Artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and digital tools have become part of most marketing teams. Why wouldn’t a business want the opportunity to streamline processes and boost efficiency? From a marketing perspective, AI is capable of so much, whether it’s optimizing ads, creating content, or predicting customer behaviour. It can do a lot of heavy lifting for marketing teams today.
But here’s the thing: Without a solid understanding of the human side of your marketing strategy, your tactics might miss the mark, and your brand may lose aspects of its personality that ultimately impact your presence in the market.
It’s pretty clear. As marketers, we need to own the deeper context—our customer’s emotional triggers, motivations, and fears. AI can crunch numbers and collect data and behaviours, but it needs your help on the qualitative side. The tricky answer is, “Why does that matter?” or “Why did you do that?”
I’m super passionate about this! Let me share why human insights are important and a few strategies to get you started.
Why human insights are a must-have for any marketing strategy today
You need to have human insights. The last thing you want is AI creating them for you. Understanding your customer’s needs, wants, motivations, and fears allows you to guide AI tools with greater accuracy and with accuracy, you can:
Align your marketing, sales and product teams
Depending on the size of your business, you may have many different perspectives growing internally on what the customer wants. Having worked with many clients over the years, I see this all the time. There is no internal voice more impactful than that of customers. With this, you can brief your teams and ensure everyone uses the same data to feed AI tools in their respective departments.
Personalize storytelling
Storytelling is so important today, and human insights provide a creative fuel for storytelling that AI really cannot match. Storytelling can make or break if someone engages with your brand by reading a piece of content or even sharing one. Without storytelling, there isn’t an emotional connection for your customers to make.
Better segmentation
AI can analyze massive amounts of data and segment audiences at scale. As a brand develops, it tends to have many different segments and personas to craft messages for. To identify these segments and build a relationship with each segment, you have to collect human insights. If you don’t do this, it becomes hard to stand out among the rest of the content you compete with online.
Improve results and decision making
Understanding what motivates your customers such as their pain points, desires, and needs will increase your confidence in making important decisions about where to spend your marketing dollars. It will also improve your long-term results, and help you avoid spending too much on short-win campaigns like contests.
How to get started with collecting human insights
This process can feel overwhelming at first, and over the years, many clients have explained why they don’t have time when racing to market. My answer is always the same: if you don’t know what resonates with your customers and why, please don’t spend your marketing dollars.
And now, with the support of AI tools, you can move faster than ever before. So, no more excuses!
Here are a few strategies to get you started:
Audit your automation stack
Review your automation stack to identify tactics that are overly reliant on algorithms and have lost the human side of your storytelling. This is a great process to have in place a few times a year as a brand gut check. Remember, you want to use AI, but ensure you still own the context and voice of your brand.
Start a regular process of customer and potential customer interviews
Like I said above, the loudest voice on your marketing team will always be your customer. If that is not the case today, you have some work to do. Start by segmenting your customers and conducting interviews with existing and potential customers. These one-on-one conversations provide in-depth, qualitative data that reveal the emotions, challenges, and desires behind customer behaviours. These conversations can be implemented regularly throughout the year or bi-annually. They are a must-have for any marketing budget today.
This will help you and your creative teams become excited about the ‘why’ behind customer actions and decisions, especially if your interviews go deep enough to uncover a hidden insight. When you invest in these regularly, you refine your messaging and tactics to continue improving in the market.
Collect surveys and feedback forms
While interviews provide in-depth insights, surveys and feedback forms allow you to gather data from a larger sample of your audience. Tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey can help you collect valuable feedback on a larger scale. With surveys, you can measure customer satisfaction, assess pain points, and gather opinions on specific topics.
Surveys and customer interviews complement each other well, and if you have a thriving email list there is no reason to skip this step. Customers usually love the opportunity to share their opinions.
The key to success with surveys is asking the right questions. Use a mix of quantitative questions such as rating scales and multiple-choice to measure preferences and behaviours and qualitative questions (e.g., open-ended) to gain deeper insights into customer emotions and motivations.
That said, I leave my open-ended questions for the customer interviews otherwise, depending on the size of your email list, you could have a lot of response data to analyze.
Behavioural data collection
To understand what a customer decides to do, you need to collect behavioural data. This is concrete proof of how customers interact with your brand. I tell clients to collect the qualitative first, so you have that context before jumping in here. Tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, and session recording tools like Hotjar allow you to see how users navigate your website, where they click, and where they drop off.
You can optimize a lot with behavioural insights.
Monitor social media and online communities
There is a good chance that your customers are already talking about your brand on social media and online communities. It may not be directly on your owned channels, but in this case, leverage AI-connected social listening tools, like Sprout Social, to track conversations and gather insights about customer sentiments, questions, and friction points.
Use your human insights to put AI to work
Once you’ve gathered human insights, AI tools can boost your efficiency. With AI-driven automation, you can quickly segment audiences, optimize campaigns, and personalize content at scale. Predictive analytics can help anticipate customer behaviour so you can adjust your strategy in real-time.
And this gives you what every marketer team asks: “Can we move faster, please?”
I’m excited to see how AI will continue to change how marketers adapt. Marketers who own the context AI needs and truly craft stories built from empathy and a deep understanding of their customers will have some fun.
If you need help starting this process for your team, please reach out. I would love to talk with you!
