I make a mean breakfast omelette. I don't claim to be much of a cook or a chef, but I will say I know how to make a good breakfast. This has partly come from practice. Lots of practice. Given the strict diet I have chosen I end up eating a lot of eggs and breakfast always ends up being an omelette of sorts. Now I know you're not reading this post because you are particularly interested in my breakfast habits or my diet. (Although, if you're interested I'm happy to write up a post about why I eat what I do.) No, I don't believe you're here for the food. So let me draw the relationship and relevance to marketing.

Distracted? Yeah, sometimes...

As I was saying, I make a mean breakfast omelette, but some mornings I'm a bit distracted. As many of you know and would also relate to, I have a lot going on. This means my mind is usually working on a couple different things at the same time. And as you have heard before, there is no such thing as true multi-tasking. We are fast-switching between our mental apps. Well, this morning I wasn't switching quite fast enough. My brain got stuck in the middle of a Mautic app and the result was a failure to add an important ingredient to my omelette.

The Missing Ingredient

You're probably already aware of the ingredient given the title of the post, and you're correct. Salt. I left salt out of my eggs. Now, I added  a good bit of other seasonings (this is one of my secrets...lots of flavor!) but I neglected the salt.

As I sat down to eat I was instantly and acutely aware of this failure. And as my brain tends to work I immediately related this to the app my brain seemingly was still stuck in the middle of processing - Mautic. Or less specifically, marketing and marketing automation.

Marketing automation continues to evolve, marketers are growing in their understanding and use of this software and how it can be implemented to improve their marketing practices. I enjoy watching this growth (and I really enjoy seeing how Mautic contributes to this growth in exponential ways). In fact, I think we start to see a shift from simple automation to more advanced personalization and that's a very important and interesting advancement.

Marketing salt

Let me explain now how my brain works and how I saw the relationship. I think of these exciting new marketing techniques to be a lot like salt. More specifically, I'd consider personalization to be the salt of marketing. Get it? It's quite simple once you start to think about it. I can sum it up in two opposing sentences.  Too much and it's terrible, it ruins the dish,  and it's very noticeable. Too little and the result is bland, unappetizing, and easily discarded. See what I mean now?

Just as with salt, if you have too much personalization in your marketing you start to sound creepy, your personalization becomes very easily noticeable almost to the point of obnoxious, and it ruins the entire marketing effort. In similar fashion, with the absence of personalization in marketing the result is a generic, uninteresting and more easily forgotten marketing effort. Personalization makes it interesting and ... dare I say ... Personal. People remember things that are relevant to them.

The greatest chefs and marketers

And so, much like a chef must carefully recognize and implement the correct amount of salt in their dishes to highlight the flavor of the food without drawing unnecessary attention to the seasoning itself; in the same way a great marketer must carefully recognize and implement the correct amount of personalization in their marketing, highlighting and improving the marketing without drawing unnecessary attention to the personalization.

Thankfully I believe I'm a much better marketer and technologist than I am a chef...unfortunately I must now end this post and return to my omelette which is now salt-less and cold. But maybe I can remedy that...