Best Practices for Merging Human Creativity with Marketing Automation

Intro

Automation has become a game-changer in the world of business and marketing. Think of Google Analytics for search engine optimization (SEO), accelerated mobile pages (AMP) for interactive email marketing, generative AI for efficient content creation, and customer relationship management (CRM) for organized customer interactions.

Automation can ‘automate’ tasks and reduce manual work, thus increasing your marketing campaign’s efficiency, accuracy, and overall productivity. However, one of the potential drawbacks of automation is losing human connections. That's why injecting human touches into automated campaigns is crucial for marketing success.

So how do you strike a balance between the two?

This page shares best practices for merging human creativity with marketing automation. Learn how such an integration can help you optimize marketing campaigns, gain customer loyalty, and ensure business success.

How To Integrate Human Creativity with Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has become widespread in business, showing no signs of stopping or slowing down. The proof is in the numbers:

The global marketing automation market could grow from $5.2 billion in 2022 to $9.5 billion by 2027 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8%.

The pandemic has even boosted the adoption of automated solutions for marketing campaigns by businesses across different industries. The following factors have driven this market growth:

• Business digitalization
• Internet penetration
• Mobile device use

But while marketing automation can help, some customers have started complaining about its lack of human connections. While it improves efficiency and accuracy, marketing automation might produce generic and robotic outputs that can drive customers away.

As such, striking a balance between automation and human approach is key to marketing success. That said, here's how to merge human creativity with marketing automation:

1. Start with Setting Clear Marketing Goals

As with any marketing campaign, the first step to take is to set your goals. Ask yourself: What do I hope to achieve from marketing? Here are some business objectives you might have:

• Increased Brand Awareness: You aim to put your brand in the spotlight right in front of the eyes of your target market.
• Improved Online Visibility: You want to take the top spot of the search engine results pages (SERP) for relevant keywords.
• Boosted Website Traffic: You hope to drive high traffic to your website for more business opportunities.
• Enhanced Customer Engagement: You plan to engage more with potential and existing customers.
• Augmented Lead Generation: You seek to attract more and more prospects to your business.
• Increased Conversion: You aim to convert leads into sales or turn prospects into loyal customers.

With clear goals, you will learn how to balance marketing automation and human resources according to Adrian Iorga, Founder & President at Stairhopper Movers. For example, you can leverage both when offering invoice financing for startups and small businesses. While automation helps you target B2B enterprises, your team of digital marketers will reach out to prospective clients. It's also important to honor data privacy by responding promptly to any DSAR requests.

2. Create Your Buyer Persona and Study the Customer Journey

When implementing marketing campaigns, it’s vital to study your target market to understand their needs. Along with this is to examine your customer journey to learn how to meet their needs in every stage. Here are two concepts to keep in mind:

• Customer Persona: This is an ideal representation of your target market—the customers you’re looking to serve. Develop your customer persona by performing due diligence and examining the needs of your potential customers based on demographics, psychographics, and other factors.
• Customer Journey: This covers all the stages individuals take to become customers—from start to finish. For example, if your e-commerce business offers high-ticket dropshipping products, learn what your customers take, from product inquiry and order placement to product packaging and shipping.

For Leon Huang, CEO at RapidDirect, developing your customer persona and understanding your customer journey lets you maximize the combination of marketing automation and human decision. While automation helps you identify your target customers and track their journey, your team of digital marketers will make sound business decisions.

3. Develop Creative Marketing Strategies

After setting your goals and studying your market, now is the time to develop your creative campaigns. Below are common digital marketing strategies you can implement:

• Search Engine Optimization: SEO involves optimizing your website, producing relevant content, and building links. The ultimate goal is to obtain the top ranking on SERP.
• Pay-per-click (PPC): PPC is a form of paid advertising that lets you display your ads and requires you to pay for every successful click. Like SEO, this marketing strategy also aims to increase online visibility and website traffic.
• Email Marketing: This marketing campaign entails reaching out to both prospective and current customers through emails. You can send newsletters, product updates, industry trends, and other promotional emails.
• Content Marketing: This marketing strategy involves the creation of content pieces, whether valuable articles, product photos, or promotional videos. Setting a world-class content marketing plan is best for meeting your objectives.

Determining the marketing campaign type to implement helps you decide what automated tools to use and what human aspects to consider. For example, you can leverage tools for keyword research, link building, and SEO audit. However, your content creators will be responsible for producing pieces of content.

4. Establish Cross-functional Collaboration

Planning and executing marketing campaigns is a complex process. You cannot entirely entrust your marketing strategies to the use of automation. You must have a team of digital marketers, including the following:

• Outreach Managers: They are responsible for connecting with both prospective and existing customers. They can leverage automated tools for inbox management and generative AI for email content. However, personalizing email messages is best!
• Content Creators: They can be content writers creating blog posts and guest posts, photographers taking product photos, and video creators producing promotional clips. Often, they take advantage of automated tools to accelerate their processes and enhance their outputs.
• Graphic and Web Designers: They are responsible for producing videos and visuals, whether video clips for TikTok and YouTube or product images for Instagram and Facebook. The use of automated tools can aid them in their production processes for efficiency and quality.

5. Personalize Messaging and Customize Experience

When implementing marketing campaigns, it’s easy to rely on automation to generate content and reach customers.

For example, you can use ChatGPT to create articles and publish them on your blog. You can also generate emails and send them directly to your target customers.

But you’ll be surprised why they aren’t working for your business. That is because you should consider two things:

• Personalized Messages: Personalization entails creating relevant content and sending valuable messages to target customers. It’s more than just addressing their names, adding greetings, and talking to them casually. It’s about ensuring the relevance and value of what you offer to these customers.
• Customized Experiences: Personalizing messages seeks to provide customized customer experiences. While you might target customers with the same demographics, their experiences will vary. So, you should customize your marketing approach to each of them. For example, employ effective Arabic brand management if you cater to B2B clients in the Middle East.

6. Monitor, Measure, and Make Changes

Any marketing campaign requires you to track and measure your performance. That allows you to see your progress and make some adjustments when necessary. That’s when you can leverage automation for your audits while you perform the actual monitoring. Take note of the following:

• Track Performance: First, you need to monitor your marketing campaign to see if it works or requires some changes. What’s good is that digital tools for marketing automation can make your task a lot easier and more seamless.
• Set and Measure KPIs: It’s also crucial to define specific metrics for your marketing campaigns, such as SEO ranking, organic traffic, number of backlinks, lead generation rate, and conversion rate. Along with this is to measure your performance based on these critical metrics using automated tools.
• Optimize Strategies: Lastly, you should constantly optimize your marketing strategies. Performance monitoring and measuring allow you to see what works and what needs improvement. That will guide you in making changes and adjustments to your marketing campaigns.

Rob Gold, VP, Marketing Communications at Intermedia, recommends harnessing the power of automation. “Automated tools can help you record, organize, track, measure, and optimize your marketing campaigns. However, your marketing approach and business decisions lie in you as a digital marketer. Therefore, you call the shots!”

Final Words

There’s no denying the power of marketing automation for your business. But integrating human creativity into this technology can even unleash the full potential of your marketing campaigns, whether SEO, PPC, or content marketing.

As such, consider the best practices recommended above for integrating human touches with your automated marketing campaigns. Ultimately, such an integration will help meet your business objectives, from increasing web presence and traffic to boosting your leads and sales!