AI is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean your content has to sound like a robot wrote it. In Episode 106 of the Hit Record Podcast, Meredith Olmstead and Sophie Bawany break down how financial marketers can use AI tools to save time while still creating real, engaging content that sounds human.
Key Takeaways:
Use AI to streamline, not to replace: AI is a powerful tool for idea generation, scheduling, and research. But it should never create final content on its own. Real stories, emotional nuance, and the right tone still need a human touch.
Authenticity builds trust with your audience: If your content feels robotic or too polished, members will notice. The most effective posts come from a mix of structure and spontaneity. Review, edit, and personalize AI-generated content to make it sound like your brand.
Be transparent about how you use AI: Don’t hide the fact that you're using AI. Instead, frame it as a way to work more efficiently and spend more time connecting with real people. When used with intention, AI can actually enhance the human side of your marketing.
Transcription:
Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales and service consulting agency. We work exclusively with credit unions and community banks. And I am here with Sophie Bawany. I'm not even sure what Sophie's title is anymore. Sophie is our, she's a digital marketing specialist, but also our social media guru and our driving your customer age and member audience age down basically. She is our youth specialist, if you will, although she's older than she looks, but I won't tell if you won't. So say hi, Sophie.
Sophie Bawany:
Hi, guys.
Meredith Olmstead:
So Sophie is also kind of like our early innovator on our team, if you will. And she does a lot of work with social media. So that's always kind of like an innovation ahead of the game. If you're going to stay ahead of the game in social media, you have to be an early adopter is what you tend to call them. And so of course one of the things that is really, really on people's minds when it comes to innovation right now is AI. So Sophie has been doing a lot when it comes to AI and authenticity and how that fits in with social media, but also all areas of marketing right now. And so I was like, "Sophie, what can we do on the podcast right now around AI that really would help our listeners?" And so she came up with an amazing topic and I said, "All right, let's hit record. Let's hear it." So what are we talking about today, Sophie?
Sophie Bawany:
We're talking about how to use AI automation without losing yourself and the human touch that makes your content relatable and create that engagement that we're looking for.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. So the first thing is everybody is so worried that AI is going to take your job. And what I can say about this, and I wasn't worried about this, I was hoping that I could put my head down and just power through until I could retire in five to 10 years. I'm older than I look, and so I'm like, okay, maybe I can make it through. And then the whole story that I tell everybody is about a year and a half ago, I was like, I'm not going to be able to do it, so I started, buckled up, started taking classes online and really doing lots of trainings on YouTube and everywhere else and really learning AI stuff. And I have become pretty decent at it and really using it in a lot of ways, productivity and just getting ideas, lots of starting points. But so is AI going to replace us in our jobs?
Sophie Bawany:
It shouldn't. And again, you hit the nail on the head if you're an early adapter or if you're accepting it, and even if you're jumping on board and digging into the tools, understanding how they can help you, you will always add value because at the end of the day, AI is a tool that has been created by humans more for efficiency, not to replace you. So think of it as a partner, a creative partner, and not a replacement.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay. But if I had dug my heels in and put my head down and pretended like it wasn't a thing, would it have been a problem?
Sophie Bawany:
A hundred percent. You're at a distinct disadvantage because the whole world around you now looks different. The way people are searching for things, creating content is all... AI is in every aspect of your life. So if you're going to be the outlier, you're going to be left behind.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So basically AI is not going to replace you, but somebody with using AI probably would replace you.
Sophie Bawany:
Yeah.
Meredith Olmstead:
Okay, cool. So then how do you keep the human voice? How do you keep the human in your brand if you're using AI?
Sophie Bawany:
So you can use AI kind of as your brainstorming partner, use AI as your base just to get the ball rolling. I would never a hundred percent leave any content creation ideas or actual scripting to AI because again, it's based on the content that it's being fed. Use it to generate a bunch of topics or use it to look at pain points and let it search, let it do the grunt work. But the actual issues that are localized to your market, that's what you come in with. You come in and actually finesse it. You use the right tone, you put a human in front of your content, and that's going to make sure that while AI is your partner, you are still driving the conversation.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. And so it's not the finished product. You start with AI. You never finish with AI.
Sophie Bawany:
Never.
Meredith Olmstead:
And that's where even it's so funny, like when we're hiring and say you give somebody a question and you give them some time to work on it, you can always tell when they feed back an answer and it feels a little robotic or it lacks an emotional flair or it lacks any mistakes, like any mistake at all, you can tell maybe this wasn't actually done by a person. There's no real feel of an actual human that might've had a little bit of a misstep or any grammatical error or any feeling or there's no emotion to it. So you want to make sure that it actually has to feel like a person wrote it. Okay, cool. What else about AI are you finding that people should keep in mind when they're utilizing it to try to keep the human touch in what they're using it for?
Sophie Bawany:
I mean, again, always review your content because we... It's so funny. I was at a seminar this weekend and the person put their introduction in ChatGPT and asked it to make an intro. And when they were reading it, they had two minutes of their own intro, which was their cadence, their tone, their voice, and then you could tell immediately when they switched to reading the content from their phone that had been generated by ChatGPT or AI because it sounded so different. If you take a quick second to review something and you're like, I don't sound like that, or our content, our brand doesn't have this voice, you can take that strategy and use it versus... Make sure that you're reviewing that content. Like I said, it's not a finished product by any means. And make sure that you're adding that emotion and keeping it consistent. You need to consistently, if you're going to use AI for topic generation, the more you feed it, it's going to give you better results. So use the tool to your advantage.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So AI can be great for scheduling, it can be great for structure, it can be great for consistency, but engagements... And that's great. So that's all very important because you have to have all those things in order to drive engagement as well, but it's quality over quantity in a lot of cases. Like you tell our clients all the time that around social media nowadays. So it's not about posting every single day. It sometimes can be about posting three or four times a week as long as the quality of those posts is good. So you don't want to push out a bunch of garbage posts either. So if you have to post a little less often in order to make sure that your individual staff has time to spend on those four or five quality posts to make them more engaging, more emotional, make them feel more real, that's really more impactful than posting seven times a week and have them be rote and feel robotic and not real and feel like stock images and not really feel like it's really connecting with people meaningfully.
Sophie Bawany:
And a hundred percent. To tag onto that, when it comes to structure, automation is perfect. AI, it's a perfect use of ChatGPT to have it create a schedule for you. You can have ChatGPT make your schedule, but then actually creating the content, you still need those people for the emotions. So it'll look at, you can say, "Hey, analyze social media SEO, best time for me to post based on my industry." Perfect, perfect prompt. And ChatGPT will say, "Okay, Wednesdays, Tuesdays, and avoid Fridays." Okay, now you have an idea of how your schedule is going to look for the month. Now you can go about creating the content. So automation is fantastic and it's a great way to use AI.
Meredith Olmstead:
Nice. And I like the idea of being transparent about using AI, so even making a joke about it or being funny about it. So we have a client that actually has an avatar that talks or whatever. Obviously that's not real. That's not like a real person. So it's kind of funny, they actually almost are leaning into the idea that this is a fake person giving financial advice in a way. It's almost like a shtick, if you will, or like a, oh, so your financial advice is coming from this avatar AI person. We can make it kind of feel almost robotic, almost so robotic that it's a joke in a way, but then make the funny stuff come from the real people in more of a human kind of way.
Sophie Bawany:
And also when you're talking about AI, it's all about, social media and content creation is all about how you frame the story, it's storytelling. So you can take, almost like PR, you can take a negative or something that's scary and spin it to where it's positive. So if you say, "Hey, we're on board with smart content and using AI because we want to get rid of the mundane stuff so we can connect with you, we can spend more time creating relationships with you," and you turn it back to how you're using it as an efficiency tool, and you're saving that capacity to put back into the community, putting it back into product services, that's a great way to be transparent and be like, "Yeah, we're using AI, but don't worry, it's so that we can be there for you as people, and we're not replacing our services with robots." People would love it and it would resonate.
Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, that makes sense. Awesome. Well, thank you, Sophia. I appreciate. This is great, great tips for really not even just... So you're not going to whitewash it, you're not going to pretend like you're not doing it, you're not going to try to put it behind the scenes. Really lean into the idea that, hey, this is going to make what we're doing better. It's going to make you more efficient. It's going to make what you're doing more real because you can take some of the monotony out of it and really lean into the real part of it and really lean into the authentic part of it and put real yourself into the parts that matter the most. So I love this idea. I love these tips. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. If you're interested in learning more about digital marketing for your bank or credit union, please visit us at figrow.com. We have lots of other great podcasts, blogs, case studies. So we'd love for you to come over and visit us and join our list. And otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.