According to a Deloitte Global RPA Survey, more than half the companies (53%) included in the study have already started their RPA journey, while 19% of respondents plan to implement RPA in the next two years. 78% of those who have already adopted RPA expect to significantly increase their investment over the next three years. What does this mean? That RPA is expected to achieve “near universal adoption” within five years.
As the founder of both Canopy and Aggranda, I’ve been constantly searching for groundbreaking tools that can uphold the fast paced evolution of the marketing industry. In fact, when one takes seriously the high expectations of lean operations from marketing departments and agencies, the strong need for RPA in marketing starts to make a lot of sense.
Five process automation use cases in marketing:
Pricing and competition monitoring
Software robots can perform thorough web searches for information on prospects and competitors. They can gather relevant data about your organisation’s online presence against your competitors across multiple sites, and even track performance over time. The job is completed in a matter of seconds, in contrast to several hours for a person. You can then use the accurate results provided by bots in your quarterly reports.
Storing customer information
Manually entering various categories of customer-related data, classifying it according to relevant features, and making it easily visible across the company is time consuming and prone to errors. RPA allows systematised data storage about new and existing customers; it also enables easy access to data.
Regular accurate reviews of old customers’ contact information from incoming correspondence, and the subsequent database updates, ensure staying in touch with current customers. Corroborated with requisite attention to information about new customers, this robotic process automation use case in marketing makes a significant contribution to increasing sales.
Data management
Capturing data from many sources and in multiple formats is a rather common issue of concern for marketers due to the many things that can go wrong with manual processing.
What can happen when data gathering is marred by employees fatigue- or boredom-related errors? Duplicate (excel) files, loss of data (since it can be saved in a multitude of locations), to name but a few. This is why data management is among the top-priority RPA use cases in marketing.
Social media monitoring
In 2021, no one can deny the tremendous importance of closely monitoring trends and finding relevant content on social media. It has the capacity to improve the effectiveness of your company’s own content, and to promote action on relevant real time events without missing potential opportunities.
But the continuously growing information overload on social media makes these tasks even more challenging for marketers. Deployment of robotic process automation in marketing not only reduces the burden of these meticulous activities, but also boosts efficiency.
Facilitating the transition from legacy systems to new technologies
Consider the task of taking data from a CRM solution (a paradigmatic case of legacy system) and manually entering it to a newer system. I’m sure that simply acknowledging the amount of time it typically calls for, as well as the risk of errors, has made you sigh and eager to find a more effective alternative.
This is precisely the role of RPA solutions. Software robots can easily (i.e., fast and with minimal business disruption) move data from old to new systems, and you can have all the confidence in results’ accuracy.
Conclusion
More and more companies are starting to take seriously the promises of RPA: increased efficiency and productivity, financial gains, freeing up employees to work on higher-value projects, all without the deep, complex infrastructure integration required by other kinds of AI.
Passing the mundane, rule-based, repetitive, day-to-day processes on to software robots is part and parcel of the move forward in digital transformation. This list of RPA use cases in marketing is meant to give you a glimpse of how it can speed up and improve a large scope of processes, from the initiation of consumer interest to customer experience – from someone who’s been in the seat of both an RPA service provider and UiPath partner, and ‘the client‘.
Cristian Ignat is Founder & CEO at Aggranda
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