What Not to Automate In Marketing and Sales

What tasks should not be automated in marketing and sales? Marketing automation is a great tool to help automate some tasks (check out our blog about automation), but it's still important to have a human touch involved in your marketing and sales process. Human Connection is a precious component of marketing as well as sales. A person has the power to empathize with customers while providing them with solutions they need - something technology can never do. The human connection allows for more personalized interactions, which will ultimately lead to customer satisfaction and retention! Some items that can't be automated are editing, research, prospect communication, client management, content review, and negative response review. Let's look at why these tasks shouldn't be automated.

We're going to look at editing and content review first. There are programs out there, like Grammarly, that make editing simple. However, sometimes their suggestions are wrong, don't match the tone of voice you're going for, or it might actually miss a suggestion. So although you can use tools like that, you still want a set of human eyes to read through anything you're writing before you post it. The same thing goes for content review. If you're using software that will automatically generate content, great. But you still want someone to look at the content before it goes up. We all know technology is great until it doesn't work, and that's why we don't want to automate our editing and review.

Research is also something that can't be automated. If we're honest, we don't even have a way to automate research. That's mainly because when you're doing research, you need to see for yourself what that research pulls up. So sometimes, those bots scanning the internet for the keyword you entered will pull up a site or article that isn't at all what you were looking for because the person who wrote the article tagged it with a keyword that doesn't fit what they wrote about.

Our final topics can also all go together. Prospect communication, client management, and negative response review. People like things personalized. Look at all of the online stores that offer personalized items. Your prospects and clients are the same. They want to know a person is going to be there for them when they need it. Don't automate things that still need your personality and empathy to show through. Negative responses should also have someone respond personally. Showing how you handle a negative review is sometimes better than getting a lot of positive reviews. Not only will this show the person who left you the review that you care, but it shows your current and potential customers that you care.

The human connection can be the deciding factor in whether or not a company will succeed. Human contact is also where you build your reputation as an expert, so it's important to keep refining your skills instead of automating all of them. If you don't have time for all of this, we said don't automate, not don't outsource. Boundless Media would be happy to help with all of your projects that you don't or do want automated!