Three ways marketers are achieving more with RPA

According to a recent survey from UiPath, automation has become a key part of business processes, with 91% of global organizations reporting that they currently use automation technologies and 93% stating that automation is at the center of their digital transformation initiatives.

Not only is automation in place; it’s delivering value: 73% of survey respondents say they are very or entirely satisfied with the returns they’ve seen from their automation technologies.

With senior executives increasingly prioritizing automation as a strategic imperative, we’re seeing the emergence of Chief Automation Officers and even automation committees.

Historically, automation has been frequently prioritized in back-office operations, including in finance, human resources (HR) and legal operations, but in two years, those surveyed predict a big surge in automation for marketing.

By leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA), marketing teams are also seizing the opportunity to enter the “Automation-First” era.

It’s proven not only as a driver for digital transformation and increased productivity, but also for a more engaged workforce. Since less time is spent on tedious, time-intensive tasks, marketers are freed up to be more creative and strategic.

Marketers know better than most that innovating ahead of the curve couldn’t be more critical when reaching their core audience. There is no need to stop this mindset from permeating the way marketers execute their job each and every day. The time to automate and leverage RPA technology is now.

Here are three ways to incorporate RPA into marketing strategies to drive best-in-class results:

1) Marketing operations

In the aforementioned survey, UiPath found that 90% of organizations already use technology to automate business processes. As a function full of repetitive tasks involving multiple systems, marketing is a prime candidate for automation.

It’s easy for a marketing practitioner to get lost in the sea of spreadsheets and data streams stemming from the various marketing tools required to accomplish their job each day. Efficient automation can connect siloed data and allow marketers to make informed, creative and strategic decisions based on the holistic presentation of the information available.

Time spent each morning analyzing competitive measurement across multiple sites can now be saved by enlisting the help of a robot. When RPA completes this task, marketers can begin to execute against their vision and broader strategy. The technology can even track performance over time, providing quick and easily digestible data for quarterly marketing reports.

2) Customer engagement

As marketing professionals know, customer engagement is the heart of a marketer’s job – making the potential buyer feel connected to the organization, brand or product that they are considering. In today’s business environment, a company needs to move beyond simply communicating to check the box and start to provide added value for their consumers at key touchpoints.

For example, when preparing for an industry event, an organization can use an RPA robot to quickly browse through its Salesforce application and determine the account owner based on a spreadsheet provided by the event venue.

By letting RPA make the necessary connection between potential customers and appropriate marketer, a team can spend its time preparing for the event, focusing on personalizing communications and more quickly responding to interested prospects.

Automating the routine and mundane facets of the customer engagement process allows marketers to begin using all the potential sources of data to improve the accuracy of targeting efforts and provide the most relevant content possible.

By not searching through databases to identify the most recent touchpoint, teams can focus on creating authentic experiences through improved personalization or building a more robust content library.

3) Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience

Perhaps the most exciting benefit from RPA in marketing is the application of AI and machine learning (ML) to the marketing funnel and customer experience. Rules-based decisions in a marketer’s workflow can improve by becoming experience-based over time, consistently becoming more intuitive.

When RPA is integrated into the entire marketing stack – whether with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, LinkedIn, Hubspot, Twitter or more – solutions can unleash the power of AI to generate quality, holistic insights for multiple solutions.

Each member of the marketing team will be able to capitalize on this added value, whether their role is creating content for social channels or determining the Google Ads strategy.

Closing thoughts

To compete in today’s business world, marketing organizations need to think more creatively and strategically to stand out from the rest of the crowd. By automating tasks that used to take hours on end, marketers are free to drive sales, increase brand awareness and generate value. Most importantly, they can get back to what really matters – creating relationships with and satisfying customers.

Bobby Patrick is the CMO at UiPath. The company’s enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for business and government organizations all over the world, improving productivity, customer experience and employee job satisfaction.