If you're running a retail shop in Australia, you've probably heard the debate: should you create your social media content yourself, or let AI do it? You should use the best technology available to achieve the best results. The future in retail belongs to retailers who adapt, and our view is backed by one of the most comprehensive advertising experiments ever conducted.
Digital marketing expert Neil Patel recently completed a groundbreaking $US 7 million experiment across 28 businesses that settles this debate once and for all. The winning approach was a strategic combination of both that delivers results better than can be achieved alone.
Neil Patel's $7 Million Experiment: What the Data Shows
Neil Patel is a British-born entrepreneur recognised as one of the world's leading digital marketing authorities. He co-founded Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, leads NP Digital (a global marketing agency), and was named a top entrepreneur under 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under 35 by the United Nations. When someone with his credentials invests $7 million to test a marketing strategy, it's worth paying attention.
His team ran Facebook ads for 28 different businesses over 30 days, testing human-created ads against AI-generated ads.
Here is his video
Round One: Human Specialists vs AI Alone
Professional advertising specialists created 1,709 ad variations, while AI generated 4,041 variations, nearly 2.4 times more content. The human-created ads won 68.3% of the time, and their conversion rates were also higher.
This result makes sense. Humans understand emotion, local context, and what genuinely connects with customers. You know your customers' faces, their questions, and what makes them choose your shop over the big chains. That knowledge is irreplaceable.
One point here: these humans were advertised as skilled in advertising with many years of experience. Most of us are not such people, so I doubt an AI would lose so badly against us.
Round Two: The Game-Changing Hybrid Approach
Here's where it gets interesting. In the experiment, they fed the winning human ads to the AI and asked it to create multiple variations. When they tested these AI variations against the original winning human ads, AI won 75.7% of the time. Conversion rates also improved slightly.
Here, the AI beat the humans by a significant margin.
The Winning Formula: Human-AI-Human
This experiment shows a straightforward three-step process that delivers superior results:
Step One: The Human Strategy
You create the original concept using your local knowledge, customer understanding, and retail experience. This might be a post about a very popular product in your shop. That is easy to get as your POS system tracks which products sell best, which promotions drive traffic, and which customer segments respond to different offers. This data gives you the insights you need to create that crucial first piece of human-directed content.
Step Two: Ask the AI
Feed your concepts to AI tools and ask them for ten (10) versions. Let the AI generate variations with different hooks and adjust the wording for other times of day, etc.
Step Three Human Selection
You review the AI-generated options and pick the best ones. Then test them to see which resonates most with your customers. Your judgment matters because you are there on the spot, measuring the results.
Conclusion
The question isn't "human or AI?" The science is precise: the winning approach combines both.
You can't, and shouldn't, try to outwork a Machine. Does not matter how fast you run, a car will win in speed. The AI here generated almost three times as many advertisement variations as humans. Trying to manually create dozens of social media post variations, as some suggest, isn't realistic or worth it. AI generates more, but as the experiment shows, it needs your direction.
Your Next Step
Ready to transform your social media strategy with the proven human-AI hybrid approach? Click here for how to make a free copy to advertise your shop, and click here for ideas on when to post these advertisements. It's all free.
Written by:
Bernard Zimmermann is the founding director of POS Solutions, a leading point-of-sale system company with 45 years of industry experience, now retired and seeking new opportunities. He consults with various organisations, from small businesses to large retailers and government institutions. Bernard is passionate about helping companies optimise their operations through innovative POS technology and enabling seamless customer experiences through effective software solutions.
