If you are on the marketing team for your company, you probably lack the time to catch your breath as you race from one marketing project to another.
Your schedule is probably packed with responsibilities, like improving your landing page, enhancing your search rankings and blogging, which is why it is easy to leave some online marketing tasks, like social media, to automatic marketing tools that can easily tabulate responses. 
Unlike SEO or web design, social media does not have the immediate gratification of moving up five spots on Google. Social media is a more nebulous platform; although you may count your followers or likes as an important metric, those measuring sticks don’t really provide insights into the intensity of your consumers’ love for your organization. The purpose of a robust social media campaign is to build a devoted customer base that is fervent about who you are and what you make.
Without immediate results, most marketing professionals feel that their efforts are a waste. More importantly, you may feel like you can’t produce a line chart detailing how well your marketing efforts are working. This can contribute to neglecting your social media project and leaving it to a marketing automation application to generate possible leads.
While there is a role for these types of programs, it is a waste of your company’s resources to rely completely on them for social media success. An application can measure the number of likes an article generated, but can’t provide the inspiration necessary to build on positive buzz a spectacular promotion on Facebook may have generated. The analytical reports a marketing automation tool can provide are a poor substitute for a marketing campaign that is based on intimate understanding of customer behavior.
More importantly, a marketing automation program lacks the insights necessary to dissect a social media campaign and determine what works and what is less than effective. The ability to analyze a vast amount of data and recognize the most important trends and conclusions remains completely within the domain of experienced marketing professionals.
While it is all too easy to allow a marketing automation tool to comb through the reports on your social media initiatives, it probably is not sufficient to producing success on these powerful platforms. You should understand that it only takes one truly exceptional social media campaign to put your company in the minds of thousands of new customers. An automated tool, while helpful, will never be able to create that type of campaign for you.
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