How to Humanise Marketing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Marketing is not something you do at people. It’s something you do for people. More importantly, it’s something you must do for the individual instead of the masses.

As automation and AI help us market with a more focused view of the individual, and at scale -everyone is NOT the same. Subsequently, marketing should serve us as individuals instead of cookie-cutter consumers.

To this end, how can we leverage AI to humanise our marketing? Below are 5 ways to respect individuality using robots.

Make it Resonate With Our Human Side

This comes first because it should guide every aspect of our marketing. The best advice for this is: “Don’t tell me about your grass seed, talk to me about my lawn.” In other words, don’t use AI to inundate consumers with statistics about your stellar company. Instead, use it to start an honest conversation about what they value in life. So how do you start that conversation?

Start Development With Human Skills

I’ve written before about the growing personalisation of artificial intelligence. As technologies like Conversational AI become more important, you must ensure your development team understand human interaction. And yes, Marketing needs to talk to IT! You simply cannot survive with IT experts that don’t interact with their audience. To succeed, you must educate your IT and Marketing workforce in such skills as active listening, empathy, and imagination.

Learn Exactly Who You’re Talking To

According to media analyst Brian Solis, people use their phones 1500 times a week. Why wouldn’t they? Mobile media makes us feel connected and empowered. It’s the perfect medium for personalised marketing. With the mountains of data mobiles create, you have no excuse to not understand your consumers. What are their goals? Where are they going? How is their lawn looking?

Of course, it can be difficult to pull the profile of a person from that pile of data. However, machine learning can draw insights from this information. By integrating machine learning with marketing personalisation, you can increase engagement enormously.

Provide Personalised Services

Marketing is about starting a conversation, so speak to your customer as an individual. To achieve this, invest in conversational AI assistants. As more individuals access services through assistants like Siri, you must secure your brand voice in this space.

Use the data we mentioned above to make your “voice” appealing to your customer. This is much easier when your developers have social conversational skills.

Above all, ensure your consumers can access your offerings without repeating themselves. After that, you must recommend further products and services using the language they’re most likely to respond to.

Engage with communities

As you connect individuals to your organisation, they’ll seek out others your brand aligns with. Though you should market to individuals, you must remember that we’re all social creatures. This means you must cater to communities that form around your company.

To grow your communities, use social media monitoring to uncover influencers that can recruit more members. From there, assign AI to engage members and incentivise their participation. Finally, deploy machine learning to manage your growing community.

As you can see, artificial intelligence is an (ironically) effective way to bring humanity back to your marketing.