Human vs. Robot: How to Balance Automation with Creation in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Here’s the frustrating Catch-22 snaring small business owners: too much automation is bad for conversion, but too little automation means a lot of money, time, and stress.

So, where exactly do you draw the line? How can you decide what’s the proper amount of automation you should use to keep your marketing personal? And, most importantly, how can you avoid sounding like HAL 9000 when interacting with customers?

Don’t panic yet! There is a way! In this article, we’ll share the steps to balancing automation with creation effectively in a digital marketing strategy.

Let’s get to it.

Why You Need Both Automation and Creation

Some things just naturally go together, like Batman and Robin, salt and pepper, and Netflix and chill. Automation and creation are one of those things. While automation makes your job easier, creation makes it more exciting.

Creating content for your small business’s blog or your social media channels is a creative process. Through these mediums, brands get the chance to show off their personalities, to interact with prospects, and to be authentic. Creative content helps businesses nurture relationships, establish themselves as leaders, and improve ROI.

But, creation takes time. A well-researched, compelling article doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to research the topic, the audience’s pain points, and to come up with a fresh and unique perspective. Notifications, comments, reviews, re-tweets, and so on demand your attention, as well. If you don’t possess some mad time management skills, it’s easy to get pulled in the uproar and ignore important tasks.

That’s where automation comes into play.

Automating your online marketing strategy can help you get more done in less time and without the stress. Digital media requires a lot of energy. From creating and publishing articles and scheduling social media posts to managing campaigns, there are days when you feel like you can’t get a spare second. Automating things like promotions or posts can give you a break and free up some time to focus on other tasks, such as generating new leads or growing your reputation.

While most small business owners agree that automation is generally great for them, many fear that they will lose the human touch when they begin to automate. But, here’s the hard truth: if you sound like a robot, it isn’t the fault of automation. In most cases, it’s the fault of bad marketing. Too often, businesses don’t even take the time to engage with customers in a warm and personal way. Their messages usually start with “Hello Client #6843” followed by a generic message.

Savvy marketers know how to play both sides of the coin, balancing automation with creation in such a way that they are cutting work in half without jeopardizing their human voice.

Here’s how:

5 Tips for Balancing Automation with Creation

1. Don’t Remove the Human Factor

Many small business owners would love to automate their online marketing and never have to care about it again. Unfortunately, marketing automation doesn’t work like that. You can’t set it once and forget about it for the rest of your life (although you have to admit, that would be pretty awesome.)

Although a large portion of your digital marketing can be automated, it is important to keep a human eye involved. That way, you can avoid reputation nightmares like the one the New England Patriots faced whet their automated software retweeted a racial comment.

2. Follow Current Events

Social media has become the main news source for many people around the globe. You can rest assured that your small business will face some serious damage if your automation system chirps happily while disaster unfolds. Just imagine a company tweeting about their half-off promotion while a tornado is devastating the region.

While it can be challenging to keep up with daily news, make sure you cut out automation when something important happens. However, you can use it if the content you create is related to the event in a sensitive and intelligent way.

3. Build Relationships

Some companies send automated messages to people who follow them on social media. While this might seem like a great way to connect with fans, it’s not. In fact, more often than not, prospects tune out these messages and receive them with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, who would feel compelled to answer to a generic message like “Thank you for following me.”

If you really want to build relationships through automated messages, focus instead on answering social media comments and questions. Put your creative hat on and give your prospects the well-researched, comprehensive answers they were looking for.

4. When You Need to Reach Out, Do It Personally

There are a lot of examples of companies famously failing at automation by sending automatic responses to users trying to engage in serious conversation. One example is Progressive Car Insurance, who, to avoid paying to the family of a woman killed by an underinsured driver, tried to side with the culprit. For every mention of the case on Twitter, the company sent auto-tweets that felt impersonal and fake.

The first thing you might want to establish before implementing automation is when you need to automate and when to reach out personally and creatively.

5. Stay Consistent

If you don’t automate, you’re limited to posting content when you are at work. That can lead to content overloads that can overwhelm and turn off your prospects. With automation, you can stay consistent and distribute your valuable content evenly. That way, not only that you can ensure your content won’t be skipped over, but you will also reduce the risk of being perceived as a spammy company. Not to mention that, when content distribution is automated, you have more time to brainstorm and create more amazing articles and social media posts.

Automation and creation are like the horse and carriage – they exist individually, but they work better together. Hopefully, this article will help you put your small business’ creation efforts on autopilot.