It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed marketing in recent years. From automating processes to generating content, analyzing data, and performing additional tasks in the blink of an eye, AI has freed marketers and leaders alike from time-consuming work, allowing them to focus on other crucial duties that drive business forward.
However, as businesses continue to adopt AI, many are now facing a critical challenge: maintaining a human touch in today’s increasingly automated world.
As more companies have adopted AI-driven solutions, audiences have become increasingly aware of their use. Time and time again, consumers crave authenticity. We’re drawn to brands that prioritize connection, the ones that feel human, even when technology is what is driving the message. To optimize your appeal to the people you serve, it’s vital to find the right balance between automation and human emotion.
After all, the future of marketing isn’t a tug-of-war between AI automation and human influence. It’s a combination of the two.
Let’s look at the ways you can strike that balance with your own brand.
1. Define the Core Elements That Humanize Your Brand
Before you can humanize your AI-driven marketing, you need to define what it is that makes your company human. This typically includes your:
- Company’s story
- Team
- Brand’s appearance, voice, and feel
- Core values
All of these elements make up the essence of your brand. They visually and emotionally represent your company, bringing the human side of your brand to life.
When determining what your look and feel should be, ask questions like:
- What does our company stand for?
- What emotions should our audience experience when interacting with us?
- What does interaction with our company look like to our various audiences?
In all your marketing, your brand voice should remain the anchor for all content, no matter how advanced your tools become, and your brand’s visuals should remain consistent across the board, from print pieces to social ads and beyond.
How to Define What Makes Your Brand Human:
- Solidify your brand’s tone and values.
- Train your AI tools to incorporate your tone and values into generated content.
- Audit and correct AI-generated content regularly to ensure it still “sounds like you.”
Pro Tip: If a piece of AI-generated content is read aloud by your leadership or sales team and feels inauthentic, rewrite it.
2. Let AI Handle the Data, You Handle the Human Connection
AI excels at collecting insights and predicting behaviors. People (well, a good many people) excel at understanding and tapping into the things that make us human.
To optimize both, it’s best to use AI to handle the “what” of your marketing (like the data, patterns, and predictions) and rely on your people to focus on the “why” of your marketing (like the meaning, empathy, and creativity that go into it).
For instance, you can use AI to segment your audience by interest or location. Then, you can have your marketing team craft personalized stories that speak to the people behind that data.
Your potential and existing clients don’t want to feel like another number or data point; they want to feel understood. As an agency, that’s where your people make the difference.
3. Write Like a Person, Even When Using AI Tools
Generative AI can be a fantastic time-saver when it comes to generating content, so long as it is guided well and well-edited to incorporate a humanized voice. Without intervention, unrevised AI content often reads like it was written with dictionary-learned empathy, rather than genuine human empathy.
Consider these tips to incorporate into your content to keep the writing sounding more human:
- Use contractions like “you’re,” “we’re,” and “it’s” to sound conversational.
- Ask questions about your content that invite reflection and improvement. Examples include “Do you think that your content sounds more like an algorithm than a person?” “What are the emotions your content brings out as is?” “If AI wrote your next marketing piece, would your clients still recognize your voice?”
- Add content to your website, social media pages, and other marketing collateral that only your team could generate. Examples include creating case studies on your website that cover projects your team has completed, posting about team member highlights on social media, or incorporating quotes provided by team members about your brand’s expertise in your email marketing.
- Give your content a humanizing rhythm and emotion. AI can mimic the way people write and structure their content, but it can’t deliver writing that exudes a natural cadence or content written from a genuinely human perspective.
4. Showcase the Humans Behind the Brand
Audiences may react positively to a logo or a brand’s voice, but people don’t connect completely with these and other brand elements. Instead, what they connect with are the people and the humanization that brings the brand to life.
Featuring your team in your marketing reminds customers that real humans power your brand’s expertise. It reminds them that they are interacting with experts who give your brand life whenever a customer emails, calls, purchases a product, receives a service, or engages with your company in any other way.
Ideas to showcase your team can include:
- Behind-the-scenes, a-day-in-the-life-of videos of your team members
- Insightful department-specific blog articles written by various staff members
- Thought-leadership pieces authored by your strategists or designers
- Real client stories, featuring team members, that highlight shared growth
Connecting your audience to content about actual team members helps solidify that you’re an invested partner working alongside your customers or clients.
5. Understand the Future of Human-Centered AI Marketing
As AI evolves, the best brands will be those that utilize it to enhance human creativity, rather than replace it.
Humanizing your brand in today’s AI landscape means understanding and implementing AI for its strengths while remembering what this technology can’t do:
- It can’t empathize.
- It can’t laugh alongside your team or clients.
- It can’t thank your customers for trusting you year after year.
Well, you can ask it to generate an “empathetic-sounding message,” a brand-related or marketing-appropriate joke, or a sincere-sounding “Thank You” message, but it will never choose to produce any of that on its own accord.
AI marketing solutions still require human interaction to work effectively, and those on the receiving end of what they generate (your audience) need humanization to draw in and show interest in what you’re trying to sell.
It’s vital to understand that as AI will continue to revolutionize marketing, the human elements of your brand will remain your most valuable assets.
The Very Human Marketing Folks at M&R Know and Use AI
At M&R, we’re all about bringing tomorrow’s innovations to today’s marketing needs. When it comes to incorporating AI into your strategies, our teams strive to strike the right balance between human intuition and AI innovation, enabling us to execute marketing plans that are both powerfully intelligent and deeply personal to your audience.
Is it time to combine the power of AI with the humanization of your brand? Then it’s time to talk to M&R: 478-621-4491
Call us at 478-621-4491 to get started, or reach out to one of our business development managers today!
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