Automate with AI, but Keep Your Marketing Human

Well, here we are in Q2 of 2024 and Generative AI continues its impressive technology takeover and promises business owners a lot.  Automate your manual processes, Analyze your data in new ways and see new patterns emerge and my favorite — automate your sales & marketing.   Did you know Gen AI can:

  • Automate your social media posting — it can do all of this for you with just a few keywords — you can even FORGET you have social media accounts — it’s like auto pilot!
  • Write blogs for you on a variety of topics — so easy and quick!
  • Write and send out sales emails for you — no need for a pesky team of sales representatives eating YOUR donuts!
  • Answer consumers’ questions 24/7 in the form of chat bots on your website — no need for customer service reps who just have to listen to people COMPLAIN all day long…..

But here’s the rub, folks. None of it is good writing and most importantly, it’s not YOU. Remember, marketing is a three-step process where we:

  1. Make people curious (usually a clear one-liner or intro somewhere)
  2. Enlighten them — (usually a good website and series of emails so they can get comfortable with us)
  3. See their commitment — (this can also be emails and ends when THEY have decided to part with their money and buy from us)

So if you’re not actually there during any of these phases, why should they be there? Here’s my contention — In marketing, instead of thinking about ways to automate and use AI, shouldn’t we work on making companies MORE human? Personally, I think the more human companies are going to end up winning. In a sea on homogenized awful garbage written by “efficient” software, human emotion and connection will win the day.

I think Gen AI makes a fine research assistant for writing and crunches numbers like a champ, but it writes like Wikipedia vomited all over my screen. And I can instantly tell when it’s used for sales or marketing. It’s just…blah and lacks any edge or pizzazz. It’s very uninteresting. So how do we put more humanity in our marketing? Here are 3 great suggestions from me to you –

  1. Listen to the customer and show them how your product or service SOLVES their problem. And show up with EMPATHY and AUTHORITY as the GUIDE to their HERO.
  2. When you blog, ADD VALUE using your expertise. That’s why we do it — to add value and auto generated blogs are going to be boring, bland and they WON’T be you. Don’t miss that opportunity. I have ghost written many client blogs and I always want to make my client come through the writing so they develop the relationship.  Super important piece that is often missed.
  3. Email is great and provides a great return on investment WHEN IT’S GOOD. If you or your AI is just writing garbage, you should try something else. Only good email is good. And we make it good by caring about the audience and again, adding value with the content. I generally get a 40-50 open rate on my emails which is ten times the industry average. Because they are good and valuable — Good wins.

Business owners have a lot of decisions to make but none will be more important than the decision to be automated, efficient and just like everyone else or to be human, empathetic and stand out from competitors. Remember, easier for us is NOT always better for them and sometimes, the investment we make to bring our humanity forward can result in real lasting human marketing relationships.