As a marketer, it’s your job to create and curate social media content that sets your brand apart. However, doing so can be incredibly time-consuming. While automation tools can’t replace the creative minds on your team, they can relinquish your team from random processes, allowing more time for tasks that require their attention.
Automation tools can cut the time spent on schedule and publishing content, by streamlining the whole process. These tools can shave off hours of the work day spent planning and rearranging content. Not to mention, automating can help cut down on the chances of human error significantly.
Unfortunately, while the benefits of incorporating these tools into your team workflow are evident, there is still a lot of hesitation towards implementing automation tools due to many myths that lead marketers to believe that they could be more troublesome than helpful.
In 2017, if you want to defeat your competition, you don’t time to do the small rudimentary tasks yourself, which is why it’s time to debunk these myths surrounding automation tools so that your team can benefit from a faster, streamlined content workflow.
Myth #1: Automation Tools Are Too Expensive
When it comes to marketing, staying on budget can be crucial. However, as the old saying goes, it takes money to make money – or in this case, to build an audience. Automation tools can increase your content’s reach and improve your leads.
Reportedly,
80% of marketers saw an increase in leads using automation tools while
77% saw an increase in conversions. On average, marketing automation tools cost $20/month, which for an increase of 77% in conversions isn’t a bad trade-off, especially if that increase continues to grow steadily over the coming months.
Myth #2: Automation Produces Duller Posts
When many people think about content automation, they often associated it with a decrease in effort on the content creator’s part in favor of publishing content at a faster, more consistent rate.
However, this couldn’t be farther from reality when using automation tools. These tools don’t replace you as the content creator. Au contraire! What automation tools do accomplish is speeding up the mundane projects like scheduling, publishing, etc, so that you can have more time to be creative, collaborate with clients, and analyze your efforts.
Pizza Hut, for example, crafted superb social media ads and then, rather than having to monitor the ads to see which performed better, their automation tools maintained and monitored the competition, ensuring everything was published successfully.
“We can now identify our customers’ responsiveness to different product segments and their repeat purchase tendencies, enabling us to better design our customer engagement and product/launch campaigns, driving incremental sales and better marketing ROI.”
– Juliana Lim, the senior marketing director at Pizza Hut
With automation, you can even segment and keep track of your audiences. Just ask the
66% of marketers that admitted automation “enhanced” targeting with a
61% chance of increased efficiency.
Myth #3: Automation Relinquishes Your Control
One of a marketer’s worst fears is to post content that elicits a negative response from the intended audience. In the past, automated responses and automated content have gotten companies in trouble for being insensitive or robotic. Where customer service is involved, you should avoid automated responses unless they can accurately address customer issues.
In regards to social media scheduling, however, automation tools allow you as the creator to retain complete control over what goes live and when. Automation allows you to stay ahead of the game by publishing, monitoring activity, and notifying you if something doesn’t go as planned.
After all, when it comes to maintaining any social media strategy, it’s always best to have a plan in place. By implementing automation tools, your team can increase the ROI of your content as well as strengthen the brand-consumer relationship.
Ready to automate your social media content creation and approval workflow? GAIN provides a team-friendly platform that consolidates and streamlines workflows of any size.
Try a free demo and find out how automation can help your team.
