// Marketing

Writing AI Marketing Copy That Doesn't Sound Like AI

Specificity beats prompting for "punchy" or "engaging"

There's a reason so much AI-generated marketing copy feels the same: "unlock," "elevate," "seamless," "game-changing," three-item lists with an em dash. That's not a flaw in the model — it's what happens when a prompt is vague enough that the model falls back on the most statistically common way to sound like marketing copy. Here's how to prompt around it.

Ban the stock phrases directly

The single highest-leverage fix: explicitly list the words and patterns you don't want.

Do not use: "unlock," "elevate," "seamless," "game-changing," "revolutionize," "in today's world," or any sentence structure that ends in a rhetorical question. No em-dash lists of three.

Give it a real voice sample

Instead of describing your brand voice abstractly ("friendly but professional"), paste 2-3 sentences you've actually written and ask the model to match that specific register. Models are much better at pattern-matching a concrete example than interpreting an adjective.

Match this voice: "We built this because the existing tools were slow and confusing. This one isn't. That's it — no bigger pitch than that." Now write a 2-sentence product description for [product] in the same voice.

Specify what the copy is competing against

"Write ad copy for my app" gives the model no sense of the actual decision the reader is making. "Write copy for a landing page where the visitor is comparing us against doing nothing (not against a competitor)" changes what argument the copy makes.

Ask for options that differ in strategy, not just wording

Asking for "5 variations" often produces 5 versions of the same idea reworded. Instead, ask for variations that take different angles:

Write 3 versions of this headline: one that leads with a specific number/result, one that leads with the pain point it solves, and one that leads with what makes it different from alternatives.

Cut ruthlessly, or ask the model to

AI copy tends to over-explain. A useful closing instruction: "Now cut this by 40% without losing the core claim." Models are often better at editing down their own draft than at writing tight on the first pass.

PromptLab's marketing templates

The marketing category in PromptLab's template library bakes in voice-matching and stock-phrase banning by default, so you're not rebuilding these constraints from scratch on every campaign.

TRY THE MARKETING TEMPLATES →