If you’re just starting your search on online marketing automation, you’ve probably come across a couple or more articles that tell you what marketing automation is and how you can use it for your business or online marketing activities.  Some of those articles may include “What is marketing automation?” on HubSpot or Marketo (both companies have software that allows marketing automation for certain aspects of online marketing).

The purpose of this article is to share with you another angle of marketing automation; one that aims to make sure you remember that although you can automate your online marketing activities, and leverage software to gather data that can help you improve your lead generating activities and content distribution, that you don’t forget the human component.

One of the reasons you’re looking into marketing automation is probably the fact that you have a limited amount of time.  When you automate your social media posts for example, or your email marketing campaigns, this allows you to have a consistent presence while freeing up your time to do other things.  What you don’t want to do though, is place everything on autopilot and forget to interact with your community as a real person.

I say this because I see it time and time again that businesses who go the autopilot route forget to actually pay attention and also include that personalized touch, which shows the person following them or visiting their site that there’s an actual person there.  For example, the automated Twitter thank you for following messages.  I don’t know about you, but every time I get one of those I cringe.  I don’t even bother replying because you can tell that it’s something generated by a machine, especially when you reply back and get no response.

Due to the array of areas that online marketing involves and that can be automated, there will be additional posts on the topic to take a look at each segment in a bit more depth.  For now, this was to help get the conversation started.

If any questions have come about already, shoot them over; and in the meantime, thanks for stopping by!  Have a lovely day 🙂