After 21 years running a marketing consultancy in Western North Carolina, I thought I had a pretty good handle on my competitive landscape. Traditional agencies. Freelance designers. The occasional out-of-state firm trying to poach local clients. I knew the players.
Then I decided to pivot my business toward AI-enhanced marketing consulting. The kind of work where you sit down with a business owner, evaluate their entire marketing operation, and build a roadmap for where modern tools — including AI — can make them more efficient without sacrificing what makes their marketing effective.
So I did what any marketer would do first. I Googled it.
"AI marketing consultant Asheville NC."
What came back surprised me. Not because of who was there — but because of what was there.
The Location-Page Factories
The biggest group showing up in my search results weren't Asheville businesses at all. They were national or remote companies running programmatic SEO strategies — creating individual landing pages for every city in North Carolina.
One company, based near Raleigh, had separate pages for Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Wilmington, Chapel Hill, Knightdale, Apex — basically every town with a zip code. The content was templated with local references swapped in. The Asheville page joked about "leaf peepers" and "brewery patios." The Chapel Hill page referenced specific local coffee shops. The Knightdale page mentioned "Station Park."
Same pitch, same services, same everything. Find-and-replace on city details.
Another company, based in Florida, had Asheville-specific landing pages that accidentally referenced Orlando businesses on their Asheville page. That's the dead giveaway of mass-generated content — when the machine doesn't catch its own errors.
A third was a national franchise model providing cookie-cutter digital marketing packages with a local landing page for every metro area in the country.
These companies don't have boots on the ground in Asheville. They haven't experienced what Hurricane Helene did to the local business economy in September 2024, and they can't sit across from a business owner at a Chamber event and have a real conversation about what's happening in this community right now.
That doesn't make them bad companies. But it does mean that when a local business owner searches for help, the results are dominated by content that looks local but isn't — and that can make the whole landscape feel untrustworthy before anyone even gets to the real options.
When the Packaging Doesn't Match the Product
The thing that surprised me most wasn't the templated pages. It was something subtler: many of the companies positioning themselves as AI marketing experts have websites that feel unmistakably AI-generated themselves.
I'm talking about DALL-E generated images front and center on the homepage. Service descriptions that read like they came from a single prompt and were published without a second look. "About Us" pages that say nothing specific about anyone. Copy that sounds impressive for three seconds and then evaporates because it never actually said anything concrete.
I'm not pointing this out to be critical. I think it's a natural consequence of the rush I mentioned — when you're moving fast to get to market, the details slip. But it creates an unintended message.
If your own marketing looks and feels like it was produced on autopilot, what does that tell a potential client about how you'd handle theirs?
This is the tension I keep coming back to. AI is an incredibly useful tool. But the businesses searching for help with AI are also the ones most nervous about it. When they land on a website that confirms their fear — that everything will sound the same, feel generic, and lose the human element — it doesn't build confidence. It reinforces the doubt.
The Agencies Navigating the Same Shift
Beyond the out-of-state landing pages, there are real local agencies I've known about — and respected — for years who are now working through the same question I am: what does AI mean for our business?
Some are further along than others. One agency has published a thoughtful position on AI that I think gets it exactly right — framing it as a tool their professionals use, not a replacement for expertise. Others are writing about AI's impact on search and SEO, clearly doing the homework before making big claims. Still others are experimenting quietly, figuring out what works before they change their public positioning.
That's all healthy. In fact, it's exactly how a mature market should respond to a major shift — carefully, at different speeds, based on each company's strengths and client needs.
The difference I've noticed, though, is that most of these agencies are integrating AI into their existing service model. AI improves how they do what they've always done. What I'm focused on is something slightly different: helping business owners understand and navigate the shift itself. Not just using AI behind the scenes, but bringing clients into the process — evaluating their operations, showing them where the opportunities are, and building their confidence to embrace the tools rather than just benefit from someone else using them.
That's not better or worse. It's just a different approach to the same transition everyone's going through.
The Shiny New Tool Problem
What I kept seeing across every category — the location-page factories, the tool sellers, the agencies adding AI buzzwords — was the same pattern: people rushing to get there.
They've got the new shiny tool. Rather than reading the instructions, they've catapulted straight into using it. And honestly? The output looks decent at first glance. The pages are up. The content exists. The services are listed.
But over time, that rush is going to show. It always does.
Let me give you two examples I've seen firsthand.
A company I know implemented AI recording across all their sales meetings — every call, every sit-down, automatically summarized by AI. And that's a legitimate win. It saves time, keeps records clean, and gives management visibility into what the sales team is actually saying. Good use of the tool.
But here's what they weren't doing: they had all that meeting data sitting there, and nobody had thought to have AI analyze the sentiment of those conversations. Which prospects are actually engaged? Which ones are just being polite? Where in the conversation did energy shift? When I suggested they run sentiment analysis on their meeting notes to identify which leads are genuinely viable, the reaction was immediate — "Wow, we didn't think of that." They implemented it, and suddenly their lead generation process got dramatically sharper because they stopped wasting time chasing every lead equally. The AI had already done the hard part of capturing the data. The strategic layer — knowing what to ask of that data — was the missing piece.
Second example: AI can build you a website. It can generate pages, write copy, and have something live in a fraction of the time it used to take. But I'm seeing sites go up that aren't optimized for search engines, aren't structured for AI-powered search tools like Google's AI Overviews, and don't match the business's actual tone and voice. The site exists. It looks professional. But it's not doing the work a website needs to do — being found, being understood by both humans and algorithms, and sounding like the business it represents.
These aren't catastrophic failures. They're missed opportunities. And they're the kind of thing that happens when you open the box and start building before you've read the instructions — before someone with strategic experience has looked at the full picture and asked, "Okay, but what are we actually trying to accomplish here?"
When you skip the strategic foundation — when you don't understand the client's business before you start generating content for it, when you don't test AI workflows on your own operations before recommending them to others, when you prioritize speed-to-market over getting it right — the cracks start to surface. The content that sounded fine in month one starts feeling generic by month three. The "local expertise" that was really just a city name swapped into a template doesn't hold up when a client asks a question that requires actual local knowledge.
I know this because I've watched this exact cycle play out before. When social media became a business tool, everyone rushed to set up Facebook pages. Six months later, the same business owners were asking, "Why isn't this working?" The answer was almost always the same: they were just posting blindly. No thought about who they were talking to, why, what the goal was for each post, or how to measure whether any of it was working. The tool was there. The strategy wasn't.
Same thing happened every time we designed a website. We'd build something sharp, hand it over, and months later hear, "I don't understand why I'm not getting any new business from my website." Well — did you write blog content? Share it anywhere? Optimize your pages? Just having a website doesn't mean customers find you. Just having a Facebook page doesn't mean you're marketing. And just having AI doesn't translate to new business or a competitive edge.
That pattern is actually why Marketing Outpost became a full-service marketing company in the first place. Years ago, we got tired of applying tools in isolation — setting up a Facebook page here, designing a website there — and watching clients not get results because nothing was connected. We shifted to integrating everything from the ground up because that's the only way marketing actually works. Strategy first. Tools in service of the strategy. Everything connected.
That's exactly the situation we're in now with AI. Layering it on top of what you're already doing will only go so far. This is a ground-up operation — rethinking workflows, understanding where the real opportunities are, and building AI into the foundation of how your marketing runs. Not bolting it on as an afterthought.
I spent over a year testing AI tools on my own business before I ever considered recommending them to a client. I needed to understand what actually works, what falls apart, and where the human expertise still matters most. That kind of patience isn't flashy. But it's the difference between a real transformation and a shiny demo.
What This Means If You're a Local Business Owner
Here's the reality of who's actually searching for this kind of help: it's not twenty-somethings with time to experiment. It's business owners in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are running established companies. You've got employees, payroll, customers, and a reputation to protect. You're busy — and if you're in the Asheville area, you're busier than ever right now because on top of everything else, you're still recovering from Hurricane Helene and its impact on the local economy and tourism.
You don't have time to spend six months figuring out which AI tools work and which ones are hype. You don't have the bandwidth to sift through search results full of templated landing pages trying to figure out who actually knows what they're doing. And you shouldn't have to.
So here's what I'd tell you to look for — whether you're evaluating me or anyone else:
Have they done it to themselves first? If someone is telling you AI will transform your marketing, have they transformed their own? Can they show you real numbers from real projects — not "up to 70% savings" from a sales page, but actual before-and-after data?
Do they have real, local experience? Not a landing page that mentions your city. Actual years in your market. Can they talk about what's happening on Merrimon Avenue or in Weaverville without Googling it first?
Does their own marketing feel human? If someone's website about AI reads like it was written entirely by AI with no human judgment applied, that tells you something important about their approach. You want someone who uses AI as a tool, not someone whose entire output is the tool.
Did they read the instructions, or just open the box? Ask them about their process. Ask them what they tested and what didn't work. Anyone who only has success stories and no lessons learned probably hasn't been doing this long enough — or honestly enough — to guide your business through it.
Why I'm Writing This
I'm not writing this to trash my competition. Most of the companies I found in my search are either good agencies doing honest work or harmless SEO plays that don't affect anyone locally. And the truth is, everyone in this space right now — myself included — is figuring it out as we go. AI is moving fast, and nobody has all the answers.
But what I saw in those search results confirmed something I'd been suspecting: the market isn't crowded. It's confused. Business owners are being told by twenty different voices that AI will revolutionize their marketing, and most of those voices skipped the step where they actually figured out how to do it well before selling it.
My approach has always been the same, whether the tool was social media in 2010 or AI in 2026: learn it, test it on yourself, understand what works and what doesn't, and then bring it to your clients. It takes longer. It's not as flashy as spinning up a landing page for every city in North Carolina. But it's how you build something that actually holds up.
That's what I'm working on at Marketing Outpost. Not AI hype. Not rushing to market. Just 21 years of experience meeting a genuinely powerful set of new tools — and taking the time to get it right before asking anyone else to trust the process.