Can AI replace the human touch in your marketing communications?
Can AI replace the human touch in your marketing communications?
A lot has been said about how AI – Artificial Intelligence – will make our lives easier - relieve us of all those mundane jobs we’d rather not be doing anyway.
The alternative opinion on AI is that it will take over our lives and put more of us out of work. Even worse… We’ll live in a world where machines have taken over, casting humans as slaves (cue Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator or Will Smith in Me, Robot).
AI promises to improve life – but do we believe it?
AI has arrived, and many of us are trying to learn how to use it in our daily lives.
Many big technology players – Google, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Meta, and IBM – are investing big money into developing their own AI platforms. And there are plenty of others fast on their heels.
The significant promise of AI explored in this recent article from AI magazine is that by understanding our needs, companies will ‘personalise our experiences with them, and make processes more efficient’.
Do we need – and want – AI in our lives?
A recent US survey by a leading SEO and content marketer found that people are happy for their service providers to use AI to help them do their jobs better. They looked at various businesses, including accountants, airlines, financial advisers, healthcare providers, designers, and lawyers.
When it comes to providing creative services, 70% of people responding to this survey said they expected their providers to use AI to do their job.
Creative services include customer research, draft copywriting, editing, and coming up with design concepts.
The AI platform that’s attracted much noise lately is ChatGPT. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformers – quite a mouthful!
Developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022, ChatGPT had 100 million users worldwide within two months of its release. ChatGPT is a chatbot that promises to write your marketing blog, company’s business plan, child’s school essay, or even a letter to your mum!
The simplest explanation of the platform is that you can type in a question, and it produces a reasonably coherent answer in conversational language.
It gathers this information from websites, articles, and online textbooks and promises to ‘learn’ from previous queries.
As it’s in its exploratory phase, ChatGPT can be used for free. Chances are this will change, but it’s certainly worth a try.
How can small businesses use AI to win customers and profitably run businesses?
Open to whatever makes life easier, I decided to try ChatGPT to answer this question.
And this is what it told me…
Small businesses can leverage AI to attract customers and improve the profitability of their operations. Here are some examples:
1. Personalised marketing: AI can analyse customer data, such as past purchases, browsing history, and social media activity, to create personalised marketing campaigns that resonate with each customer's interests and preferences.
2. Customer service: Chatbots and virtual assistants powered by AI can provide customers with fast and accurate responses to their inquiries, reducing response times and improving customer satisfaction.
3. Inventory management: AI can analyse sales data and forecast demand to optimise inventory levels, reducing waste and minimising stockouts.
4. Fraud detection: AI can detect fraudulent activities and alert business owners, preventing financial losses and protecting their reputations.
5. Pricing optimisation: AI can analyse competitors' prices and customer demand to optimise pricing strategies, maximising profits while remaining competitive.
6. Predictive analytics: AI can analyse data from multiple sources, such as sales, social media, and website analytics, to predict future trends and identify new growth opportunities.
7. Human resources: AI can help small businesses streamline HR tasks such as resume screening, employee performance analysis, and scheduling interviews, saving time and reducing costs.
Not bad!
Final thoughts on using ChatGPT
Using ChatGPT to draft your marketing communications will overcome the ‘blank page’. It’s easy to use and is a great time-saving tool to get you started on all sorts of business writing tasks.
But if you need to personalise your client communications, having the human touch is still essential.
And take care. ChatGPT can make mistakes.
Only some things on the web are accurate, making the answers produced by ChatGPT prone to error. It also needs help understanding the nuances of conversation, which may lead to misunderstandings.
So, before you sack your copywriter and designer, remember to remember this.
Contact us if you’d like to discuss how we can help you with your marketing communications. Call Katarina on 0415 128 804.