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How to Provide a Human Touch in the Robotic World of Marketing Automation

Posted by John Aikin
on April 17, 2017

Inbound marketing essentially boils down to the practice of using your website and online presence to drive qualified traffic, convert them into leads, and nurture them into prime closing opportunities. It is all about how you can use content and social media to bring new visitors and, ultimately, customers to your business digitally. Today’s automated marketing tools, like HubSpot, are designed to make digital marketing easier; however, they often seem at odds with the concept of genuine social communication. How can something be both automated and personal? Robotic and human?

Moving your visitors through the funnel and closing on them is what the game is all about, but how are you going to maintain an authentic experience between your business and your many different customers every step of the way? Your automation software should serve as a vessel for you to deliver that genuine communication, and not just a vehicle for your content to simply exist on its own.

In this article, we’ll break down how you can make the most of marketing automation software while keeping your messaging authentic and relevant to the individuals who read your content. Learn how to analyze your messaging to see what works, to keep consistent across all properties, and to toss everything out the window when it’s not working.

Track and Analyze

Your messaging shouldn’t just be a bunch of “Buy Now!” buttons thrown all over the place. In today’s market, it’s imperative that you take the time to understand just how your audience is interacting with you. When you first set out on your marketing journey, you’re really only taking shots in the dark at the kinds of content your audience will enjoy. If you fill up your automation software with content that isn’t going to connect and then just leave it alone to do its thing, don’t be surprised when you’re not getting the clicks and readership you’re hoping for.

From a lead standpoint, not every site visitor or blog reader is necessarily a prospect, and not all of them will be interested in what you’re selling. This is all part of the process. Digital marketing workflows are built to separate leads from your broader audience. People love free content, especially if it’s valuable. This is how you get most folks to even notice your existence. What you do with them from there is all about tracking their journey through your content and analyzing what kinds of information they’re looking for and then intentionally providing relevant content around those things.

Your leads may come from different places, and the kinds of messaging they respond to can differ among them. Separate your audiences and speak to them uniquely. A/B testing your content titles and their presentation allows you to better understand the messaging tactics your audience better responds to. Then, it’s all about mixing it up, gauging reactions, and optimizing your other content to match with those working messages.

Maintain Consistency Across All Facets

Imagine you meet somebody at a bar. They’re clean, well-dressed, intelligent, and funny. You exchange numbers and decide to get a coffee during the week. When you get to the coffee shop, you’re looking around for that same person; however, they’re sitting at a table with messy hair and
disheveled clothing. They’re grumpy and, frankly, they have a strange smell coming off of them. Throws you for a loop, right?

You don’t expect someone close to you to be a completely different person each time you see them. In the same vein, your consumers aren’t expecting you to be different with each interaction they have with you. People don’t simply change, so why would your brand? Consistency starts with a clear-cut brand and messaging standards. This is particularly important if you’re following our advice above about separating your messaging and making it appropriate for different types of audience; maybe the subjects you write about change from persona to persona, but that doesn’t mean your key messaging and your voice should be different.

Know your audience, know your products’ place in the world, and
work to implement those standards into every facet of your messaging, even when
 you’re making pre-b
aked messages for your automated marketing. Do this by creating a working brand style guide that details all physical elements of your brand—logo, color schemes, typography, kinds of graphics and imagery, layouts schemes, and more. In everything you do, every interaction, your messaging needs to adhere to those style guide standards. Doing so provides a seamless set of experiences that all work to promote the same look and feel for your company. That consistency will translate into customer comfortability with your brand.

Be Ready to Upheave Everything

When you’re looking down a direct path for rapid growth, you’ve gotta understand this important thing: people change. Rapid growth will only be as good as your ability to shift and mend your strategies to fit the ever changing expectations and desires of the consumer. Keep a close eye on your analytics to gauge how readers are accessing and moving through your content, but also to understand what is and isn’t working. Sometimes, what seem like the best marketing strategies end up being a bust, and that’s okay. Just be ready to pivot your strategy and move on with something different. Even a working campaign will eventually lose its luster and you’ll start seeing a drop in click rates and readership. Do you have a back-up strategy ready to launch when your current one starts going down hill? Your marketing plan might be doing wonders for your growth today, but things will be different sometime in the future, are you ready to make sure your brand and messaging can upheave and pivot as needed?

A one-size-fits-all kind of marketing solution isn’t going to cut it tomorrow. When you can take into consideration the ever-changing ways people are accessing your content, the different kinds of information they’re looking for, and how they see your product within their lives, you’re able to see how you need to pivot to better suit them.

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