The summer I was twelve, my best friends Courtney and Laura went to the grocery store for lemons and peppermint sticks, a classic Baltimore snack.
But not by themselves. They went with Courtney’s dad.
He insisted on bikes and further insisted on taking “the scenic route,” which extended the one-mile trip into an adventure so rapturous that Laura and Courtney couldn’t shut up about it at swim practice the next morning.
“And then we turned onto Charmuth again,” said Laura.
“I swear he was lost,” said Courtney.
“Hup,” said our coach, and I started a lap, even though it wasn’t my turn.
I was seething.
I had missed what was shaping up to be THE event of the summer, all because I’d been trying to beat my sister at Russian Bank.
And look: I’m still thinking about it almost three decades later. Because there is real power in the scenic route. There is power in showing people something they weren’t expecting on the way to what they were.
In this piece, I’ll explain how you can tap that power to imprint in the minds of an audience increasingly inundated by AI.
Competing on Information Is a Race to the Bottom
We all know that competing on price is a race to the bottom. In the age of LLMs and zero-click SERPs, the same is true for competing on information.
People search Google and get answerbox results without ever visiting another site.
People go straight to LLMs for information. (Yes, I know LLMs aren’t always reliable, but they’re at least more fun than company blogs because you get to watch the answer being generated in real time, which still feels kind of novel.)
If your content marketing strategy still involves a lot of “how to” or “what is” content, you’re almost certainly not seeing the traffic or conversions you did five years ago. People just don’t expect to go to websites – and certainly not websites that are obviously trying to sell stuff – to find reliable information anymore.
The good news: this will make your life easier.
Because the job of a B2B brand is not to inform.
Your job is to influence.
Why? People do not make decisions based on facts. They make decisions based on emotions, then backfill logic to justify those decisions. If you need evidence of this, turn on the news.
(Side note: I’m not talking about product marketing here, which does need to have facts. But even then, there's plenty of persuasion happening.)
So. How can you influence potential customers such that they will want to work with you? Take them on a micro-detour.
What Are Micro-Detours?
Micro-detours are what they sound like: small deviations from the most efficient route. The scenic route to the lemon store (even if it’s 90 degrees out).
Probably, this sounds terrifying.
We’ve all heard that people’s attention spans are shorter than ever. But that’s not quite true. People binge TV. They listen to four-hour podcasts.
Our attention spans aren’t shorter, we’re just more discerning than we used to be. We have access to more content than ever. If this article gets too boring, you’ll click away and check Insta. Or email. Or the weather (which is the reason you picked up your phone in the first place, remember?).
We have high standards and endless choices, which means we have a very short attention span for bad content.
When you recognize this as a B2B marketer, it’s wildly exciting.
Your job is to influence a busy audience.
This means you must first win their attention.
Which means you have to be interesting.
Micro-detours are one way to do that. Let’s look at why they can work so well in the B2B space.
Why Micro-Detours Shine in B2B
There are two reasons micro-detours work so well in B2B marketing:
- A lot of B2B marketing is boring.
- AI content is too smooth.
I’ve said before and will say it again: if I were in charge of some big enterprise’s content program, I wouldn’t invest in digital ads. I’d hire comedians to write and produce comedic shorts about life in our office. We’d be the Dunder Mifflin of real companies. There would be no stopping us. (Big companies reading this – call me.)
Why would I do this? Because so much of B2B marketing does the same thing over and over. There's a big fear of not looking serious. Nobody has the time to be creative.
And the pressure is always in the wrong direction: less funding for marketing, less time, more focus on what's measurable regardless of what's impactful.
LLMs have only accelerated things.
They output text so fast, and it’s so smooth. So seductively smooth.
It takes you directly from one concept to another with no detours.
But the efficiency is just an illusion. LLM output is the writing equivalent of a 2.5-kid family. The perfect average of all the text that was fed into the machine. And it resonates with precisely no one.
Don’t take it from me, though. I’m a writer and an environmentalist, so I have a bone to pick with LLMs. I’m opinionated but biased.
Take it from Kristan Bauer, an SEO consultant who recently helped a client get indexed on Google by replacing their all-AI site content with human-written content.
Take it from this marketing automation firm, which pitted AI-generated content against human content and found that the human stuff…
- Drove 5.44x more traffic.
- Engaged visitors 41 percent longer.
- Earned better SERP rankings.
- Drove 3.5x more social engagement.
Huh.
How to Use Micro-Detours: A Little Bit Goes a Long Way
When I say micro, I mean micro.
Your audience is busy. You need to get them where they’re going. But you can have some fun doing it.
A few ways to create micro-detours in your written content (note: what works depends on your audience!!!):
- Short anecdotes. No more than a few sentences. Bring them back in longer-form work so they pay off. (See: the scenic bike ride.)
- Imperfect grammar. LLM grammar is perfect. It’s also boring. Don’t be afraid of fragments.
- Visuals. Visuals stick even better in our minds than hooky writing alone.
- Asides. An effective aside is an incredible micro-detour.
- Quirky word choice (use sparingly). Poetry is powerful because it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar – often through unusual word choice. You can do that too, but in business writing, tread lightly. You don’t want readers unsure of what you meant.
When in doubt, be yourself. Say things the way you’d say them to your friend – not the way you think a corporate comms person would recommend saying them.
In the Age of AI, Your Strangeness Is Your Best Asset
The rise of LLMs has shown just how much online writing tends toward sameness. We’re all following the same SEO hacks, chasing the same algorithm updates, hoping our little dashboard lines will keep climbing up and to the right.
And the LLMs are regurgitating ourselves right back to us. And it sucks.
(But not the way you suck on a peppermint stick to get that sweet-tart sugar rush on a summer afternoon – it sucks in a bad way.)
So let’s all take a page from Courtney’s dad’s book. Dare to detour. Delight your audience. Risk doing something unusual enough that people are still talking about it years from now. Because you know what? In your line of work, that’s about when they’ll be ready to buy.
