Is Your Marketing Human Enough? | Social Joey

After reading that headline, you might be saying, “Well, of course, our marketing is human.” You may well be right.

In a world where everything is becoming increasingly automated—and some industries are even being overrun by robots—it’s a question worth exploring.

While there are certainly some aspects of your marketing efforts that can be automated, marketing isn’t something that you can “set and forget.” You need constant human input to make it work well.

How can you strike the right balance between automating some aspects of your marketing to streamline your work and making it human? That’s what we’re exploring in today’s blog! Read on for our take.

Humanizing Marketing in an Age of Automation

There’s a benefit to setting up some level of automation with content marketing. In social media marketing, for example, you may utilize a system that allows you to schedule out your social media posts. Then you can set those and forget them.

Or you may create blogs and then set your CMS up to publish those on specific dates spaced out over time.

Both of those reflect some level of automation that makes your job a little easier.

But your best bet is to keep most aspects of your marketing in human hands. That means combining these automated tools with the work of people, both within your organization and through outside vendors like Social Joey.

In the work we do every day, we utilize a customized platform that integrates with social media platforms to publish our content. We create posts based on our clients’ goals, needs, and audience, then they are either scheduled for a specific date or published over time.

In that way, our clients benefit from the best of both worlds—they’re having their content automated, taking it off their everyday to-do list, and they’re gaining that invaluable human touch.

But that human touch is very important. Marketing is a field that needs consistent revisiting and tweaking, based on how your target audience is evolving.

That means someone needs to have an eye on how your content is performing, whether you’re hitting your ROI goals, and other similar factors. Then you need to be able to adapt your marketing efforts to align with any necessary changes.

If you’re working with an outside vendor, that means partnering with an organization that will essentially serve as an extension of your marketing team. You need a partner that will come to understand your needs and goals innately—and create and implement solutions accordingly.

That’s the human touch.

The Other Meaning of “Human” Marketing

But the human touch goes beyond simply having humans in consistent touch with your marketing efforts. It’s also about making your marketing appealing to the humans in your audience.

While it can be easy to fall into a habit where you’re constantly promoting your brand and your service offerings, your audience is looking for something bigger. People want to see content that’s warmer, friendly, approachable—and helpful.

That means going beyond calls to action and incorporating other types of content to appeal to your customers and potential customers. And that is important whether you’re speaking to a B2B or B2C audience.

As Leela Srinivasan with SurveyMonkey once said, marketing is “really all B2H—Business to Humans—whether you are buying a product on behalf of your organization for enterprise usage or you’re buying it for yourself and a teammate in a startup to use.”

So, in a world dominated by algorithmic efficiency, how can you make your marketing more human? Try these tips:

Share What You Value

There’s a way to carefully strike a balance between talking too much about your business and sharing what makes you unique. Part of that, especially in today’s world, includes talking about your values and what you stand for.

This can include everything from your franchise’s mission and a values or purpose statement to standing up for causes and issues you believe in as an organization.

Taking a stand truly has a purpose in marketing today, and it’s an important part of humanizing your marketing.

That doesn’t mean making your business political, but it does mean being authentic with your customers.

Don’t Forget Who You Are

We talked earlier about how marketing needs a human touch because it needs to be adjusted regularly. But while tweaking is a natural part of the marketing process, it’s important to not leave your brand behind.

There’s something to be said for consistency. And let’s be honest: Part of building up a customer base through your marketing content is creating consistency—consistency in how often you post, what you post, and how you post.

So while you will need to make adjustments, keep your voice and tone steady.

Cultivate Your Community

If we could only give you one tip, this would be it! We’re all about building a community through content.

Ultimately, when you’re trying to carve out space in a world of competitors, becoming a part of your local community is essential. You do that in a number of ways, including engaging with others out in the community. But content can play a key role.

You want to incorporate “hyperlocal” content in your posts. That means including posts related to your community, both by highlighting your franchise’s activities in the community and your team and by posting about events, news, and other community happenings that are potentially interesting to your audience.

Talk With Your Audience

When you’re operating a business, relying on assumptions can be incredibly expensive, both in time and money. To truly meet your customers’ needs and expectations, it’s best to go straight to the source.

Engage with your customers and others in the community to gauge what they truly need and want. What are their pain points? What solutions are they searching for? How could you make their lives easier?

Don’t just ask for the feedback—listen! And better yet, ask first, listen second and create your solutions last.

When you truly have conversations with your audience and adjust your content and offerings accordingly, that’s as human as it gets.

Make Your Content Engaging

In a 2019 study, Salesforce found that more than 50% of consumers believe companies are impersonal. That’s not a winning move, y’all.

Impersonal content and outreach to the community is a huge blunder when it comes to content marketing—and especially social media marketing.

You need to put a little heart into it.

Your content should be filled with a variety of resources, including images, videos, memes and articles from outside resources. Above all, your content should be interesting.

Every individual person is looking for something a little different on social media. That’s true even of people within a specific persona. But there’s one single thing that everyone wants—they’re looking for something to engage with.

How do you make content engaging? There’s no single formula for success, but content that’s useful, helpful, and relevant to your audience is where you should begin.

Your human side needs to appeal to your audience’s human side.

When you’re ready to make your marketing a little more human, we’re ready and waiting to help! Get in touch today to put together a customized strategy to reach your marketing goals.