Have you ever had one of those days where you sitting at your desk, completely lost in the thought of all the tasks you want to accomplish for the day? All you really think about is getting some work done. But, a friendly face walks by and asks you to get lunch with the others. The stickler inside you always screams into your conscious, “What the hell are you thinking?! You don’t have time for fun! Get back to work!”
Of course, we always get to calm that voice down and I went out for that lunch and I was sure glad I did so. I ended up having an extremely in-depth conversation about marketing and automation with some of my peers. For a while now I have been adamant about the fact that Marketing cannot be automated. This has caused me to have sort of a pessimistic, negative stand when it comes to people discussing the advancement of technology and data.
Good Automation and Bad Automation
It is increasingly in vogue in entrepreneurship and business to ensure that you maximize your time. This means outsourcing tasks and automating different aspects of your business. However, I think I’ve been too hard on my stance. I was talking to a co-founder of Novvum, a mobile and web application development boutique based out of the OC, and we were discussing the advent of data and how coding has allowed us to be able to streamline many processes that would otherwise add more to our day-to-day work. I shared with him my general view about how automation and marketing didn’t click for me.
He mentioned something though. He said, “Jason, there is good automation and there is bad automation.”
Sounds relatively simple, but it really shook me in how I was thinking. I think somewhere I forgot that there was a spectrum. It wasn’t black and white.
Automation’s Relationship with Marketing
The reason why I am bringing up this topic is to remind you guys, that when it comes to marketing, yes we can automate things, but there is a difference between automation and giving complete control away. Automation is great, but it cannot carry your marketing efforts. It can make things like scheduling and publishing easier, but it cannot solve problems like creating great content or establishing strong relationships with other brands, businesses and your community.
The purpose of automation is to make our lives easier. It helps take care of frustrating manual labor that would otherwise take too many hours from our day. Automation is therefore a great tool to help boost you to focus on bigger problems, but it should never be used to a point where you ignore what is important. Ensure that you take care of things that are important to digital marketing success including things like customer service, community building and influencer outreach. So I leave with this last question.
Are the things you’ve automated making your life easier? But how about your effectiveness?
