Credit: Limitless Visions/Adobe Stock
A robot can write your subject lines. It can generate captions, schedule your posts and even analyze your audience. From an efficiency standpoint, we can all be happy about that. What it can’t do, though, is feel. And marketing is all about a feeling (especially when it comes to marketing about money).
AI can’t sense the lump in someone’s throat, a spark of nostalgia or the trust between a brand and its people. In marketing, evoking that emotion in consumers and creating human connections is everything. For credit unions, that’s not a threat. It’s an opportunity to differentiate. Use this as a competitive advantage.
Consumers Recognize the Difference
Generic emails, templated social media posts and vaguely written messages that lack tone or personality stand out – and not in a good way. Consumers are even sniffing out the AI in video ads. Recent research from NIQ, a global marketing research firm, indicates that consumers are quick to identify video ads made with AI and generally find them annoying, boring and confusing. That includes AI videos deemed high quality – like recent holiday ads from Coke. NIQ research indicates the brand’s recent AI-generated holiday ads were not well-received by consumers, who apparently crave the nostalgia of the Coke holiday polar bears. This past holiday season, that nostalgia was replaced with a more modern, AI-generated version.
Recommended For You
If the marketing of one of the world’s most well-known brands can disappoint consumers, your credit union definitely is not immune. Today’s consumers are craving something real, and in the financial space – where trust is paramount – that need for authenticity matters even more. When people choose a credit union, they’re not just choosing rates. They’re choosing relationships. They want to feel seen, known and understood – both in person and in marketing. That’s especially true of digital natives.
The Authenticity of Storytelling
Think about this human connection in terms of storytelling. Every credit union has an arsenal of stories about how they changed members’ lives. Whether it’s the adoption loan that helped a couple start a family, the teller who paid attention and kept an elderly member from losing their life savings to a scammer or the first-time auto buyer’s loan that took a chance on someone the bank turned down, these are stories AI can only tell if someone tells it these stories first, because that is how AI works.
On a recent podcast, Eric Fulwiler, founder and CEO of marketing consultancy Rival, said this about AI and differentiation: “If you are a business and a brand that wants to be differentiated, that wants to be ahead of the curve, that wants to be leading within your industry and against your competitors from a marketing perspective, right now, a lot of the AI technology does not do great and it certainly doesn’t do differentiated. These applications are designed to make the user happy. It’s telling you what it thinks you want to hear, and it’s also providing similar answers to those that have come before in your industry.”
Use AI as a Tool, Not a Voice
There is no doubt AI has its place in marketing and business in general. AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can boost brainstorming and help marketers shape ideas in a fraction of the time they used to. It can streamline workflows and improve efficiency. AI should not replace your people. It should give them more capacity to do what people do best, which is connect (including selling and marketing).
Take automated emails, for example. Calcasieu Teachers & Employees Credit Union in Lake Charles, La., recently began sending birthday and anniversary emails to members. The process of sending the emails is automated, but the content and sentiment are generated by humans. Members noticed quickly. Within days of this new initiative launching, members in the branches thanked the staff for the well wishes. Something that simple stood out in their day and made them feel remembered. That’s the human element.
How to Humanize Your Marketing
How can you keep that human element in your marketing? Here are some tips:
- Use employees and members in your marketing.
- Tell stories.
- Write like a person, not a robot (use emotion and empathy).
- Personalize your marketing (as simple as dear
in an email or putting their first name on a banner in online banking). - Avoid canned responses to email or social media posts.
- Use messaging that communicates compassion and understanding.
AI is a powerful tool, but it’s just that – a tool. What makes marketing meaningful isn’t just how fast or smart it is – it’s how human it feels. As credit unions, we have a unique opportunity. We’re already known for relationships, trust and service. That reputation gives us a head start.
So yes, use AI to help write, build, track and automate. But you need to keep the heartbeat in your marketing. Make people feel something. Because at the end of the day, your members don’t want to be marketed to – they want to be understood (something a robot doesn’t do).
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more inforrmation visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
