I’ve been reading a lot about marketing automation recently, and the advances that have taken place over the past few years have been eye opening. Truly, we’ve come a long way, and many in the marketing realm can’t imagine doing their jobs effectively without some sort of automation tool in place.
In my own personal world, it makes me 10 times more effective to have tools that help track a client’s media coverage, for example, rather than doing it “by hand” all the time.
In many ways, marketing automation has followed the path of the assembly line, where machines now tackle 80 percent to 90 percent of the rote work. And because many things in marketing could be considered repetitive, automation is playing a key role in transforming the industry.
But there’s one area where automation just doesn’t make sense to me, and that’s in the area of content creation. I’ve seen the solutions and heard the arguments, but I’m just not buying the fact that this is a function to be automated. The Associated Press clearly disagrees; the news service announced earlier this week that it will begin to produce the majority of its corporate earnings stories through automation technology rather than delegating the task to individual reporters.
I get it. While these articles are important to companies for disclosure, they eat up the valuable time of reporters who could be doing something more meaningful, such a writing about the trends behind the numbers that are shaping a particular industry. But such thinking always leaves out a key ingredient: the human factor. Granted, if the content automation tools are as good as advertised, they should be able to take raw numbers and keywords and turn them into something resembling a story. But an editor—possibly one not familiar with the topic or company—needs to review the content anyway, potentially making significant changes that would have been avoided if a reporter familiar with the company wrote the report. So what time is really being saved?
I’ll make the same argument against automating marketing content. I recently heard from one company touting you could “put your blog on cruise control” with automated content. Why on earth would you want to do that? Your blog, your white papers, your social media accounts—these are your connection with your audience, your customers, your partners. Why would you want a computer taking over that content?
The simple answer: If you want your content to be personalized and focused on your customers, you don’t want to give up control. People read blogs and white papers to get more information about your company and its solutions, and see if it’s one they want to do business with. People follow companies on social media because they find their content helpful, unique or downright funny. If you consider any of this a rote task, you’re looking at it the wrong way.
Content stirs emotion, and that’s something you’ll never get from content that is automated. A trusted partner that knows and understands your goals, themes and key messages? Yes. A computer? Never. That connection with your customers can’t—and shouldn’t—be replaced.