Iterating AI drafts: A practical guide for marketers
How to refine AI-generated content into usable drafts
AI won’t nail your draft on the first try. If you expect perfection in the first pass, well … you’re setting yourself up to be frustrated.
Take it from professional writers who have been sent too many AI-generated drafts to count, and been told to “make them better / rewrite for the target audience / make them more human.” (Frankly, it’s faster for us to just write from scratch.)
The first output is just a starting point. It’s like the rough pass you’d scribble in a notebook before shaping it into something real. What matters is what you do next — how you give feedback, what you ask AI to revise and how many rounds of refinement you’re willing to work through.
One of the most important AI drafting skills is knowing how to iterate your way to something workable.
The revision process is where you’re actually teaching the AI what you want. Each round of feedback helps it understand your preferences, your audience and the specific angle you’re trying to take. Without iteration, you’re stuck with generic output that meets some of your requirements but misses the nuance that makes content actually work.
*** Note: Even with solid iteration, AI content still needs editing and fact-checking before it’s ready to publish. We covered what to realistically expect from AI tools in our introduction to this series. ***
Let’s walk through a revision process that we recommend to help you get from AI-generated draft to functional content.
The anatomy of a clear and specific revision prompt
Vague feedback gets you vague results. “Make this better” or “this doesn’t sound right” won’t help the AI understand what needs to change.
You need to be specific about what’s wrong and what you want instead. Point to exact sentences or paragraphs that need to be fixed. Explain why something isn’t working — is it too formal? Does it bury the main point or use the wrong examples?
Here’s what weak versus strong revision prompts look like:
Weak: “Add more details to section three.”
Strong: “Section three mentions budget constraints, but doesn’t show the impact. Add specific numbers. What does the average company waste on this problem? Include one brief example of a team dealing with this issue.”
Weak: “Add more about the challenges.”
Strong: “The challenges section lists problems but doesn’t explain why they matter. Add one sentence after each challenge showing the business impact, like lost time, wasted budget or frustrated teams.”
In your iterative prompts, your job is to:
Identify the specific problem.
Explain why it’s a problem.
Tell the AI exactly what to do about it.
The more specific you are, the better the revision will be. Think of iteration like sanding wood — every pass smooths out the rough spots, but only if you check your work as you go.
Common iteration mistakes
These habits will slow you down and waste time on revisions that don’t improve the draft:
Asking for too many changes at once. If you list eight different problems in one prompt, AI loses focus and might correct three of them while making the others worse. Stick to 1-3 specific changes per round.
Being vague about the problems. “This section feels off” or “Make it flow better” doesn’t give AI anything actionable to work with.
Not reviewing each iteration before moving on. If you prompt for three rounds of changes without checking the output in between, you might find the draft went sideways in round two and you wasted time on round three.
Expecting one round of revisions to fix everything. Plan for 2-3 rounds per section, minimum. If you’re frustrated that it’s not perfect after one revision, adjust your expectations.
A simple iteration workflow
Here’s the process that actually works for refining AI drafts:
Review the section. Read through what AI gave you and note what’s not working.
Identify 1-3 specific issues. Pick the biggest problems to address.
Prompt for those fixes. Be specific about what needs to change and why.
Review the revision. Check whether AI actually fixed the issues or created new problems.
Repeat until workable. When it’s good enough to edit manually, stop iterating.
Move to the next section. Don’t try to make one section perfect before moving on. Remember, you’ll be editing manually after the AI drafting process, so when you’ve iterated enough that a section is in decent shape, move forward.
Iteration takes time. You’re reviewing, giving feedback, waiting for output and reviewing again. This is one of the reasons AI doesn’t save you time in the writing process — if anything, this back-and-forth often takes longer than creating the draft yourself.
When to stop iterating
You’ll hit a point where iterating becomes less efficient than just editing the draft yourself. That’s your signal to stop.
You’ll reach a point (when the structure is solid, the main points are there, and the tone is close) when you can take the draft across the finish line yourself. After a few rounds of iteration, you typically hit diminishing returns.
And some issues are genuinely faster to fix manually. If you’re spending five minutes crafting a prompt to change one awkward sentence, it will likely be faster for you to just rewrite it. Save iteration for structural problems, major tone issues or sections that missed the point entirely.
Refining your way to better drafts
The first few times you iterate with AI, it will feel slow and tedious. You’ll wonder if you’re doing it wrong or if there’s a faster way.
Unfortunately, there isn’t. Good iteration requires multiple rounds of specific feedback, careful review between each round and the judgment to know when to stop refining your draft with AI. The process gets faster as you develop instincts for which feedback prompts work and which issues are worth iterating on versus fixing yourself.
Or if the back-and-forth refinement process sounds like more than you want to deal with right now, Horizon Peak can create strategic content for you (without all the AI wrangling). Reach out to talk about how we can help.
Check out the other articles in the series:
Your AI writing process is broken — let’s rebuild it
How to create a simple brand guide that makes AI write like your company
A beginning guide to prompting like a writer
Structuring inputs and source material for AI drafting success