6 Strategies to Make Your Content More Human in the Age of AI
In a world where AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent, adding a personal, human touch to your brand’s content is more important than ever. As users seek authentic, relatable connections, brands must adapt their strategies to ensure they connect with audiences on a deeper, more genuine level. While AI can be a valuable tool to increase productivity and streamline processes, it’s essential for brands to balance AI-driven content with human-driven insights and creativity.
The growing popularity of platforms like Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok highlights the demand for content that resonates with real, lived experiences. Users on these platforms often seek authenticity, looking for content that reflects genuine human interactions rather than the polished, formulaic posts that AI can easily produce. This shift in consumer behavior presents an opportunity for brands to stand out by humanizing their content and fostering deeper connections with their audience.
Here are six key strategies to humanize your content and make a more authentic, lasting impact in the AI era.
1. Focus on Content That Supports the User Journey, Not Just Search Volume
Before generative AI made content creation more accessible and affordable, many brands focused primarily on generating content based on search volume. The idea was to create content around any keyword related to the brand’s product or service to attract more traffic. However, as AI allows anyone to generate content easily, this approach is no longer a competitive advantage. To stay ahead, brands must pivot toward creating content that aligns with the user journey and genuinely addresses customer needs and pain points.
Rather than focusing solely on popular search terms, brands should leverage audience research and insights from their sales and support teams to create content that helps customers at every stage of their buying journey. This could involve conducting user research, mapping out the customer journey, and identifying key decision-makers and their specific challenges.
For example, if you sell a headless CMS (content management system), understanding the customer journey might reveal that buying decisions often take months and involve multiple stakeholders. Therefore, instead of creating generic content, you can produce resources tailored to specific roles, such as IT decision-makers or content managers, that address their particular pain points and provide actionable solutions.
This audience-centric approach ensures that the content your brand produces is not only relevant but also valuable in helping users navigate their buying decisions.
2. Use Sales and Support Conversations in Your Audience Research
Sales and support teams often have direct access to the questions, concerns, and pain points that customers experience. By tapping into these conversations, brands can uncover valuable insights that drive content creation. Sales and support interactions provide an authentic, real-time glimpse into customer needs, helping you identify key topics and language that resonate with your audience.
Analyzing sales conversations, customer support tickets, and online community discussions can uncover recurring issues, common questions, and customer frustrations. You can use these insights to inform your content strategy, ensuring that you address the most pressing concerns your audience faces.
For example, if your support team receives frequent inquiries about a specific feature of your product, you can create a detailed blog post or tutorial that answers these questions. Similarly, by paying attention to feedback from customers, you can adjust your content to better reflect their priorities and preferences.
Additionally, there are tools available to help automate this process, such as AI-driven text analysis tools that can identify common themes in customer interactions. These tools can save time and help you spot emerging trends and issues quickly.
3. Collaborate with Internal Experts to Create Content
Internal subject matter experts are a goldmine of knowledge and insight. Collaborating with these experts can help you create high-quality, authentic content that reflects the true expertise of your brand. While internal experts may not have the time or resources to write content themselves, you can work with a ghostwriter to facilitate the process.
A ghostwriter can interview your internal experts and translate their knowledge into engaging and informative content. The goal is to ensure that the content authentically reflects the expert’s voice, expertise, and insights, while also aligning with your brand’s tone and messaging. These collaborations can result in blog posts, case studies, social media content, podcasts, or videos that showcase your brand’s genuine expertise.
The key to success in this process is to ensure that the expert is involved in every step, from content ideation to review. By allowing them to provide input and feedback, you ensure that the final product accurately represents their knowledge and adds value to your audience.
4. Offer an Authentic Point of View
One of the most effective ways to humanize your content is by sharing unique, authentic perspectives. While maintaining a consistent brand voice is important, allowing individual authors to infuse their own personalities and insights into their writing can make the content feel more genuine and engaging.
People crave content that feels personal, and offering an authentic point of view helps establish trust with your audience. Encourage your team members to share their own experiences, opinions, and even challenges. These personal stories help to humanize your brand and create a deeper connection with your audience.
Google’s new “Discussions and Forums” and “Perspectives” SERP features reflect the growing importance of personal experience in content. By showcasing real user experiences and combining videos, social media posts, and news, Google is recognizing the value of authenticity in content. Brands can tap into this by ensuring that their content reflects real-world experiences and offering unique perspectives that stand out in the crowded digital landscape.
Creating a space for employees to express their personalities through content also allows for more diverse and creative content. Develop guidelines that encourage authors to infuse their voices into their writing while still maintaining brand consistency. This balance will help your content feel more human and relatable.
5. Add Personal Video to Your Top-Performing Articles
Video is one of the most engaging formats for content, and incorporating it into your content strategy is a great way to humanize your brand. Video allows your audience to connect with real people, rather than just reading a piece of text. It provides an opportunity for authors to share their expertise in a more personal and relatable way.
A simple strategy is to take your top-performing articles and repurpose them into video content. This could involve summarizing the key points of the article and recording a video where the author discusses these points directly with the audience. Video also provides the opportunity to incorporate non-verbal communication, such as tone of voice and body language, which can make the content feel more authentic.
Using AI tools to assist in video creation can help streamline the process. AI-powered video editing tools can remove filler words, add intros and outros, and optimize the video for engagement. By testing the video format on your top articles, you can evaluate how well it resonates with your audience and consider rolling it out to other content.
6. Establish Your Employees as Influencers
One often-overlooked way to humanize your content is by leveraging the expertise and influence of your own employees. Your internal experts are already trusted by the company and have valuable insights that can resonate with your audience. By empowering them to share their knowledge and content on their personal social media platforms, you can extend your brand’s reach and credibility.
To support this strategy, you can create content that employees can share on their own platforms, such as LinkedIn posts or Twitter threads. You can also help them build their personal brands by offering resources or training on how to effectively engage with their audience on social media.
Employees who are passionate about the content they create will naturally want to share it, further amplifying your brand’s message. Recognizing their contributions and celebrating their efforts helps build a culture of authenticity and trust within the company.
In Summary
As AI-generated content becomes more commonplace, consumers are increasingly seeking content that reflects real human experiences and authentic voices. Brands can tap into this demand for authenticity by prioritizing genuine connections with their audience and focusing on human-driven content strategies.
By creating content that aligns with the user journey, using sales and support conversations for audience research, collaborating with internal experts, offering authentic points of view, incorporating video, and empowering employees to become influencers, brands can humanize their content and build stronger, more lasting relationships with their audience. In the AI era, the key to success lies in embracing the human elements that foster trust, authenticity, and meaningful connections.