AI can scale marketing—but as Hiper explains, without human context and local nuance, it risks losing the connection that drives customer choice.
As AI takes over the world, there’s a creeping recognition that it’s not a silver bullet. It excels in some areas of automating life and work, but not others. This feeling-out process applies to local marketing & commerce, given the still-unanswered question of where AI’s role should begin and end.
For Hiper Co-founder and president Melissa Telsrow, much of this boils down to a question of where human work carries an irreplaceable essence. Even though some human tasks can be automated through an evolving crop of AI tools, it’s often a question of whether or not they should be.
As background, Hiper helps multi-location brands optimize their local marketing, which is all about balancing centralized marketing support (e.g., franchises) with decentralized and scalable execution (franchisees). The latter is where the magic is, in terms of genuine voices that speak to local markets.
And that brings us back to the human in the loop. One place this applies is to business operators in local communities. Social posts, for instance, need to be in their voices – not that of brand marketing departments. Another place human essence matters is the hands-on agency work that Hiper itself does.
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Applied Judiciously
Taking those factors one at a time and starting with the voice of local operators, this is where multi-location brand marketing can find its edge, says Telsrow. The advantage of local/decentralized execution was framed above as a scalability play… to crowdsource all that work. But it’s also about quality.
For example, empowering franchisees do their own social posts, selfie videos, or other genuine narratives can resonate in local markets. This is critical for franchisees that go up against mom & pops in their markets. They need to align with consumer sensibilities around supporting local businesses.
But the importance of the human in the loop doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t have a place – it just has to be applied judiciously. AI can help a multi-location brand with quality control, as marketing execution by far-flung franchisees can mean unintended consequences and content that deviates from brand standards.
For example, Hiper uses AI for managing online reviews and search optimization, as well as analyzing trends that inform content strategy. But the actual creation is human driven, including a team of content creators that works with local operators to devise authentic, original and community-centric narratives.
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Scale & Sustain
Moving on to the second place that requires primary human execution – hands-on agency work – this is likewise an area where human touch is irreplaceable, says Telsrow. Though aided by AI, Hiper applies nuanced judgment and rigor in areas like reviewing franchisee social posts to ensure on-brand quality.
Conversely, there are areas that Hiper has automated… which frees up its valuable human capital to spend time on higher-order tasks like the above. For example, responding to reviews in the voice of the business – and doing so quickly – has become a key SEO ranking factor, and one that AI is good at.
Hiper’s hands-on agency work also pays dividends in the ways that it works with its clients. One of the core tenets of its value proposition is to be an extension of its brand clients’ marketing teams. As such, it’s an appendage that handles all the headaches of decentralized franchisee quality control.
By insulating brand marketing departments from such headaches, Hiper demonstrates value that’s felt on a daily basis. And to do that effectively requires a balance of automation (to scale) and human interaction (to sustain). The optical formula for this organizational cyborg will remain a moving target.
Hear more from Hiper at Localogy’s L26, April 20-21 in Houston, TX , as Melissa Telsrow takes the stage.
