You have probably noticed it by now. That blog post a company published that sounds like it was written by a committee of robots. The LinkedIn post that uses all the right buzzwords, but says absolutely nothing. The email that opens with “In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape…” and immediately gets deleted. That is AI slop. And it is everywhere.
We wrote about this problem recently. AI can absolutely write your marketing content, but if you just hit generate and publish, you are contributing to the noise, not cutting through it. The tools are powerful. The problem is how most people use them.
So what does it look like when you use AI well for marketing? There is actually a name for it now: Vibe Marketing.
What Is Vibe Marketing?
The term started with “vibe coding”, a concept from Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI. He described it as letting AI handle the technical execution while the human focuses on creative direction and intent. You tell the AI what you want. It builds it. You guide the result.
Vibe Marketing applies that same idea to content and campaigns. Instead of spending weeks going through the traditional cycle of strategy, brief, draft, review, revise, approve, publish, you work alongside AI to move faster while keeping your brand’s personality and expertise at the center.
This is not “let AI do everything.” It is the opposite. Vibe Marketing is the intentional combination of human intuition, strategy, brand voice, and emotional resonance that AI cannot generate on its own. The data and keywords are the bones of a campaign. The vibe is the soul.
Searches for “vibe marketing” have increased nearly 700% in the past year (source: MarTech, citing Exploding Topics: https://martech.org/the-vibe-marketing-manifesto/). MarTech is hosting an entire Vibe Marketing Lab at their March 2026 conference. Companies are hiring dedicated “vibe marketers”. This is showing up as a real trend worth paying attention to.
Why Most AI Marketing Falls Flat
Here is the pattern we see constantly. A business owner discovers ChatGPT or Claude. They get excited. They generate a bunch of blog posts and social media content. They publish it all. And then… nothing. No engagement. No leads. No results.
The content is technically fine. It is grammatically correct. It covers the topic. But it has no personality. No point of view. No reason for anyone to keep reading instead of scrolling past.
The problem is not the AI. The problem is that these businesses skipped the most important step: defining the vibe before generating the content. If you skip that foundation, you end up with the same generic content as everyone else who typed a prompt and hit publish. And that is how you become invisible.
And it is not just “people are tired of generic content.” Discovery is getting more competitive everywhere. Google’s AI features are expanding how search results are shown, and other tools can summarize or recommend answers instantly. The fundamentals still apply, though: helpful, original, people-first content wins over thin, repetitive content. If you publish generic output at scale, you are not just boring humans. You are also giving every system (human or algorithm) fewer reasons to choose you.
How We Actually Use Vibe Marketing at MantyWeb
We use AI in our business every day. We are transparent about it. But the way we use it is what makes the difference.
We have internal best practices documents for vibe coding and are working on internal best practices for vibe marketing. These are not generic prompts copied from the internet. They are built from our coding and marketing experience, plus what we have learned working closely with AI the last few years.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
We start with what we actually know. Before AI touches anything, we define the voice, the audience, and the specific problem we are solving. AI is the coworker or assistant, not the starting point.
We give AI deep context about the business. When we create content for a client, the AI knows the industry, the audience, the competitive landscape, and the specific tone that works for that brand. Generic prompts produce generic results.
We review and refine everything. AI gives us a faster starting point. It does not give us a finished product. Every piece of content gets reviewed by someone who understands the business and the audience.
We use AI where it adds the most value. Generating content variations for testing. Analyzing competitor positioning. Repurposing a blog post into social media content. Drafting email sequences. These are the tasks where AI saves hours without sacrificing quality.
The result is content that moves faster than traditional agency timelines but still sounds like it was created by someone who actually understands the business. Because it was.
Digital Twins: Testing Your Marketing Before Your Audience Ever Sees It
One of the most useful ways we use AI for marketing is building “digital twins” of a client’s ideal customer.
Here is what that means. We take what we know about a client’s target audience: the job context, the pain points, how they evaluate vendors, what language resonates, what turns them off, and we create detailed, AI-assisted customer personas. Not the static “buyer persona” PDFs that sit in a drawer. More like interactive profiles we can use to pressure-test messaging and tone.
Then we use those digital twins to test things before they go live (see related research on LLM-based “generative agents”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442).
Writing a new ad campaign? Run the copy through the digital twin first. Does this headline feel relevant to a 45-year-old operations director at a logistics company?
Does this call-to-action feel pushy or helpful to a casino marketing manager who has been burned by vendors before?
The value here is not predicting the future with certainty. It is catching obvious problems early: unclear positioning, the wrong tone, jargon that makes you sound like everyone else, missing objections, weak differentiation, or CTAs that feel too aggressive for the buyer’s context.
But it goes beyond content testing. We use these ICP profiles to pressure-test branding decisions, evaluate messaging for new service offerings, identify objections a sales team might face, and refine the tone and language on website pages. When you can ask a “best-guess version” of your ideal customer, “What would make this more believable?” and get structured feedback in seconds, you start iterating like a much larger team.
This is not a crystal ball. Digital twins do not replace real customer feedback and real market data. But they give you a fast, inexpensive way to gut-check your instincts and filter out the ideas that are clearly off, before your real audience ever sees them.
Why This Matters for Your Business
If you are a business owner, you have two choices right now. You can ignore AI and fall behind as competitors use it to produce more content, test more ideas, and move faster.
Or you can adopt AI without a strategy and end up producing content that blends into the noise.
Vibe Marketing is the third option. Use AI as a force multiplier for the expertise and personality your business already has.
This is especially critical now because of how search is changing. We wrote a complete guide to GEO and AEO optimization, Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization. The short version: discovery is expanding beyond classic “ten blue links,” and AI-driven experiences can influence what people see first. The way to compete is not to pump out more content faster. It is to publish content with real expertise, real perspective, and real value, because that is what earns trust, links, shares, and conversions over time.
That is exactly what Vibe Marketing produces when you do it right. Content that has the speed advantage of AI with the authenticity advantage of human expertise.
It Is Not Just Marketing. We Apply This to Code Too
The same principle applies to how we build things. “Vibe Coding”, where the developer guides AI to write code while focusing on architecture, quality, and user experience, is something we have been doing more and more.
We are writing a separate article on Vibe Coding in the near future and what it means for WordPress development. But the core idea is the same: AI handles the heavy lifting. Human expertise ensures it actually works, performs well, and serves the business goal.
When you work with MantyWeb, you get the speed of AI with the vibe of nearly 20 years of development and marketing expertise. That is not something a prompt can replicate.
The Bottom Line
Vibe Marketing is not about replacing your marketing team or your agency with AI. It is about making everything they do faster, more targeted, and more effective while keeping the human expertise that actually makes content connect with real people.
The businesses winning with AI right now are not the ones who automated everything. They are the ones who figured out how to combine AI speed with human judgment.
That is the vibe.
Need Help Finding Your Vibe?
If you are trying to figure out how AI fits into your marketing strategy, or you are already using it and not getting the results you expected, we can help. We work with businesses to develop practical AI strategies that combine the efficiency of modern tools with the expertise that actually moves the needle.
Give us a call at 832-497-1610.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Vibe Marketing and regular AI marketing?
Regular AI marketing typically means using AI to generate content quickly. Vibe Marketing adds an intentional layer of human brand strategy, voice, and expertise on top of AI efficiency. The AI handles speed and scale. The human ensures the content actually represents the brand and connects with the target audience.
Is Vibe Marketing only for big companies with big budgets?
No. Vibe Marketing is especially powerful for small and mid-size businesses because it lets a lean team produce content at a scale that previously required much larger teams.
The key is having clear brand guidelines and someone who understands your business guiding the AI output.
How does Vibe Marketing affect SEO and AI search visibility?
Content created through a Vibe Marketing approach tends to perform better in both traditional SEO and in AI-driven discovery surfaces because it is more original, more useful, and more credible. The AI does not magically “boost” your content. The benefit comes from publishing higher-quality content that real people engage with and trust.
What is the connection between Vibe Marketing and Vibe Coding?
Both concepts come from the same idea: let AI handle the execution while humans focus on strategy and quality. Vibe Coding applies this to software development, where a developer guides AI to write code while maintaining control over architecture and user experience. Vibe Marketing applies it to content and campaigns.
Can I start using Vibe Marketing on my own?
Yes. Start by clearly defining your brand voice, your target audience, and the specific problems your content should solve. Then use AI tools as a coworker to help build your marketing content. If you want help developing a structured approach, let’s talk.
One final note: Every day we are experimenting with new techniques to improve our process, because AI is changing on a daily basis. You do not have to be on the cutting edge to make use of AI, so do not get overwhelmed with all the things you could be doing. Just do something with it to start, something that moves the needle for you.
References
MarTech, “The Vibe Marketing manifesto” (cites Exploding Topics trend data): https://martech.org/the-vibe-marketing-manifesto/
MarTech, March 2026 conference announcement: https://martech.org/registration-is-open-for-the-march-2026-martech-conference/
MarTech, March 2026 conference agenda (includes the Vibe Marketing Lab): https://martech.org/conference/march/agenda/
Scale AI “Vibe Marketer” job listing (Built In): https://builtin.com/job/vibe-marketer/7927951
Google Search Central documentation, “AI Features and your website”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
Google, “AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search” (PDF): https://search.google/pdf/google-about-AI-overviews-AI-Mode.pdf
Park et al., “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior” (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442