Don’t Fall for This AI Marketing Trap

Artificial intelligence may be a great tool, but it’s no Don Draper just yet.

The use of generative AI in marketing efforts, through advertisements, blog entries, and social media posts, can create more engagement from prospects — and that’s always a positive for financial advisors. But, since the content is fundamentally based on pre-existing work, there’s plenty of room for inherent biases, errors, and some trippy hallucinations. 

Worse, the content may not comply with regulations, or could plagiarise right from a competitor. Most importantly though, the content just might not be all that effective without a real person at the helm. “As AI proliferates content, a lot of this is going to have the same format, tone, and feeling, and people are just going to scroll right past it,” said Robert Sofia, CEO of the martech firm Snappy Kraken.

Fake Images, Real Thoughts

When used properly, AI tools like copy editing programs or image-generating software can help advisors enhance their promotional content. Better marketing materials lead to more engagement, which in turn leads to more business, Sofia said. “There’s just no scenario where if you increase your lead volume by 20% that you’re not going to increase your client acquisitions,” he told The Daily Upside.

• Overall AI use is still fairly limited, with only 12% of advisors using it daily, according to a survey from consulting firm Horsesmouth.
• However, of those advisors, 41% use AI for marketing copy and 56% use it to convert ideas and outlines into drafts.

But AI is not a panacea, and it can be a finicky devil for marketing efforts. That’s especially true when generating people: hands often have too many fingers, faces fall into the uncanny valley, and everything has a surreal, oily sheen that lets you know these are not actually humans. Eric Roberge said his financial planning firm, Beyond Your Hammock, initially tried generating AI ads with people, but they always looked “a bit off.”

“We will only use generative AI on graphics rather than trying to replicate a realistic photo,” he told The Daily Upside. “This business should be based on trust and real relationships. Putting out fake images undermines that.” 

The same principle applies to content in blog and social media posts, Roberge said. He likes to use AI as a “thinking partner” to brainstorm or expand on the firm’s original ideas. He’ll also take transcripts from podcasts he’s recorded and have ChatGPT turn them into articles. “It helps us efficiently recycle existing content into something a little more unique than simply copy/pasting the transcript,” he said.

Not a Robot. In Sofia’s opinion, advisors shouldn’t use AI to generate all promotional content because it can look average in an already highly competitive market. It can also create distrust, and, in some cases, make you look downright lazy. “There’s a hard-to-quantify aspect of the human psyche that if we’ve seen something before, we tend to ignore it,” Sofia said.