As worldwide CIOs build the perfect automation strategy, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is being widely adopted to minimize errors, improve productivity, and accelerate time-to-value. For marketing teams, the technology has been particularly beneficial, as it allows them to avoid all the heavy lifting of repetitive tasks and do more with less. Using RPA, marketing executives can cut across data silos and fragmented processes to reach more customers, forge strong client relationships, and drive better revenue across geographies, channels, and touchpoints.
Popular Use Cases of RPA in Marketing
Every marketer today is looking to be able to productively connect with customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle – whether it is to induce inquisitiveness at the awareness stage, enable curiosity in the interest stage, or fortify trust in the consideration or purchase stage.
But mundane and repetitive tasks often take away a lot of time that can actually be spent fruitfully in being creative, focusing on the overall strategy, or driving rich engagement.
Thankfully, RPA helps in pulling information and pushing actions via predefined workflows that make it easy for marketing teams to focus on aspects that matter the most.
Let’s look at the top 7 RPA use cases in marketing:
- Lead nurturing: One of the most popular use cases of RPA in the marketing department is lead nurturing. As the buyer decision process becomes increasingly complicated and time-consuming, RPA allows teams to meaningfully quality and nurture leads – without investing substantial time and resources. By automating as much of the lead nurturing process as possible, teams can focus their efforts on pivotal interactions that turn prospects into loyal buyers. For instance, using RPA, marketers can set criteria for leads worth pursuing, automate the lead scoring activity, and prioritize targeted efforts towards high-value prospects. They can also use automatic campaigns to improve accuracy and quality, reach the most relevant audience, and prevent them from engaging with your rivals.
- Competitive analysis: Successful marketers invest considerable time and resources in determining what their competitors are up to, which makes competitive analysis another popular use case for RPA. You can set up RPA tools to keep track of what your competitors are doing: right from their behavior, product prices, and campaigns to the strategies and tactics they are implementing. RPA can allow you to gather competitive intelligence, so you can tweak your strategies and adjust prices accordingly. By automatically gathering competitor data, instead of manually visiting each competitor’s website to identify trending products or painstakingly compare prices for hundreds of products, you can take steps to optimize pricing, messaging, and the overall marketing approach and drive profitability as competitive behavior changes.
- Bid adjustments: Automating bid adjustments for marketing campaigns such as PPC is a great use case for RPA. Using RPA, you can show ads more or less frequently – based on when, where, or how your customers’ search. RPA can aid in scheduling the appropriate ads, based on factors such as weather, economic fluctuations, or current trends and events. You can also adjust bids based on how your ads perform, thus ensuring you get the best return on your ad spend and enjoy high marketing ROI. For instance, when using Google Ads, marketers can use RPA to determine when ads need to be scheduled while optimizing them at times when purchase intent is the highest. You can, for example, schedule a higher number of bids on weekends, if that’s when your conversions are maximum.
- SEO reporting: SEO reporting, although extremely crucial to improve visibility of your website and assets, often ends up being extremely stressful for the marketing team, especially when reports have to be manually created, audited, and shared. Scaling these reports becomes a problem too, as humans are only capable of doing so much. By automating the task of SEO reporting, you can ensure data is automatically consolidated from different sources, reports are accurately created, and issues are quickly detected – before they cause any damage. You can also rely on RPA to enrich reports with personally identifiable information, upload reports to different channels, and also constantly audit them for best results.
- Social media monitoring: As social media becomes an increasingly important tool for marketing, RPA can help companies keep an eye on their performance on popular channels. RPA can help them analyze why a particular post is getting more engagement as compared to others, or what kinds of ads are driving fueling conversion – instead of having marketing staff manually assessing posts using siloed tools and fragmented processes. RPA can also help in analyzing the impact and reach of social media marketing efforts and suggest how or when new changes and modifications can be introduced in existing campaigns – while helping the teams identify the right trends and maintain a positive brand image.
- Customer engagement: RPA is also a great tool for forging long and strong customer relationships, especially as CMOs look to be more involved in customer engagement. Using RPA, they can improve the accuracy and timeliness of their targeting efforts and ensure the relevance and authenticity of the data and content they use. RPA can also be used to analyze customer behavior and preferences and suggest products that best fit their needs. At the same time, RPA bots can help in responding to customer queries quickly and efficiently and in accelerating the decision-making process, so you can improve the experience customers have with the brand – thus improving loyalty and retention.
- Marketing operations: The realm of marketing is full of repetitive tasks that involve multiple systems and require multiple resources to work on them on a daily basis – which is often extremely tedious. RPA makes it easy for marketing teams to extract and manage data, get access to updated reports, and fuel better conversations with customers. By minimizing the need for manual data entry and decreasing the number of errors and mistakes, RPA helps in producing quick and accurate results, improving customer satisfaction, and enhancing operational performance in the long run.
In the world of marketing, the use cases of automation via RPA are many. Instead of wasting time, money, and efforts in manually segmenting data, qualifying, and nurturing leads, carrying out competitive analysis, driving customer engagement, monitoring social media, building SEO reports, or adjusting bids, embrace the world of RPA today to inspire quick action.
