To Err Is Human. To Market Like One Is Becoming Rare.
There’s an increasingly common experience we’ve seen personally and heard about from both friends and clients recently, and we’re willing to bet you have experienced it too. You’re reading something online. It might be a social media post, a website’s homepage, or a newsletter, but whatever it is it feels slightly off. The sentences are fine, the grammar is correct, and the ideas all make sense. But the humanity is missing. There’s no real perspective being given, no personality to the words, no sense that any particular person wrote it or cares whether it gets read.
This is becoming the norm, and it’s changing how consumers respond to marketing.
The AI Explosion
The volume of AI-generated content on the internet has exploded in a very short period of time. It now takes seconds to produce blog posts, social media captions, email newsletters, website copy, and product descriptions at a scale that was impossible just a year or two ago. For businesses struggling to stay visible in this “new” online, the temptation to go full throttle with these tools is entirely understandable.
The problem here though is that when every business does the same thing with the same tools, it all becomes ineffective. When every remodeling business is publishing the same kind of content at the same frequency, hitting the very same topics with the same smooth AI voice, the content gets lost in the mix and becomes invisible. There are no relationships built from this kind of writing. Their websites might get some traffic, but this at the cost of eroding authenticity and trust.
Audiences adapt faster than most businesses realize. They may not be able to articulate why exactly that Facebook post feels weird and hollow, but they can sense it and they will respond. They’ll scroll past it, they won’t click, and they won’t reach out.
How Does One Market Like A Human?
Being human in your marketing means being specific about your business, honest about who you are, and letting your real perspective shine.
An AI-generated social post for a local realtor might say something like “Summer is the perfect time to move and upgrade your home! Contact me today to learn about our latest listings.” It’s not exactly wrong, it’s just that it could have been written about any realtor in any city by anyone who has never set foot in their area.
A post written by someone who knows that area might talk about their favorite nearby parks and restaurants, share an observation from a recent listing that surprised them, or describe what a family said when they got settled in their new home. That’s something only that particular business can offer, and when they do it’s obvious it’s real.
Being Human is Important for SEO
The human element in marketing isn’t just about striking emotional resonance with the reader. There are also practical implications for how your content performs in search engine results.
Google’s EEAT framework, about which we’ve written previously, specifically rewards content that demonstrates real experience and expertise, and authentic trustworthiness. EEAT is something that AI-generated content fails to provide, because those signals come from the experience of having actually done the work and having formed opinions about it, and a willingness to give those opinions out to the public.
A bathroom remodeler who writes about a challenge they encountered on a recent project, what caused it, and how they solved the problem is providing something useful that reflects their real knowledge. Google is getting better by the day at distinguishing that expertise from a generic article ChatGPT wrote about bathroom renovation trends that it assembled from fifty other articles also generated by AI. Businesses that invest in content reflecting their real experience are building SEO authority at the same time they’re creating relationships with potential customers.
The Customer Relationship Is Marketing
Some think of marketing as a process that treats every piece of content as transactional. A post goes out, people click, some convert, and you repeat. This is an incomplete understanding.
Businesses that build the best and most durable customer relationships understand that their content is a vital part of those relationships. Emails that sound like they came from a real person, social media posts that show genuine knowledge, and blogs that have useful and authentic things to say create trust that will pay off when a customer is ready to make their decision.
This kind of trust is basically impossible to build with AI-generated content. What builds that trust is a consistent voice, specific perspectives, and evidence that a real person cares about and is paying attention to the customer. AI can produce reams of content, but it can’t produce any of that.
Give it a Human Touch
For most small businesses, leaning into the human element is in practice pretty simple. It doesn’t require you to have a massive content operation, it just requires a shift in how you think about what you’re putting out into the world.
Share what you’re seeing in your market right now, talk about a specific customer interaction that made you think, or write about a mistake you made and what you learned from it. Show the work you do, not just the results. These are things you have done and that only you can provide, and they will help people feel like they know you before they’ve ever called or visited you.
That’s the goal of marketing. When a potential customer reaches out, you want them to feel like they’re calling someone they already trust, not just contacting a random business they found on Google search.
Wild Iris Marketing can help you harness your human voice and spread it across your content, your social media, your newsletters, and your website. If your marketing feels like it could have come from any generic competitor in any generic city, then let’s get together and talk about fixing it.