**Marketers love productivity gains but hate when their automated messages feel impersonal. Here's a way to strike a better balance.**
Andrew Davis is here to “toon-up” the way marketers tackle their toughest challenges. In Drewdles, he’s sketching out the issues and drawing exciting conclusions – all you need to do is connect the dots for your brand.
By Andrew Davis
Marketers, we find ourselves in a quandary: We want to automate as much of our marketing as possible, yet we don't want any of it to feel automated.
We'd love to be able to just “set it and forget it.” But great content marketing is designed to build relationships (which drive revenue). And, unfortunately, automating our communications can make that goal harder – not easier – to achieve.
Sure, there are tools designed to automate posts on our social media profiles, and even the direct messages we send through LinkedIn. We can also choose to automate our most valuable interactions – such as our welcome emails and thank you notes.
But when we do that, the resulting messages don’t feel authentic. They also lack personalization – a critical factor in relationship-building and revenue generation. In fact, research from McKinsey found that companies with the fastest rate of revenue growth were more likely to prioritize personalization in their communications.
So, as much as we may want to put tasks on autopilot to increase productivity, we wonder how much our relationship-building efforts might suffer if we do.
I've spent the last three months wrestling with that question, and it turns out I'm not the only one.
Even five years ago, 43% of marketers stated that optimizing productivity is the most important objective of a marketing automation strategy.
It's not hard to understand why we need to optimize our time. The average marketer spends 1.25 days each week on non-core tasks, according to brand-new research from Airtable.
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