Marketing needs real, dedicated time by real humans - whatever that looks like for your setup.

I've seen more and more articles, landing pages and even whole businesses built around 'automating' marketing processes in the past 12 months...

...And while automation absolutely speeds up the creation / distribution of your marketing messages, it's also entirely useless if those messages aren't working.

If you haven't nailed who your audience is and how they like to interact with your brand, there is no point spending time and money on automation.

I'm not going to get into the chicken and egg discussion about marketing before product. Because I don't believe in building hype for something that doesn't exist (see Fyre Festival as the best case study on this...), and most customers today see straight through that. So yes, you do need a product to sell. But once you have something people will use, the next thing you need to build is a good marketing function in your business.

Marketing is one of those strange phenomena, like eating more vegetables. We know it's important but it can also feel overwhelming (especially if we're technical founders who don't really like talking about ourselves at the best of times.)
Sometimes you just need to pick a place to start, and get going. My biggest piece of advice to you is to carve out some dedicated time to try, and test, new things. Make sure you have real, useful tracking so you can base decisions on data, not conjecture. Throw out things that aren't working and refine things that are.

Contrary to popular belief, marketing doesn't have to be sitting on Twitter (or on IndieHackers) for 3 hours a day responding to people in person, or putting out polished YouTube videos as content, or writing blogs - there is no one rule that will work.

You need to cultivate something that will work for your audience AND makes sense for your team, and how the people in the team work.

This blog post talks in a bit more depth about how to start working out your golden formula for marketing (spoiler, it's different for every team and you'll need to spend some time refining it). There's a whole series here about how to run an experimental process to define marketing formula for your business. My hope is that at the end of it you have some great habits, backed by real data, that you can replicate again and again.

Once you've got there, THAT is the point to start automating some of the things that already you know will work. But any brand that wants to keep its customers loyal in the long term will always need real humans. Unless of course your customers are bots, then maybe not...