Is using AI in your marketing really worth it?

It may just depend on where your values lie within your business. But lets look into this further...

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a profound move in the day-to-day activities when running a business. Utilising machine intelligence has helped narrow down the level of tasks and time taken to gather data; helping businesses with efficiency and optimising tools to its fullest capability – however this comes with its challenges. As much as AI helps reduce having to put much thought into certain tasks, this can actually have a detrimental impact ethically and legally to your business if not done so with care, so why take the risk?

Well, by the end of this article, you will see the weighed-out pros and cons about using AI to gain a better understanding of how it might help but has many potential drawbacks.

1.      Reduces costs, HOWEVER… Requires a High investment  

AI can help with automating routine tasks as well as target marketing towards your segmented market more efficiently. More often now, companies use them as chatbots as well or virtual assistants to have customer support on hand for people 24/7, not relying on human labour.

Despite this, there is still high costs for when it comes to investing into these services and finding the right help to automate the technology to work with your specific company system can make for additional costs. Also, who really enjoys talking to chatbots? They often don’t function properly leading people to become frustrated with the poor service provided.

2.      Improved customer insights, HOWEVER… has Data privacy concerns

Utilising customer data has never been easier than now to narrow down who is most likely to use your products or services to then effectively target marketing towards those groups. From analysing their behaviour, interests and online interactions to ads, companies can personalise offers and prices to entice those customers who are most-valued.

Naturally, using customer data could potentially breach data protection laws like GDPR which can face many companies with legal consequences. You often see companies who are called out in the news for leaking or selling customer data which lead to customers losing trust and leaving the company with a sour reputation – with AI publicly being established as not very reliable, this may not keep customers around.

3.      More content creation, HOWEVER… lack of Human Creativity

A lot of platforms now can generate posts, hyper realistic videos, use fake models for their clothing range and much more to promote their products. On one hand, it keeps feeds consistent and can assist with analysing the performance that each post makes to adjust and improve it.

This is very noticeable for customers and often times the moment they notice something is made with AI, your company becomes automatically viewed and inauthentic, lazy and unreliable. It’s the same idea as you see a poster for a random shop in the street noticeably made with AI, would you trust going in there if it’s your first time? Probably not. So why would customers trust content that doesn’t authentically showcase your services and done creatively.

4.      Scalable, HOWEVER… Overreliance on Technology

These resources could help cover wider ground in handling more types of customers as well as handling large volumes of data, meaning operations can expand without too much concern with scarifying the quality of your marketing efforts.

This could also backfire if your business becomes too compliant with the AI as many studies have shown that AI actually can reduce your brain activity in thinking creatively, critical thinking and learning. These are detrimental skills to lose if AI is essentially running all the operations in the company for you, so it is important to remain knowledgeable and feel in control of the marketing strategies you enforce.

5.      Less workers required, HOWEVER… more Job Displacement

Relying more on machine intelligence means less reliance on people – the mindset of many companies. It is true that it does help reduce labour costs but this is at the cost of employment for thousands of people who are very capable to add beneficial skills to the marketing department. Having more human staff than machines not only improve your reputation by enhancing trust and confidence in your customers, showcasing your value for human work effort.

With every benefit, there is a downside to the use of AI in marketing so it really just depends on where your values lie in how your businesses is perceived vs efficiency in how it runs. Do you want customers to have more trust, view your business as authentic and feel as if the business truly tailors to their needs? – maybe sticking to human-made marketing is the route to go.

This is something we hope to bring to businesses like yours to invest in something long-lasting that will forever speak to your customers personally. Let’s choose authenticity in a world that is becoming more fabricated and less about quality.

By

Victoria Angell-Sanchez, COO