AI can help a small business produce more marketing in less time. But if the message could belong to any business, what has that speed achieved? I spoke with Keith Lauver, founder and CEO of Ellavator AI, about how businesses can use AI without sanding off what makes them different.

Keith’s point is that the work starts with knowing whom you serve, what you believe and what you want to say. We also talked through how his team built Ella, how he says the tool approaches marketing, and why smaller businesses should experiment without tying their entire workflow to one platform.

Introduction

Jeremy: You’ve built businesses and spent time trying to explain what made them different. How did that lead you into marketing?

Keith: I struggled to tell my own story and define my position. After selling my fourth business about ten years ago, I bought a marketing agency and partnered with specialists so I could study marketing from the inside. I see myself as an entrepreneur and a student of marketing.

When AI makes every business sound alike

Jeremy: You described AI as pulling people towards average. What concerns you about that?

Keith: People can now produce something that looks like marketing very quickly. But if they rely on generic output, they may lose the point of distinction they already had, and add another general message to an increasingly noisy market.

Jeremy: I’d been thinking about the competition to stand out. But a local business serving a particular group doesn’t need to speak to everyone.

Keith: Exactly. A lot of people misuse AI by assuming their audience should be everyone. The opportunity is to understand whom you are speaking to and make the message more relevant to that person.

KEY TAKEAWAY

When a business uses AI to address everyone, its marketing can become a generic message that speaks to no particular customer.

That question matters in advertising too. A useful starting point is to decide who the message is for and what that person needs to hear, an idea also explored in our article on matching content and ad messaging to the audience.

Why Keith’s team built Ella

Jeremy: Where did the idea for Ella come from?

Keith: We had a group of specialists in storytelling, brand, design, tactics and audience building. Bringing their different skills together gave clients a valuable service, but it was expensive to deliver. We asked whether we could make more of that thinking available through a tool.

Keith: We built a prototype and later a tool that others asked to use. That led us from providing services towards software for marketers. One founding principle was to augment a person’s thinking rather than simply automate the work.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Keith says his team built Ella, an AI marketing tool, to bring different marketing specialists’ thinking into one place and support a person’s decisions rather than automate them.

Start with a point of view, then plan the content

Jeremy: I want help turning my own commentary and podcast ideas into content, but I don’t want to lose my voice. How would you approach that?

Keith: First, build up the knowledge behind the business: its insights, website, story and brand thinking. In Ella, we call those pieces “Ella-ments”. Then define your own voice, point of view and the topics you want to be known for before planning posts, blogs or interviews.

Jeremy: So the content calendar comes after that groundwork?

Keith: Yes. Knowing what to do in the right order matters more than jumping straight to tactics. If all you want is a tool to crank out content, there are other tools for that. Our focus is helping people define a plan and carry it into the work they produce.

I’ve also written about where AI helps my team and where experience still matters. This conversation brought the same practical question to content: whose judgement is shaping the output?

Connect the tools, but keep the knowledge portable

Jeremy: Can businesses feed performance information back in as their campaigns and content develop?

Keith: Yes. We use Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to connect Ella with other systems and bring results back into the conversation. We are building connections so users can review results and adjust their plans over time.

Jeremy: For a smaller business, learning several new tools takes time. Do you think the market is settling around fewer products?

Keith: Some tools are grouping around jobs such as writing, design and analysing results, but there is still a lot of change. My advice is to experiment and solve a problem you have today while keeping your knowledge portable, so a change in software doesn’t mean starting again.

KEY TAKEAWAY

A small business can test AI tools against a real marketing problem while keeping its customer knowledge, message and plans usable outside any one platform.

For campaign work, that still means checking the numbers and the context behind them. Our discussion of AI in paid advertising covers why a tool is no substitute for deciding what the business is trying to achieve.

Key takeaways for SME owners

  • Choose who you need to reach. Before asking AI to write copy, be clear about your customers and what makes your business relevant to them.
  • Give AI something real to work with. Supply your business knowledge and point of view, then check that the output still sounds like you.
  • Decide what to say before scheduling more content. Your topics and message should guide the calendar, rather than the calendar driving generic posts.
  • Test one useful application. Start with a current marketing problem and keep your customer knowledge and plans somewhere you can use them if you change tools.

Learn more at Ellavator AI, and connect with Keith Lauver on LinkedIn.

This conversation was recorded for Marketing for SMEs with Jeremy Yang. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your preferred podcast app.