Using automation in your content marketing cycle might feel daunting, but its functionality is endless. You can create, personalize, and scale content while improving SEO, managing campaigns, and analyzing metrics. As a result, content marketing is easier, faster, and more effective. But when it comes to authenticity, content marketers must be cautious when using content automation or risk losing consumer trust. Here are some tips to help guide you as you work to find the balance between automation and authenticity.
Identify where “human touch” matters most
Automation is simply a tool to assist humans, not to replace them. Consumers trust marketers will rely on humans where it truly matters, including when creativity, empathy, and personal engagement are needed.
One only needs to look at the fiasco with the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA), which fired four employees after they unionized and replaced them with an AI chatbot. The automated service began offering harmful advice, presenting a legal liability to the organization and a massive loss of trust from users and the public in general.
Because every brand, company, and organization is unique, your team must determine where human intuition, imagination, and interaction are necessary to maintain credibility and trust. Here are a few areas in which automation alone won’t be enough:
Brand guidelines
While artificial intelligence can scan your content to ensure it aligns with your brand’s values, voice, and style, you’ll want humans to establish these brand guidelines. After all, you need an accurate summary of what your organization stands for, against which your automated tools can compare. Non-human intelligence may not always fully understand the nuances of your values—such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Original content
Automation—including AI-provided services—can be a godsend that saves time, money, and embarrassment when used correctly. But rely on it for brainstorming, rough drafts, and final reviews, leaving the true crafting and storytelling to your team. Filling in the blanks with personal insights, anecdotes, unique humor, and first-hand expertise will resonate better with audiences than generic content created from a machine-generated amalgamation of words and ideas.
Community engagement
Automation is indispensable when analyzing data and preferences from your audiences, but crunching numbers and evaluating sentiment doesn’t always translate to understanding. Questions and comments on content are best served by a human response whenever possible. Nothing irritates consumers like irrelevant canned answers to specific questions. Using automation when true relationship-building is expected can not only deter prospects but also turn them into detractors.
Relationship building
Content marketing automation can help connect customers to your brand with the help of technology but it takes human interaction to develop relationships and deepen trust. The same is true when building partnerships with content creators. While automation can certainly be used for tasks like influencer discovery, onboarding, tracking, and payment, leave more intimate interactions to humans. Initial collaboration offers and negotiations, compliments and other feedback, and other outreach designed to make creators feel special deserve a personal touch or risk feeling impersonal and devalued.
Where automation shines
Knowing where your marketing team members need to be hands-on, you can automate manual processes to save time, money, and headaches. Oversight aside, here are some content marketing tasks that can be taken off your team’s plate:
Researching keywords and trends
Armed with your SEO goals, you can generate keywords and analyze their metrics to optimize your content strategy. The same is true for industry trends and how your competition incorporates these popular topics in their marketing efforts.
Content and influencer brief drafting
Feed prompts to AI and let it generate ideas and drafts for content and briefs for influencer marketing campaigns.
Segmenting audiences
To help ensure that your customers and leads receive only hyper-relevant messaging, turn to automated audience segmentation to deliver your content via email, text, or social media.
Scheduling content posts and distribution
No more manually inputting dates, times, and channels for content distribution. These tasks can be automated through a content marketing platform.
Tracking campaign performance
Of all the ways automation shines, its ability to track and analyze campaign performance is near the top for most content marketers.
Scoring leads
Where are your prospects on their customer journeys? Automate the task of ranking prospects to help get a more accurate feel for their readiness to make a purchase or take other action.
Nurturing leads through drip campaigns
With your prospects and customers organized by their demographics, behaviors, and interests, you can set up workflows that automatically send content through a drip feed.
Triggering emails and text messages
Automate transactional emails, such as those sent for abandoned shopping carts or webinar registration, to help drive action based on specific conditions.
Creating a balance between authenticity and automation will probably take some practice. But content marketers who are determined to learn from their mistakes—and successes—can adapt their efforts to earn the respect and trust of consumers.
