Is your marketing authentic? Are you honest, transparent, and sincere in communication and interactions with clients? Does your marketing reflect your brand identity, values, and promises?
Are you sharing a real message with real people?
Authentic marketing is essential for building trust and credibility with your target audience.
When you focus on authenticity in your marketing, you can:
- Differentiate your firm from its competitors
- Create a distinct and identifiable brand
- Appeal directly to your ideal client
However, with recent developments in AI (artificial intelligence), the temptation to share unoriginal content is at an all-time high.
So, we want to take this opportunity to discuss the importance of building a true brand story and explain how you can use AI and still be authentic in your marketing.
Building a Brand Story
Before you can jump into creating and distributing content, you need to focus on building a brand story.
A brand story is an essential piece in creating an authentic image for your firm. It’s not just a piece of your marketing, it’s a narrative that defines your firm’s brand and its values. With a compelling brand story, you can build a stronger connection with your audience and set your firm apart from the competition.
Tips for Building a Brand Story
Start with your “why”
What is the purpose of your firm? Why did you start this business? What makes you different?
Be yourself
Your brand story should be genuine and truthful. Talk in your copy like you would talk to your clients in person. Emphasize what makes your firm unique.
Make it emotional
You know how to solve your client’s heaviest problems. You know that with your help, they can feel secure in their finances, grow their business, and achieve their goals. Use your brand story to convey the emotions they’ll feel when you help them do these things.
Use visuals
Your clients will connect your logo, colors, and images with your business, so make it memorable. Use visual storytelling to your advantage.
Be consistent
No matter where your clients look they should see a consistent story. Across all platforms, your messaging, visuals, and tone of voice should align.
What Comes Next?
Once your brand story is built, your next steps are to ensure the content you create and share aligns and stays true to that brand story. This is what reinforces authenticity and continuously enhances your brand.
Unfortunately, this is also where many firms slip up and fall victim to unauthentic content.
AI’s Role in Authentic Marketing
AI has made massive shifts in the marketing industry. On its most basic level, it can create a social media post about cash flow. With a more complex command, it can craft an entire marketing strategy for your firm along with the content needed to put it into action.
Mind-blowing and kind of frightening all at the same time.
There’s no denying AI can bring efficiency to your marketing. However, relying on AI jeopardizes authenticity – something you can afford to leave out.
Take a blog post, for example. Blogs are great for:
- Providing value for your clients
- Boosting SEO
- Establishing authority as a thought leader
- Building brand awareness
- Increasing engagement
You can ask AI to write you an 800-word article on cash flow. It will do it and it will be grammatically correct, include accurate information, and will likely be chalked full with keywords.
However, what it will be missing is authenticity.
When you ask AI to write an article, it will use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. In other words, it uses a culmination of existing articles on the internet to generate a new article. When it does this, it also uses the language, structure, and topics of these articles to ensure your article is similar in style and subject matter.
See what we mean? AI creates unauthentic content. But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what ChatGPT had to say about the topic:
“While AI can be useful for generating large volumes of content quickly and efficiently, it may not be able to match the creativity and nuance of human writers. It’s worth noting that AI-generated content is not a replacement for human writers, but rather a tool that can be used to support and augment human efforts.”
What does this mean? Your content still needs you to bring it to life.
Using AI in Your Marketing
All of this being said, it’s important to keep in mind that AI can help you be authentic in your marketing.
You can use AI-powered tools to:
- Generate topic ideas
- Optimize existing content
- Brainstorm social media posts
- And so much more
Apply the results it gives you to your marketing strategy and intertwine your brand story throughout your content.
Don’t let yourself get caught up in the efficiency and ease of AI that you bypass authenticity and tell the wrong story.
If you have questions about authenticity, building your brand story, or using AI in your marketing, reach out to our team at Full Stadium Marketing! We’d love to learn about your firm and its story.
