Why Automated Marketing Techniques, Like Mass Post-Sharing, Damage Your Brand Positioning

When online marketing became more the norm than the anomaly for businesses, there was a shift in the processes for many marketing tactics. Brands focused a lot of their energies on automated marketing techniques, like mass-post sharing, especially after the implementation of social media. The reason?  The time investment to effectively manage an online brand strategy or one intended to generate leads can often be significantly more arduous than expected and a lot of companies found themselves scrambling to keep up with the effort.

Sites like Socialoomph, Ping.fm and Hootsuite were created to answer the needs of companies floundering with the consistency in their online and social media marketing efforts. They supplied an automated marketing answer, allowing for network-wide shares of content with the click of a button.

What seemed like a simple answer has become a detractor in the brand strategy goal of generating leads. Online shoppers are becoming savvier with how to gauge the sincerity of a brand. Its sincerity, how well a brand communicates their understanding of the real needs of its clients and prospects, that drives leads.

Moderators from Social Media groups, article marketing sites or industry do not recommend automated content sharing, like using ping.fm to share your blogs posts to all your groups at once.  Regular missteps in this vein can get your brand banned from a particular group or even a site, which can hurt your brand image and chances to market in those spaces online.

So, what are the alternatives for brands that are engaged in an online marketing strategy to generate leads that have been using automated mass-post marketing techniques?

Real People in Real Time

To effectively manage an online marketing campaign, real members of your team have to spend time in your online spaces, social media pages and profiles, offsite blogs and publications on a consistent basis, sharing content that is not only timely but relevant and engaging.

Listen First, Talk Second

While “joining the conversation” has become white noise as far as marketing-speak goes, it is still a relevant concept for effectively building a brand strategy online. Brands can effectively generate leads by joining in an ongoing discussion, commenting on blogs and posts. By sharing your brand perspective in someone else’s forum, you have the ability to differentiate your brand and potentially engage a prospect you wouldn’t normally have reached.

Switch Gears

Take time within your brand strategy to just share with your audience. Not about your company, or your products, but just sharing headlines, news, interesting facts or even a holiday wish that is completely unrelated to your business shows that you have a focus other than just the company lead generation goals.

Automated marketing is not completely off the table for brands, and it can be an effective way to get a portion of your messaging out there to your audience. With that said, keep the bulk of your efforts online organic, in real time and by real people. Your audience will appreciate your sincerity and will begin to trust your brand more quickly to the tune of more sales.