Every day, marketers perform rote tasks that don’t take full advantage of their creative skills, things like gathering data from a bunch of different social media accounts, publishing content multiple times per day, and trying to come up with alt text for images or hashtags for posts. These rote tasks take time away from developing strategy, developing a brand voice, building campaigns, creating content that resonates with customers, and nurturing customer relationships. As more platforms provide more ways of automating more tasks, it’s important to know how and how not to use them.

Uses of Automation

Scheduling social media and blog posts. Once you’ve developed a brand voice and a marketing campaign, it’s easier to create all of your content at once than to come up with a new caption for an Instagram post every day. Instead of writing and publishing each post individually, write a batch ahead of time and use automation tools to schedule posts. Scheduling automations also make it easy to recycle evergreen content such as seasonal and holiday posts, or outdated posts that have suddenly become relevant again.

Entering accounts into email sequences. With a smart CRM, you can create all kinds of automation workflows. One of the more useful workflows involves entering different customers into different email sequences based on different actions. For example, you can set up workflow to send a welcome email to visitors to your website the first time they enter their email address on the site, a promotional email to visitors who return but haven’t purchased anything, and information about requesting a quote to visitors who frequently visit your catalog or product pages. Doing this manually would take up hours of your day, or would require a whole team of people just monitoring website analytics, depending on how much traffic your website gets.

Generating hashtags and meta descriptions. Coming up with the right hashtag for a social media post or meta description for a webpage is as much science as art, especially with Instagram posts now showing up in Google search results. Automation tools can help generate relevant hashtags based on the content of your captions.

Generating alt text. Alt text makes visual content accessible to visually impaired people or anyone who uses a screen reader. There are guidelines for writing good alt text, but it’s not always easy. If you’re stuck for a decent description, some social media automation software includes tools for generating alt text. Just make sure to check that the generated output is accurate.

Connecting accounts. Instead of publishing the same content separately across all of your social media accounts, use automation to connect all of your accounts. Some software also allows you to pull analytics from all of your different accounts into one central location, making it easier to analyze and act on that data.

Automating rote responses. Automation tools let you automatically respond to the kinds of questions for which there is just one answer. Auto-replies are also helpful for directing followers to an FAQ or to let them know that a person will provide a more detailed response when available. 

Limits of Automation

There are also tools that automate the creation of content (image and text generators), but be careful with these. Marketing is communication, and while generated words and images seem like communication, they lack the context, care, nuance, critical thinking, and voice that only a human being can truly understand. As machine-generated text starts filling up more and more of the internet, a common refrain of frustrated internet users has become, “If you didn’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?” Automate the posting of content, not the creation of content.

The same goes for strategy. While there are tools that will help you develop a social media strategy, these tools do not possess the reasoning ability, contextual knowledge, lived experience, emotional intelligence, or lateral thinking ability necessary to create a social media strategy that aligns with your business strategy, your customers’ needs, and your capabilities. Take the output of these tools with a grain of salt and trust your business instincts and knowledge, as well as the instincts of your marketing team, to provide the x-factor that only the human mind possesses.

Tech-Driven Marketing With a Human Touch

We have experience with a number of marketing automation tools, from straightforward social media management tools like Hootsuite and Missinglettr to feature-rich smart CRM systems like HubSpot and Odoo. We’re here to help create marketing campaigns and content and find the right tools that make your job easier, integrate them into your existing tech stack, and get your message in front of the right customers so you can reach your growth goals.