We live in an age of automation.
Ever since the spinning jenny first came for the cottage spinners in 18th century England we’ve spent 250 years looking over our shoulder for the machines about to replace us.
And in the information age (that’s two ‘ages’ and counting - forgive me) there’s always an app, a site or a Saas platform that can do the job for you: quicker, cheaper, and without the messy business of having to deal with (urgh) people.
It would be foolish in the extreme to deny that these machines can be helpful. I’m using about four of them right now.
But nevertheless it pays to be careful and thoughtful as we navigate the world of marketing-products-that-automate-stuff.
Here’s why.
The Human Touch
Machines are great at doing mindless repetitive things. Unfortunately, they absolutely suck when it comes to doing anything that involves what you or I might call thinking.
And that, of course, describes most marketing. No laughter at the back please.
At this point someone somewhere will inevitably start wittering on about artificial intelligence.
“What Mr Farrell fails to account for is our platform’s innovative AI that enables us to categorise leads more accurately by…”
Repeat after me: “until proven otherwise artificial intelligence does not exist, and certainly does not exist in marketing platforms retailing for $19 a month (pro edition $99)”
I’m not even talking about creative work here, because most of us understand computers aren’t very good at creative work.
I’m talking about the bread-and-butter of B2B marketing processes. The answers to questions like:
“Is this a good lead or a bad lead?”
“What sort of email should I send to this lead?”
“When is the right time to next make contact with this lead?”
And so on.
I’ve worked in marketing for over 25 years (insert link to Dignitas clinic here) and I can tell you right now machines are not good at answering these questions.
And yet… marketing departments all over the world delegate these tasks to machines without a second thought.
In doing so they actively undermine their sales and marketing processes by making dozens of terrible decisions every day.
And these are the worst kind of terrible decisions, the kind that nobody sees unless they go looking.
Why?
The Marketing Automation Complex
There’s one big reason why. There’s a huge amount of people and organisations who desperately want us to buy something they have to sell.
It’s their job to tell us humans aren’t very good at making decisions because they don’t sell humans.
Let’s call these people the marketing automation complex. There’s nothing wrong with what they do. But we should be clear about their motivation and on that basis be careful enough about believing anything they say.
Instead, let’s adopt a rule of our own:
Any marketing decision or action should be made by the most senior and experienced person, until that becomes no longer possible.
That makes total sense. If I want to make a call about whether a set of details that comes into my business may or may not be a ‘good lead’, then a senior, experienced sales or marketing professional is going to make a better call than any machine - or at least they will do in 99% of cases.
So learn to ignore the siren calls of the marketing automation complex and follow your own common sense.
The Danger Of Copying “Success”
There’s another reason why we blindly automate what can be done by hand: we look at successful businesses and adopt their processes without question.
In other words, if Salesforce or Amazon does something, then it must be the right thing to do. So if they send nurture emails to potential customers, that must be a good approach for my start up.
But that gets the logic entirely the wrong way around.
As a rule, successful businesses are large businesses. And large businesses have to make all sorts of compromises to deal with scale.
If you are dealing with millions of customers like Amazon, do you have time to personally craft an email to each one? No.
But how many customers and prospects does a typical tech start-up have? Not quite so many.
Therefore, don’t make compromises until you need to: until scale forces you to. Don't build complicated automated processes to perform jobs worse than you could do them yourself without a huge investment of time.
Remember the rule above and commit it to memory. If you do that, you’ll make smarter decisions, deliver better marketing campaigns, and grow as a result.
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