To improve your marketing in 2015, change your perspective. Rather than focusing on the quantity of likes, fans and followers, really think about the people you’re trying to reach and how they’re responding to your message.
 Baileigh Industrial shows the human side of the metalworking/woodworking company by sending “shout outs” to its customers and encouraging fans to follow them.
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“Someone reading your branded content for 10 seconds is different than someone doing it for 10 minutes,” said Eric Samson, founder of the consulting firm Group8A. “To improve your ROI on marketing, you will need to humanize your communications.”
Here are two ways he suggests you attack that goal:
1. Balance quality and quantity. Instead of counting clicks, gauge the reaction your fans have to your content, he said. You can glean this by reading comments and listening to social conversations your customers are having. If you’re looking for blog ideas, for instance, you could check out message boards on wedding sites to figure out what brides to be care about.
“Publishing higher quality content of interest to your audience increases the likelihood your brand will stay top of mind,” Samson said. A great example of a brand that’s made the effort to feed its fans what they want is Baileigh Industrial, a metalworking and woodworking machinery company. Baileigh’s Instagram account is chock-full of visually compelling images “that reflect the topics that matter to their customer base, while also highlighting customer success stories,” Samson said. (Check them out @baileigh_industrial.) “Their competitors don’t even come close to this level of engagement and therefore, it’s much easier for them to come off as a more relatable, humanized business.”
2. Don’t automate everything “If you try to automate everything, your customer will notice your scripted messaging and the use of templates, which makes it far more likely that you’ll be ignored,” Samson said. Furthermore, automation means “you won’t be targeting or segmenting your audience appropriately.”
Samson recommends tools such as Marketo and Hubspot to help you target select groups of customers, understand their needs, and cater your message accordingly. Start by sending a few different versions of your company newsletter to different demographics of customers. “This way you’re able to both automate your messaging (saving you time) without overdoing it and coming off as too robotic,” Samson said.
To start, try better segmenting your email list to begin to see results. Automating a few different templates, each with a unique message to a few segments of your audience. This way you’re able to both automate your messaging without overdoing it and coming off as too robotic to your customer base.