Effective Content Become the Norm?
Every founder I work with is asking a version of the same question right now. It goes something like: should we be using AI to produce more content?
And the answer, almost always, is: that’s the wrong question.
The right question is: what does our content actually do for us? What job is it supposed to perform? And is it doing that job better than anything else could?
Content exists. Blog posts get written. Email newsletters go out. Social updates get scheduled. But the content isn’t working as a growth asset. It’s working as background noise.
It gets produced. It gets published. And then it sits there, doing nothing much, while the ad budget does all the heavy lifting.
So content creation becomes a mis-aligned obligation. A piece of the marketing puzzle that becomes aligned to the job of doing.
Why Won’t ‘More AI Content’ Solve Your Ecommerce Growth Problem?
The arrival of AI content tools has made this worse, not better. Now the cost of producing more content has dropped close to zero. This has made the temptation to produce more content higher than ever.
Is ‘more’ content really the answer to an ecommerce growth challenge? No. It never was. The problem was never volume. The core problem is that most ecommerce content is written from the inside out. It describes what a brand sells, explains how products work, announces new arrivals, promotes seasonal offers. All of that is fine. None of it, however, is deemed remarkable.
And remarkable is what earns attention in a world where attention has never been more contested.
Yes, AI can produce content at scale. It cannot share its perspective.
And that perspective is what earns trust.
When a founder or a team produces content from a place of genuine expertise, that’s grounded in real experience and real customer insight, that content does something that AI-generated content cannot. It will teach. It will challenge. It shifts how a reader thinks about a problem they already have.
That’s the content that you create that gets shared. That’s the content that you create that earns inbound links, organic visibility, and the kind of brand authority that compounds over years rather than quarters.
Human Customer Insight Is the Advantage AI Can’t Replicate
There’s a concept I come back to constantly with the brands I work with. It’s simple. It’s the advantage of knowing what your customer needs to know.
Your customer is trying to do something. They’re trying to get fit. Build a studio. Run a better kitchen. Start a business. Whatever category you’re in, your customer has a job they’re trying to accomplish, and they are somewhere on the journey of figuring out how to do it well.
You know things they don’t know yet. You’ve seen the mistakes people make. You understand the decisions that look simple but aren’t. You know what to look for, what to avoid, what to prioritise at each stage of the journey.
That knowledge is not something AI has access to *yet*. AI can aggregate what’s already been written. It can summarise existing thinking. It can produce competent, accurate, generic content at remarkable speed. That’s all it can do. It can’t tell the stories that make what you make matter.
Want to know what else AI can’t do? I cannot sit across from your best customer and understand the specific thing that shifted for them when they finally got it right. The emotive draw. It can’t create the emotive sell. It cannot draw on a decade of watching brands scale and fail and scale again. It cannot know what your customer needs to hear next, because that insight only comes from the relationships and the experience that you’ve built. It can’t zag.
| Want to win the content game? Don’t become the brand that’s producing the most content. Become the brand that has developed the clearest point of view on what your customers need to understand to make better decisions. |
Sorry robot friends, that’s a human job. And right now, in a world flooding with AI-generated output, it’s a job that’s becoming more valuable by the day, not less.
The Reframe: Treating Content First as a Strategic Positioning, Not a Publishing Schedule
Content First isn’t a publishing schedule. It’s not a keyword strategy. It’s not even a channel decision. It’s central to becoming the brand less ordinary.
Content First is a strategic positioning choice. It’s the decision that you make to build your brand around what you know, rather than only what you sell. And, strangely, that’s the core positioning of a brand less ordinary.
When you make that choice, your content stops being a cost and starts being an asset. It attracts the right customers at the moment they’re forming the beliefs and preferences that will drive their purchase decisions. It earns the kind of trust that’s very hard to buy with advertising budget alone.
It also creates something that compounds over time in a way that your ad spend can’t recreate. A piece of content that genuinely helps someone make a better decision doesn’t disappear when a campaign ends. It keeps on earning you attention. It keeps on building your authority. It keeps bringing in customers who are arriving already aligned with how you think.
The greatest marketing strength you have is the ability to be discovered as the brand that shares what people need to know. Not just what you want to sell.
This is what I mean by the Answer Machine concept that sits at the heart of the Growth Machine framework. Your content should answer the questions your customers are already asking, before they know your brand exists. Not just product questions. Not just ‘which one should I buy’ questions. The upstream questions. The questions being asked at the very beginning of the journey, when someone is trying to understand their situation and work out what they actually need.
If your content is the content that answers those questions better than anyone else, you’re not just visible. You’re trusted before the first transaction has happened.
Use AI for Amplification. Absolutely. Your Human Perspective? That’s the Real Moat Around Your Business
AI is an extraordinary tool for distribution. For refinement. I use it daily to curate new ideas within my work and within my writing. Yes, even those images at the top of my articles, they’re created by a robot. AI is there for taking a rough draft and sharpening it. For turning one good idea into ten useful variations. For freeing up the hours you used to spend on execution so you can spend more time thinking.
Don’t let AI be the source of the idea. It cannot supply the insight. It cannot hold the conviction that comes from having built something, lost something, learned something, and rebuilt it better.
Your perspective is the asset. Everything else? It’s just amplification.
The brands that are going to earn disproportionate organic visibility over the next five years are the ones that invest in developing and sharing a genuine point of view. Not more content. A sharper perspective.
That is the one competitive advantage that scales with AI rather than being diminished by it. The better AI gets at producing average content, the more valuable genuinely human insight becomes.
The job of Content First strategy is to make sure that when the right person is searching for the insight they need, they find you. Not because you ranked for a keyword. Because you earned the authority to be trusted.
Build the machine around what you know. Share the things only you can share. Let AI do the heavy lifting. But make sure the insight, the perspective, and the genuine expertise are yours.
That’s not a content strategy. That’s a growth strategy.
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