Consider this thought experiment.

‍

‍

Imagine you own a local coffee shop. You’ve been operating for a little while and your number of customers is growing. With the increase in demand, you need to increase your capacity to service your customers.

You don’t want to sacrifice product quality and you don’t want people to wait too long to get their coffee – because that would impact their experience in a negative way. So you have to scale your production capacity while maintaining quality.

‍

To do that, you buy a bigger, better, more expensive coffee machine. What do you pay for,exactly? It’s not the coffee that the machine makes, because you were already making great coffee.

You pay to have two things: a) increased production capacity and speed, and b) consistent quality.

This coffee machine is a good and necessary investment, and you’ll be glad you made it as you watch your business bring in more customers each day. It cost a fair sum to have it, but it did so because it can deliver you perfect coffee in every cup, with the speed and consistency to seamlessly serve countless happy customers day in and day out.

That’s how I like to think about automation in the context of marketing.

Your marketing machine should reflect your business needs and priorities.

Your team’s focus should be on strategy, content, and the “human” layer of your brand. Scale and reach can be achieved more effectively by using tools and automation than by manual labor.

‍

It’s important to define the role that people should play in building your brand and maintaining the quality of your outreach as you grow, and, separately, the role that software should play in doing that effectively at scale.

Creativity is where people shine. Repetition is where machines do. If you can automate anything you’re doing manually, many times, the chances are you should.

‍