The Future of Automation & Human Creativity in Marketing

Speaker 2
00:07
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new episode. The topic we've been going over the last handful of episodes has been automation and building holistic marketing strategies. And how do we combine those things? Why are they important? This episode specifically is going to be kind of wrapping this series up. We want to talk about the future of automation and human creativity in marketing. How do those two things blend? Right? How AI and automation is going to shape the future of marketing and what should businesses be doing to stay competitive in that space? So specifically, how will automation change the role for marketers? How has it already changed it and how is it going to continue to change that going forward? 

Speaker 1
00:56
Yeah, 100%. I think when it comes to change, we sometimes see the word change with a negative connotation. And I don't think that's the case here. It will allow you to actually scale your capabilities and your capacity as well. Right. More than anything. And I don't want to speak for the collective. Right, because marketers enjoy many different things. It's a really broad role, but I definitely want to say it'll make you do less manual work and it'll get you closer to the purpose of whatever you're doing. Basically marketing. I always say it's like how you tell the story and advertising, that always goes hand in hand. It's who do you tell it to? So you can focus on those two parts. When your AI or automations are doing the repetitive work of telling the story, you know how to tell the story. 

Speaker 1
01:37
You can train an AI or an automation and how to scale that, but you own that. Right? So that's the freedom, like I've said before, of like training an AI as if it was you. It's like delegating, right. To an assistant that you would have hired either way. And I'm not saying, yeah, let's replace human led efforts, but let's augment your own efforts if you're not able to, you know, augment with human led efforts as well. And then the data piece of it. All right. There's a lot of tools right now and natural language is a blessing that we can use with AI. Right? I mean, when you're a marketer, you want to. Again, I don't want to speak for the collective. 

Speaker 1
02:09
You may want to just be more focused on the creative side of things and telling that story and AI can educate it and then amplify and make that story better through data in a lot of tools nowadays, whether that's tableau or whether that's another BI tool, even Google looker you can talk to and set up a chatbot and say, hey, what does this data mean for me, the business and for X, Y, Z goals? And then learn from there and just focus on the strategy again, on how to tell the story and who to tell it to. That's what people want to see, probably the most human touch when they hire you. They want to work with you. You need to do things a machine cannot do for you. Let's just let the machine do that repetitive work for you. 

Speaker 1
02:46
So again, it's more of an augmentation, like I've said before, of your own capabilities in your craft. It's not replacing any part of the process if you don't want to, because a lot of people say, oh, if I need to automate my, you know, my processes, it's everything. No, like the beauty of it all. You can transition into it based on priorities and of course, what drives your work, your revenue and whatnot. It doesn't have to be all at once. And with that being said, it allows you to like, offer personalization at scale as well. As you learn from your data, you can scale efforts, you can scale strategy, and you can scale channels as well as to, like, what you can automate and get that content out and again, sell it to the right people. 

Speaker 1
03:25
Other than that, I feel like it's also, it also from an effort of learning, right? I mean, I won't do everything for you. You got to learn about what you're doing and like I've said before, have it trained you so you can learn and get inspired, but also for you to learn how it works. So then you can shape it and shape the narrative as much as you want towards whatever goals you're trying to achieve, but still, like, focused on the things that you enjoy. It's about the psyche. It's about also what brings you closer to your own personal mission as a marketer, your own purpose, right? 

Speaker 1
03:54
I mean, you want to come to work and be happy about the things that you're doing and making sure that maybe the things that don't make you as excited, being handled, but you have full control over it as well. But 100%, you gotta educate yourself. And that comes from the mindset, right? I mean, get away from the fear of like, hey, it's gonna replace me. See it more as a, hey, it's gonna augment me and it's gonna make me even look even polished in front of the people that I'm working with, because it's gonna inform me a Lot better on top of everything that I already know. Again, you can just reverse engineer from your knowledge to kind of like what you're trying to achieve. 

Speaker 1
04:23
So that's kind of how I see it and how I like to convey it to teams that are early adopting, you know, AI in their organizations. Maybe it's an easier way to, you know, get rid of the fear. 

Speaker 3
04:33
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Speaker 4
05:09
And I, you know, I think marketers definitely need to understand AI and automation tools and become proficient in them in order to stay relevant. But of course, yeah, there are different types of marketers, so to speak, but to some degree everyone needs to get on board. And I do think the future will favor more of an engineer's mindset and there are different ways to interpret that, but understanding basics like inputs and outputs and error handling, right, you don't need to be a developer with all of these tools. But the field of marketing especially of course digital marketing is getting more and more technical each day. 

Speaker 4
06:02
But I do think there is this middle ground emerging where the quote best marketers, so to speak are at least understand what can be built and what can be automated and what, you know, how to design a workflow or how to think about problems so that we're abstracting the human work and replacing the right parts of it with machine or AI work, automated work. So yeah, I think it's gonna, a lot of things are gonna change and it's hard to predict the future, but those are my thoughts. 

Speaker 2
06:40
Well, and going off of that, you mentioned engineering skills, something like that. It will be helpful. What other skills, what skills will marketers need in an AI future? You know, what do we need to know? 

Speaker 4
06:56
Yeah, you still need to know the basics, right? Like AI can make bad marketing happen much quicker just as it can make good marketing happen much quicker. But the ability to know the right questions to ask, right. Like I do think some level of subject matter expertise, to a degree, right. Might be replaced or augmented by AI. Right. You can ask ChatGPT how to solve this problem and get a pretty good idea and then ask whatever tool how to do it in X tool. Right? Like, marketers should be able to learn and execute on different strategies more quickly. But, but the basics like data driven thinking, AB testing, multivariate testing, all of these things are still going to be important. Like, you know, Karen mentioned the ability to interact with your analytics. GA4 the UX is not great. Right. 

Speaker 4
08:05
A lot of, a lot of marketers have complained about it. So let's abstract that UX make it less about learning a tool and more about solving a problem. Just ask the analytics what's going on? What are my top service pages for the month? Whatever it is. 

Speaker 2
08:19
Yeah, I love that. So when we're doing stuff like this, we're integrating some of these new tools into our efforts. How do we stay authentic as a brand while using AI generated content? 

Speaker 4
08:36
Yeah, I would say, you know, that again, it's back to the basics. Know what your brand voice is and stick to it. But also if you are using AI to generate content, make sure that it's encoded in whatever tool you're using. Right? If it's Jasper or Copy AI or any of these, make sure that your brand guidelines are added to the appropriate settings. Or if you're creating a prompt library using something like prompt layer or team GPT or even just text files to organize your prompts, make sure that in that prompt you are giving ChatGPT guidelines about your brand and your brand voice and how you want to talk about things. So that's one thing, you know, making sure that you're using AI for efficiency, not replacing human creativity. 

Speaker 4
09:42
You know, of course you can have inputs into your prompts that human, you know, you could insert human creativity, your unique perspective, your subject matter expertise. But don't just ask AI to create a blog on X and then click submit and then you have a blog. Right? That's not the right way to do it. So making sure to incorporate that human knowledge and expertise in whatever it is you're doing. And then along those lines, even providing human input isn't always sufficient. You know, it's rarely sufficient unless it's a simple communication. So using human editors, after you've produced content to go in and humanize the content, edit the content, check for, you know, deviations from what you would expect is still really important. And yeah, just use AI to make content personal, but don't try to create mass swaths of content programmatically. 

Speaker 4
10:49
Google, you know, penalizes that kind of stuff. So just be smart about it. 

Speaker 2
10:56
Great. Awesome. And then so going off of that, how do you bail? How do you balance those two things? Right, we talked a little bit about this, but balancing AI driven efficiency with human creativity, what does that relationship look like in practice? 

Speaker 1
11:14
Yeah, definitely. I think like we said before, right, I mean automate the things that you would definitely delegate to someone that's not client facing. Let's say anything that has to do with admin work, start there, right? I mean I would always say don't start with the things that drive trust to your brand. Keep it with a human led effort, right? I mean everything that has to do with direct contact with decision making on the user side, always keep it human led. But you can start automating, you know, any sort of admin tasks that you want to do that's not client facing, that it's actually going to inform you to then make a decision with clients and drive the customer success. You can automate those sort of tasks. But I would never start with revenue drivers or anything that drives the trust to your brand. 

Speaker 1
11:56
Always keep that human led because that comes from the empathy that comes from the customer success, the attention to the client, making them feel like they're the only one in the world. Because people like to be seen. And again, when they're making decisions and even more like in heavy industries like healthcare, right. Or even luxury, right, that it's all driven by emotion, it's all driven by like quick decision making or even low cycle, sorry, definitely don't do that for that. Just keep it very human led. And again for repetitive tasks. So you're free to do the strategic work that will drive again the trust to your brand. It's all related to customer success. So anything that's admin related, anything that doesn't have to do with client facing task or revenue drivers, I would start there for sure. 

Speaker 1
12:37
And again, keep everything that has to do with emotion. And that's more of a qualitative KPI that you need to find ways to like, you know, track, right. Whether that's really tracking your customer journey and the flows that matter. And then that will give you kind of the predictive data that you need to understand to then do these things. But other than that, I mean I would just keep everything that's closer to the decision making side of things on the end user and high touch kind of like situations that have to do with like, you know, money on the client side or refunds on what. Not everything that's human led. People like to talk to humans. And that's more on the customer, you know, success side. When it comes to marketers, it's more about the strategy, right? 

Speaker 1
13:19
I mean, people want to know that you understand it's not a machine because the machine can mess it up. AI people have this misconception that it will do everything for you. It's just a vessel to do things, right? A model is just a vessel to do things. It depends on the type of data that you feed it and that comes from you. You're the one that decides how you want to feed it, how you wanted to act on it. So be intentional with how you want to train your AI models and how you want them to mimic parts of you, but it doesn't have to mimic you. Okay? Use it to filter out. Use it to identify patterns. Use it to identify patterns in your customer success. Find it to identify patterns in your campaigns. 

Speaker 1
13:56
That's being used a lot as well. Feed it with historical data from things that have worked before. Rag. It's really popular right now. Saves you in pre training and whatnot. It makes you make better decisions along the way. But you're the end, like the end user that makes the decision for the client. And client likes to see that there's a human behind that, not a machine, because it could go wrong, right? I mean people are afraid of robots, meaning that they're afraid of AI. Let's just take away that kind of fear and put a face to it. And automatically I think from this psyche, that brings a lot of peace of mind to people. So anything that's customer related, customer facing, I cannot reiterate it enough. Do it with a human. 

Speaker 1
14:34
Everything that's behind the scenes, start doing it little by little, getting away from the revenue drivers with automation. That would be my 2 cents on the topic. 

Speaker 2
14:43
I love it. Thank you very much. Well, that was a great last note. Thank you everybody for listening. Our next series we're going to be diving into is revenue driven marketing. So the next few episodes will be focused on that. Thank you again so much for following along and we'll see you soon.