Steal This Playbook What to Automate in Marketing—and What to Write Yourself

If It Repeats, Automate It: The Litmus Test for Busy Marketers

Stop burning cycles on deja vu tasks. If a task happens more than once, odds are it is a candidate for automation. That does not mean everything that repeats should be handed to a robot, but if you find yourself copying, pasting, exporting, or futzing with the same content again and again, automation will buy you focus and sanity. Think of automation as the office assistant that never sleeps and never asks for a raise.

Use a three-question litmus test before you wire anything up: frequency, predictability, and impact. Frequency: does the task recur daily, weekly, or with enough volume to justify setup time? Predictability: can the process be codified into rules and templates without creative judgment each time? Impact: will automating free time for higher-value work or cut errors and delays? High frequency + high predictability + reasonable impact equals an easy automation win.

Operationalize the test with a quick audit. Track recurring tasks for two weeks, estimate minutes per occurrence, and calculate time savings against setup cost. Start with low-risk wins like welcome emails, invoice reminders, reporting exports, social scheduling, and lead scoring. Use templates and personalization tokens so automated messages do not sound robotic. Connect triggers to clear actions and add simple branching for common exceptions so edge cases do not break the flow.

Keep strong guardrails. Write the core brand copy yourself, automate repetitive assembly and delivery, and schedule regular human reviews to keep voice and strategy aligned. Monitor conversion and error rates after launch and be ready to pull back or tweak. Run a two week automation sprint and see how many hours open up for strategy, experimentation, and actual writing that machines cannot replace.

Set-and-Wow: Welcome, Nurture, and Win-Back Flows That Print Results

First impressions sell. Your onboarding sequence should feel less like a manual and more like a VIP handoff: quick wins, clear next steps, and a personality that sounds like a human, not a help center. Think of the first three messages as your brand handshake — sincere, useful, and impossible to ignore.

Break the journey into three automations: welcome, nurture, and win-back. Automate timing and triggers so nothing slips, but insert handcrafted moments where empathy matters. For low-friction wins, link to resources and social proof and consider a light promotional nudge like buy TT boosting as an example of offering relevant services without sounding pushy.

What to automate: segmentation, tagging, conditional paths, and simple behavioral nudges (abandoned cart, first app open). What to write yourself: the opener, the story-driven mid-sequence email, and the reactivation copy that tries to rekindle emotion. Use templates for scale, but craft the first message of each flow by hand and A/B test subject lines, preview text, and the single bold offer.

Measure opens, clicks, time to first action, and lifetime value lift. Iterate fast: swap one line, rerun a test, and treat every flow like a mini product. Ship the automation, keep the soul, and turn passive subscribers into repeat customers.

Keep It Human: Brand Voice, Stories, and High-Stakes Replies You Should Craft

Automation can handle scheduling, A/B tests, and routine follow-ups, but when the story matters, do not hand it to a bot. Your brand voice is the personality customers remember and the compass for every message. Build a voice bible: 3–5 adjectives, banned phrases, and a 10-word elevator pitch so humans and systems align.

Stories need human arcs. Use setup–conflict–resolution in social posts and case studies; human writers catch nuance and subtext templates miss. Give writers raw analytics and interviews, then let them sculpt the narrative—do not automate the sculpting. A tight example: one vivid anecdote, one surprising metric, one real quote.

High-stakes replies—angry customers, press inquiries, product failures—demand judgement and presence. Use a short framework: empathize (mirror the feeling), own (what you know), act (clear next steps), and follow-up (timeline). Always draft the first reply by hand; only after human approval should guarded templates take over.

Simple rule: automate where speed and scale beat nuance; write where trust, reputation, or conversion hinge on empathy. Train the team on the voice bible, rehearse crisis replies, and block creative hours for storytelling—loyalty comes from human craft, not perfect automation.

AI as Co-Pilot: Prompt Recipes to Draft Faster Without Sounding Like a Robot

Think of AI like a sous-chef: it preps, chops, and suggests seasonings, but you plate and taste. Start prompts with a compact brief: audience, goal, and must-have lines. Use four elements every time: Seed: one-sentence brief; Tone: two adjectives and an example phrase; Constraints: length, forbidden words, brand words; Next steps: editing instructions. That formula saves time and keeps drafts human.

Prompt recipes to steal: 1) Draft-first: 'Write a 120-word social caption for {audience} about {topic}. Keep it witty, use one metaphor, include a CTA and one customer quote placeholder.' 2) Rewrite-for-voice: 'Rewrite this copy to sound like {persona}, shorten sentences, add contractions, remove jargon.' 3) Expand-with-story: 'Turn this feature list into a 40-word micro-story that shows benefit in real life.' Feed any of these with examples and a short style line and you'll get useful variations fast.

To avoid that 'AI-sounding' sheen, add final prompt constraints: ask for a specific flaw ('too formal' or 'robotic') and request a fix, e.g., 'make this friendlier by adding a one-sentence anecdote.' Force specificity: replace vague adjectives with concrete images, swap passive voice for active verbs, and ban corporate filler like 'synergy' or 'innovative' unless you provide a fresh metaphor. Always ask for three tones so you choose the most human one.

Make the process: generate, scan, tweak, humanize. Quick edit checklist: swap any canned phrase, inject a tiny personal detail (a short customer quip or a specific outcome), verify facts and links, and read aloud to check rhythm. Automate the heavy lifting — headlines, variant lines, meta descriptions — but keep the finishing strokes: your brand's quirks, stories, and judgment. Those are the things automation can't steal.

Launch in a Weekend: A 5-Step Roadmap to Your First Automation Stack

Think of this as a sprint, not a dissertation: in a weekend you can stitch together five focused automations that pull leads, qualify them, and follow up without babysitting. Start by picking one measurable outcome—newsletter signups, demo bookings, or cart recoveries—and ruthlessly refuse anything that doesn't directly move that needle this weekend.

Next, assemble the tiny stack: an email tool, a simple CRM, and a workflow runner (Zapier, Make, or an equivalent). Sign up, connect a single capture source (form, chat widget, or ad), and stop shopping for features. The fastest launches use two to three apps with native integrations so you can spend your hours on messaging and logic instead of engineering.

Sketch the flow on a napkin: capture → tag → score → nurture → convert. For each node write the minimal copy that earns a click or reply, not a novella. Batch your assets so you can paste and test quickly. Quick wins to seed your weekend stack:

• 🚀 Trigger: Instant webform entry that starts the welcome sequence.
• 🤖 Automation: Auto-tag new leads and push high-intent ones to sales.
• 💁 Follow-up: Two short, human-sounding nudges spaced over 72 hours.

Now launch: flip the switch, monitor open and reply rates, and prune steps that leak attention. If part of the plan is to seed initial social proof or reach, consider a fast amplification option like buy YouTube views fast to jump-start visibility while your funnels warm up. Watch the top three metrics for two days and make one quick edit.

Finish the weekend with a tiny playbook: a list of the five automations, the two best subject lines, and one hypothesis to test next week. Ship imperfectly, iterate quickly, and you'll have an automation stack that earns its keep before Monday coffee finishes brewing.