Keep your marketing personal in an AI world
By Ruth Wilson, director of Ruth Wilson PR.
Marketing is an essential part of your business success. It embraces a range of tactics that shape and protect your brand reputation, communicate your company values and support the sales team, by promoting your people, products and services.
Media relations, community engagement, events, advertising, social media, email marketing and your website should all combine to ensure your stakeholders have the most positive and well-informed opinion of your company – and hopefully choose you over your competitors.
AI can be part of this, but it’s really important to remember that marketing is aimed at people – so it needs to be authentic and personal.
Start with your audience, otherwise you could be wasting funds on output that doesn’t reach the right people. Who do you want to target and what are the main messages you want to communicate? AI can help you research and create the most targeted audience databases and understand the priorities of each demographic, to approach them in the right way, through the right channels, at the right time – it’s a good timesaving tool.
Earned content
‘Earned content’ is media coverage. Local, national, specialist trade or business to business, print, online or broadcast – there are lots of options.
This is not paid advertising, this is getting awareness that has the extra caché of a journalist endorsement, so the key is to research your media as much as possible: know what those journalists cover, so you can target them effectively. Press releases are great if you have genuine news. Expert advice is often welcomed by journalists.
Many trade titles have planned features and will be proactively looking for content. Product reviews can work really well, and tapping into existing news to present informed opinions can sometimes be pitched successfully. This is not the time to use AI. Journalists will not appreciate being spammed with ChatGPT content. Targeting and a personal approach is vital.
Owned content
Your ‘owned content’ (your website, your social media channels) are often the first places people look for information about you. The jury is out on using AI content in socials, in ads, on your website, or in your email marketing – it doesn’t have the nuance of human copy so might not be seen as genuine – and Google can spot it, so it doesn’t help your SEO (how high your page ranks and can be found compared to others).
But it can create great headlines, summaries and generate personalised stats to help targeting in your email marketing, so again, it’s worth considering as a time-saving tool.
Events
Live events and face to face activities are an important part of marketing: they allow businesses to make authentic connections and build personal relationships. They also offer the platform to demonstrate products and services in real time and can lead to excellent data collection opportunities that can then be used in ongoing marketing (AI can help here!).
They should never be treated as isolated tactics: events have a wealth of PR opportunities around them. There will be press offices to engage with, media partners to target, filming and interview opportunities at the event and lots of content that can be created for social media channels and websites.
82% of marketers and communicators expect that further adoption of AI will lead to productivity improvements, enhanced development and improved financial results.
But a recent Nielsen global study showed that 88% of consumers still trust recommendations from people they know. Which shows that marketing should be about the people: events, targeted PR, and community and stakeholder outreach should form the basis of your marketing, not AI.
AI is a support: it can help you create clear targets and track results so that you can assess immediate and long-term success, and generate data for ongoing targeting. But it’s the marketing of the people, products and values that will help you remain competitive in a crowded market.
Ruth Wilson is a PR consultant. She works with clients across a range of industries throughout the UK, helping them formulate effective PR strategies and then delivering them, to generate positive media coverage that gets real results.