Marketing is a lethal game.
You need to have more impactful digital marketing tools and strategies than competitors to win the game.
Of course, you must be using some paid marketing tools and scratching your head hard to define lethal marketing strategies.
But the major catch here is that you have to use marketing tools and execute ROI marketing strategies manually. Such practice definitely requires effort and does not guarantee accuracy.
Now, imagine the same scenario with the automation! Automation frees up staff and promotes accuracy along with efficiency.
However, the question is, how to automate the marketing processes? Here is where RPA (Robotic Process Automation) comes into the picture.
What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?
You must have heard about the autonomous car or actually seen one on the road navigating traffic all by itself.
What is an autonomous car? Well, it is just a conventional car with a software program that works on if-then rules and navigates traffic by calculating the if-then conditions.
Similarly, if you install a lightweight software program on the computer and the computer performs a series of tasks by itself based on predefined if-then rules, it is called automation.
The RPA is nothing but the approach or technology to automate the process on the computer.
For example, if you develop a software program that automatically checks the price of your competitors’ products daily and gives you a detailed report on a fixed time, it is called robotic process automation.
Here, you can clearly see that RPA eliminates the need for manually checking each competitor’s site and preparing the report.
It also reduces the chances of the errors as unlike humans, a software bot does not get bored even after doing the same repetitive tasks.
Automation in Marketing – Jaw-Dropping Facts
Just to make you aware of the scale automation is being adopted for marketing purposes, here are some numbers.
- 75% of companies have already been using at least one marketing automation tool (according to Social Media’s Today 2019 State of Marketing Automation Survey report).
- 63% of companies nodded to increase the marketing automation budget very soon. (According to the statistics published by Invespcro.)
- 40% of companies that are not using automation in marketing processes are planning to adopt it soon. (According to a survey from 2017 Liana Technologies: The Benefits and Challenges of Marketing Automation.)
- Last year, the marketing automation software market was valued at $6.1 billion and anticipated to double the size by 2023. (According to SharpSpring’s “Investor Presentation Jan 2019”)
- Even in 2016, almost 480,000 websites were using marketing automation solutions. (According to Bold Digital)
- More lead generation is one of the major goals of adopting automation in marketing. (According to SocialMediaToday)
- 83% of marketers believe that social media scheduling is the best use of automation, making social media schedulers the most popular use case of RPA.
The following are some other use cases of RPA in marketing.
RPA in Marketing – Use Cases
The following are the top scenarios or processes where you can apply RPA for automation.
- Customer Data Management
A marketer is always looking for data. He stores it, analyzes it and makes data-driven decisions.
However, it is a tedious process to store data manually in spreadsheets. Even worse, data analysis from spreadsheets is time-consuming and less accurate.
Here is where RPA plays its role.
RPA bot adds, updates, or deletes the data automatically after a certain event or after a user command.
RPA bot also performs many complex calculations to analyze the data and generate the user report every day at a fixed time.
Such practices reduce time-consuming and complex tasks for marketers and allow them more time to make crucial decisions based on the data.
- Competition Monitoring
A marketing campaign for a company targets its competitors. A company always compares its products/services with competitors to strengthen its market position.
For that, the marketers spend a lot of time monitoring the performance of competitors which includes user review analysis, pricing analysis, marketing efforts analysis, and many more.
To gather data and analyze it, marketers need to manually visit different channels which are by default not recommended because of the time it can waste.
A software bot collects several data of competitors by fetching different sources and prepares a comprehensive document containing all the information of competitors. It can repeat this process every day for any number of times.
Imagine the time and efforts it can save if a marketer needs to have data of 10 competitors every day!
- Customer Onboarding
A marketer promotes product or service on multiple channels such as social media, emails, websites, and press releases.
No matter how hard he tries, he can never reply quickly to the leads coming from these many channels.
Considering the fact that late replies can lower the customer interest, it is crucial to reply quickly to customers and assist them to select what he is looking for at the most relevant price and as quickly as possible.
The RPA bot can be deployed as the customer experience manager who gives personalized replies to each customer and helps them to find their preferred product/service without causing any kind of trouble to customers.
The best part of the RPA bot is that it can be integrated with multiple lead channel.
This way, it does not only enrich customer onboarding experience but converts more leads into business without the higher dependency on staff!
- Marketing Campaign Monitoring
As discussed, a white label marketer aims to earn leads from multiple channels. For that, he runs marketing campaigns on multiple channels.
However, once he starts running marketing campaigns, he needs to monitor its reach, convert ratio, budget spending, and overall success almost every day. This of course takes a whole lot of time to manually measure success and keep a track of it.
A software bot eliminates this ongoing struggle. It keeps an eagle eye on all marketing campaigns running on individual channels. It gathers crucial data including reach, budget spending, visitors, and convert ratio every day or after a certain event and presents a detailed report to the marketer.
Marketers can now get the data of all 360-degree marketing campaigns running on different channels from the single report itself.
- Internal Sales Reminder
No matter how advanced a software bot we develop, there are some conversations that should be carried out by humans themselves.
The sales teams talk to hundreds of customers every day. Because of the large volume, there are chances that a team member might forget to be in a meeting with a customer.
Such mistakes affect the company’s reputation and put customer acquisition at risk. RPA bot can completely eliminate such situations by reminding internal sales teams about their meetings. It can also schedule meetings automatically and alerts the customer if there is a change in the scheduled meeting.
Future of RPA in marketing
RPA isn’t the ‘perfect’ technology. It has many limitations which restrict us to automate each and every process.
One of the major limitations of the RPA is that it can be only applied to a process with fixed input and output.
This limitation has lately turned out to be the major concern of businesses as many businesses are now working in more dynamic environments.
To address this challenge, RPA engineers have found a way – leverage AI and ML to give intelligence to the software bot. Using intelligence, the software bot can make decisions by itself and automate a process in a dynamic environment.
RPA leveraging AI and ML is called cognitive RPA. However, it has not yet been adopted on a large scale. But looking at the advancement of the affordable and easy-to-develop AI programs, cognitive RPA will soon become mainstream.
With cognitive RPA anticipating to gain popularity, the future RPA bots will be able to work in advanced dynamic environments very accurately by making decisions by itself. This will lead to complete marketing automation – with zero human interaction.
Conclusion
Marketing is not a task, it is a process. It involves brains, tools, reports, efforts, and people. The proper coordination between these factors is key to success.
However, humans can not establish proper coordination between these many complex things manually. Thus, automation is required.
By automating the marketing process, businesses can add up time for marketers, reduce errors, and increase productivity. If well-executed, automation can double your business leads and revenue instantly.
Before concluding, it is important to mention that automation doesn’t eat up jobs. It just creates a collaborative work environment of robots and humans to increase sales, productivity, and accuracy.
Still, you are lacking about the automation process so its better to hire a white label digital marketing services. As experienced marketers, we are one of the best digital marketers that will guide you to apply the automation process as well as give you the best marketing decisions that will be helpful for your marketing process.
About the Author:
Parth Patel is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of SyS Creations – a leading robotic process automation development firm. Operating the IT Infrastructure of SMEs and startups keeps him on his toes and his passion for helping others keeps him motivated.
