AI is on the up. Brands are using it to supercharge productivity and create content at record speed. As a business owner, it’s hard to know how best to use AI to help your brand stand out when a lot of AI-generated content can have the reverse effect.
At Jump, we pride ourselves on staying up to date with the modern advancements of today, whilst appreciating old-school craftsmanship. We’ve found a balance between utilising AI to boost brand awareness and championing human creativity wherever possible.
There are three main aspects to consider when working out how to make your brand stand out in an age of AI:
- Defining your approach to AI
- Knowing how and when to use AI
- Deciding how to address your audience with AI tools
Defining Your Approach to AI
Be confident in your strategy
With so many advancements in the world of AI, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the endless options. Plenty of businesses scramble to make sense of the new AI technology, often wasting time and money on software and tools. It’s best to take a calm and measured approach to using AI; think about where it makes sense for your business, rather than blindly hopping on trends.
Stay true to your values
Apply healthy skepticism and understand the limitations of AI applications. They will get things wrong, and some tools that work for other businesses might not be the best for you. Whilst AI is developing rapidly, it is still relatively new for lots of people. It’s exciting to discover different ways of working, but there are instances when it might be best to stick with your current strategy rather than integrating AI. Having confidence in your approach will help your team understand how they should go about using AI tools.
Knowing how and when to use AI tools
Jump believes it’s best to use AI to do boring jobs and have more time to spend on creative projects. You might be tempted to use AI to write blog posts or create graphics because it can do so extremely fast, but how is the quality of these outputs impacting your work and team morale?
Empower your employees
Train your team to use AI so that they can decide when they want AI tools to enhance their workflow in a way that suits them. This approach will empower your team to sharpen their skills and creativity, rather than feeling like they are working towards being replaced by technology.
Openly integrating AI into your workflows and inviting your team to choose when to use AI in a way that works for them will help you discover who is working effectively. Some people might prefer to use AI in secret to potentially get away with doing the bare minimum, whereas others could be excited by how much more they can get done with AI taking on their admin.
Get high-level transformative data
One thing that AI is undoubtedly good for is getting high-level data on your customers’ habits. You can use AI integrations to dive into your data sets and pull high-level insights that can help dictate how you target your customers. This is a good example of understanding where you should put time and energy into using AI to help your business stand out. Rather than focusing on how fast you can generate visual or written content with ChatGPT, it might be better to think about how AI could help your business behind the scenes.
Effectively addressing your audience in an age of AI
Don’t underestimate your audience
We believe it’s vital to continue celebrating human creativity. Machines will never be able to properly replicate the originality and artistry that comes from passionate creatives. It turns out, a growing number of consumers agree. Click Consultant found that 34% of people would hesitate to buy from a brand upon learning AI is behind their content production. Don’t make the mistake of believing your audience can’t tell when something is blatantly AI-generated and hasn’t been edited or enhanced by a real person. Your brand may blend into a sea of sameness if you don’t recognise the importance of people in the creative process.
Think before generating
To make sure your audience doesn’t feel hoodwinked, ensure you only use AI to produce content that you could make yourself. If you use it to automate spam that you don’t fully understand the process of creating, your audience will be able to tell. Trust your writers and creative team to either create content themselves or heavily edit AI-generated assets to make them feel personable to your audience.
Personalise your message
With AI able to pull in-depth data on your consumers’ habits, there is no excuse not to create highly personalised campaign messaging. Use data to create customer personas—groups of different types of users of your service. When that’s done, show your different customer personas how you are delivering a value proposition unique to their experience. In other words, how are you meeting their needs that led them to your service?
Most people want to know how they specifically could benefit from engaging with your brand or product. Delivering a tailored value proposition to your different types of customers makes your messaging feel more personalised rather than a one-size-fits-all AI-generated message.
Make physical promotional materials
An easy way to help your brand stand out in an age of AI is to opt for printed promotional materials, something they can engage with in the real world. We’ve written a whole blog post dissecting the benefits of using print in a digital-heavy era. In short, we believe printed marketing assets can show your customers that you’re willing to go the extra mile, widen the scope of your brand exposure to people outside of calculated algorithms, and leave a lasting impact on people who interact with your printed promotion.
That’s a wrap on our guide to making sure your business stands out in an AI-dominated era. Celebrate creativity and find a way to use AI to empower your employees and get the best out of your business.
