Who’s Better at Marketing to Humans: People or Computers?

With the quick development of artificial intelligence in homes, commercial businesses, websites, online stores, and social media, as a company, why not use it to convince consumers to buy a product? Similar to the development of the printing press in the twentieth century, Artificial Intelligence is opening a lens into the possibilities of scientific exploration, the spread of knowledge, and the development of communication.

We’ll dive deep into understanding what exactly AI Marketing is and how it is used as a beneficial tool and as a detrimental tool to the mass consumer world compared to the effect of direct human influence

What is AI Marketing?

Artificial Intelligence marketing platforms are being utilized more to improve the customer experience and reduce the need for human labor. These AI platforms can provide insights into the progress of personalized marketing campaigns, while also providing an understanding of the average consumer to best influence them. By reducing the workload of marketing team members, AI marketing programs allow for more strategic tasks in a shorter amount of time.

How is AI Used Today?

Now prevalent in homes, AI is used as “smart technology” making day to day tasks easier. For example, A Roomba can not only clean your home but it can gain an understanding of your floorplan, gauge when it will run into someone or something, and run from a click of a button on a smartphone.

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Customer Service chats and phone calls are monitored by AI programs to answer basic questions about profiles, product information, and order information. With the rate of progress of Artificial Intelligence, personalized human customer service may become obsolete. 

Utilization of AI in Marketing

AI Marketing allows for reduced human nuance, work, influence, and error to provide a calculated and efficient demonstration of the trends following human consumption in multiple different areas of marketing. Here are some ways AI is used in marketing:

Data Analysis

AI can collect and go through multiple separate marketing data from different platforms in a quick amount of time. In preventive health circumstances, AI could be used to gather information about personal DNA to prevent disease and understand genetic illnesses. 

Natural Language Processing and Content Generation

Networks of chat, imaging bots, and specialized AI programs create human conversation and language for personalizing campaigns, blogs, or videos.

Algorithm and SEO Personalization

AI Marketing tools can personalize a social media or website user’s feed to fit the customer’s past preferences. Personalizing posts and ads increase clicks to links to buy a product. Searching for a product on Google, for example, will use AI to specialize your preferences or the details of a product the algorithm thinks you may have interest in.

Analytics

The use of AI programs greatly reduces the need for human analysis. For example, AI can analyze personalized spending habits in a shorter amount of time than a human could. This allows humans to interpret the data given from AI to determine where they should spend less and where they have the freedom to spend more.

Jobs

A study suggests that roughly 6 out of 10 marketing specialist and analyst jobs will be replaced by AI marketing programs. The changing marketing landscape is crucial to our development, but can pose threats to human job value

AI Marketing Challenges

Although AI Marketing can be quick, reliable, and timely, there can be downside to the utilization of these online tools where humans can succeed.

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Privacy 

Issues of AI Marketing include the lack of privacy that may be present. Digital marketing teams must be aware of the penalties involved in their AI marketing tools and what they are programmed to observe in relation to legal guidelines. The issue of privacy lies in the attention of the consumer. Terms of Service on apps and websites are often overlooked, and with an increasing digital age, attention to privacy settings is crucial for protected assets.

Personalization

With the use of AI specifications to tailor search results and products, over personalized matches can actually cause a decrease in revenue. For example, online and retail corporation Walmart hired a team to provide extreme personalized results, revenue did not increase compared to their less-personalized competitors.

Humanization

Consumers yearn for a human experience that is specific, expressive, and understanding. For example, Rhianna produced a line of women’s clothing and the company took off because consumers liked that there was a person behind that company.

Experience

Text based content, videos, or images are becoming more readily available because of AI applications. By scraping all the details it can receive from the internet on a given subject, AI can produce informative and detailed information to the public. What AI lacks is personal experience in these given subjects where human application has an abundance. 

The Human Touch

The humanization of human marketing has its own benefits to compete with AI Marketing. Depending on the organization running the AI marketing programs and the consumers knowingly supporting them, do the benefits of human connection compare to the benefits of AI?

Though AI Marketing is quick at organizing and sifting through data and efficient at producing results, the human element is not forgotten by some. 71% of professional marketers agree that AI’s lack of human creativity and contextual understanding could prove to be a barrier to successfully using AI in the workplace.

Ethics

The question of ethics is always teetering on the perspective at hand. Some would argue that AI marketing has no ethical base: basing their persuasions strictly on data, Artificial Intelligence cannot comprehend a moral code, where humans can. A lack of consideration for negative repercussions from AI can harm consumers and marketing efforts can seem intrusive and representative of the company as a whole.

Emotional Intelligence

AI cannot produce the correct emotions at the right time and contextualize different areas of conversation. Relying strictly on data-driven analytics, AI does not have the knowledge of needs, wants, and preferences outside of their past bought products and searches.

Personal Connection

Consumers crave a human relationship where AI cannot provide. Yes, AI-to-human contact is achieved through routinely sent emails and chat boxes, but genuine and unorthodox natural human communication cannot be found with AI. The personal touch that a human marketer can provide gives suggestions on personal preferences based on a consumers’ personalized experiences and preferences.

Human Error

Whether an issue in human judgment or a slip in the day-to-day course of work, human error is inevitable. On the other side, AI fails to see room for exception. Accepting the rules given to them, they will follow them blindly. 

Repetition

Especially with content writing, videos or photography, producers of this content have limited available resources (especially if on a deadline) to gather their information from. Similar to AI, repetition can occur when they are producing content if no personal spin is added to make content unique and different. 

Misrepresented Info, and Personal Bias

If personal bias is gathered and placed in content, this leaves the viewer with misrepresented information. This can cause a domino effect that spews out false information out to any reader or follower. Especially now, true, relevant information is treasured. 

Slips

A “one time slip” can happen when a worker is tired, distracted, or ignorant. Although a slip error may seem insignificant, a mistake on an important document can also lead to a domino effect, creating confusion and further mistakes within the process. With AI’s data-driven knowledge, it will produce strictly correct information on data or analytics without error.

Simply Put

Artificial Intelligence has made monumental developments in our current technological age through personalized posts, efficient data analysis, and SEO utilization–but is it worth it? The ethical dilemma that marketers seem to have when incorporating AI into their marketing campaigns is the lack of humanization, moral code, and experimental knowledge that a human marketer possesses. What do you think? Is Artificial Intelligence better at marketing to humans than humans are?