Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a lot when it comes to lead nurturing. In fact, we’re fast reaching a point where a prospect could conceivably complete the entire lead nurturing journey without talking to a human.
At least, that’s the theory. In practice, however, your leads probably have other ideas.
A prospect may have an industry-specific problem they’d like to chat through. Or maybe they want to get a sense of whether your brand would be a good cultural match for their company. They might even be keen to just put your knowledge to the test, and reassure themselves that they’re about to do business with someone who really knows their stuff.
In all of these circumstances, things like AI-generated walk-throughs, query boxes, and fairly limited robotic scripts don’t really cut it. What leads need is the ability to connect, interact, and identify with real people.
A recent survey asked online buyers to call out their biggest frustrations when it comes to dealing with brands. Chatbots came top of the list by some distance, with 43% of all respondents revealing it as their primary complaint.
It’s clear that AI is here to not only stay, but enhance communication in a number of different ways. This doesn’t mean that you should engineer the human approach out of the process, however.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence
We know that AI is incredibly sophisticated and able to create and produce an endless number of responses with the right prompt. However, when it comes to creating something meaningful that lasts, it’s lacking.
Human cognitive intelligence is something that can’t be artificially generated. Machine learning simply can’t compete with the emotional factors that make us who we are, like empathy, creativity, and humour. Cultural nuances, contextual evidence and social intelligence is also often overlooked in machine-built responses, as they rely heavily on the prompts given by the user. In other words, if the instructions are not crystal clear, the results will not be accurate. This is known as AI hallucinations.
While AI systems excel with data analysis and pattern recognition at speed, when it comes to communicating with your audience, it’s not the most effective.
Human Connections in an AI World
From showcasing your expertise to building real interactions, here are some suggestions for ensuring that your brand makes the most of that all-important human element.
Networking Opportunities
The events and networking industry is expected to grow at a rate of around 7% a year over the next decade – and for good reason. People love to network.
Speaking to someone – whether face-to-face or online – offers the chance to exchange ideas and perspectives, and stimulates our minds in a way that can’t happen when you’re talking to an algorithm.
This is exactly why we take so much care when planning and producing our podcast episodes. When you appear with an analyst, we take the time to completely understand your business and sector needs, pairing you with the industry expert that’s best suited to discuss the future of the industry, allowing your voice to shine through and help shape the discussion.
By networking on this more human level, your target audience and peers are able to see who you and your brand are. This level of authenticity can help generate more engagement, which naturally leads to a higher number of qualified lead prospects.
Building Real Connections
Audiences, potential customers, and leads expect a level of genuine and transparent communication. In other words, they are looking for reassuring signs of authenticity. This can have a direct impact on your bottom line, with research suggesting that 70% of customers spend more if a brand is perceived as being authentic.
A big part of this transparency involves customers being able to put faces to your brand and knowing they’re connecting with real people. An overly-automated lead nurturing programme can detract from this, with leads getting the distinct impression that they’re being nudged from one AI-generated resource to the next, without any real sense of your brand’s human identity. This also removes any hint of genuine concern for the specific problems they may be facing, which can be frustrating and cause them to drop out of your sales funnel.
Real-time, AI-driven interactions can also be problematic on the authenticity front. A computer system can be an excellent way of resolving quick, simple customer queries. However, there’s a big difference between a quick interaction and a genuine connection. Over-reliance on this type of technology may mean that you’re failing to deliver the empathy and understanding that comes with real-life human connections. This impersonality can make leads feel undervalued; diminishing their perception of your brand’s commitment to genuine engagement.
When it comes to nurturing leads, we take a more impactful approach. Rather than use AI to authenticate leads, our team takes the time to get in touch with each lead, start a conversation and relationship, and qualify them as genuine marketing leads. This ensures that each lead feels looked after and cared for, making them more likely to continue through the sales funnel.
Creating Trust
If they are going to eventually purchase from your company, buyers need to see solid evidence that you represent a safe pair of hands. Recent statistics show that 87% of B2B buyers say that trust is essential in their decision-making process. They’re on the lookout for those all-important trust indicators right from their first point of contact with your brand.
If they cannot make any connection with any human presence behind your branding — or if every response to their attempts at communication seems to be an automated one — it sends out all the wrong messages. After all, if the human element is missing at this stage, it hardly bodes well in terms of the type of service they can expect from doing business with you.
What’s more, with AI now commonplace, it is even more important to ensure the human element still has a presence. Research suggests that despite using voice assistants and similar tools frequently, almost half of UK consumers do not trust AI-generated output. As such, even if it’s just as a reassuring backstop, it’s essential to make your human presence felt.
Two areas to focus on here are transparency and authority. Be prepared to address your audience face-to-face, to regularly update them with relevant information, and be open about your processes, products or services. Transparency in communication helps to build credibility, and reassures leads of your integrity.
Appearing on a video podcast, for example, gives you the opportunity to deliver insightful content in a direct, face-to-face way — even through a screen. It offers the chance to position your brand as a thought leader, while simultaneously connecting personally with your audience: which is exactly the type of approach you need for nurturing trust.
Gathering Unique, Valuable Feedback
One of the big promises of AI is linked to gaining a better understanding of your customer. Automation makes it much easier to sift through feedback and comments from multiple channels (e.g. emails, socials, and surveys). Advanced sentiment analysis tools even promise the ability to read and interpret customer input, distinguishing between positive, neutral, and negative sentiments.
All of this can help give you a broad sense of how leads and customers regard your brand. But what about the details? What do your leads really think about your offerings? What improvements would really make a difference to them?
Analysis of tickbox surveys or isolated social media remarks will only go so far in helping you understand this. As we’ve discussed, AI is best suited for data processing, so to get the truth on what your audience really thinks, you’ll need to dig deep and discover the nuance in longer responses.
Regular communication with your target audience allows you to not only build trust, but hear what they find challenging. Whether it’s through addressing viewer-submitted questions on a podcast or through regular interaction on social media, you want your audience to feel like they’re part of the conversation.
Connect with Analysts with EM360Tech
It’s easy to see why marketers are embracing AI. Next-gen martech can significantly enhance your lead management capabilities, making it a lot easier to provide leads with precisely the information they need, at precisely the right time.
That said, in a world of automated touchpoints, the need to maintain genuine, human connection with your audience becomes more important than ever. To build stronger relationships, we should be looking at human/AI collaboration, for both to co-exist and complement each other.
Through strategic content creation, you can bring the human side to the forefront of your brand, becoming an authority within the space and building that trust with your audience.
EM360Tech offers a viable, effective way to this kind of content creation. Offering expert production input and the chance to collaborate with a vast range of partners and big names across the tech sphere - not to mention a ready-made audience of tens of thousands of potential leads - you are all set to place real, compelling face-to-face input at the centre of your lead nurturing campaigns.
Discover how our services can help you, or get in touch with a member of our team to start really speaking to your audience.