In the age of the Internet and digital, there are still many marketing processes that can benefit from process automation.
As a good marketing manager, I imagine you're looking for ways to transform your marketing department to make it work faster and to avoid missing sales opportunities.
Process automation could be the best solution to positively transform marketing in your organization.
There are multiple activities that, with the adoption of automated processes, can lead to significant gains in efficiency and time. Specifically, repetitive tasks can be reduced by almost 80%, in terms of sales and marketing.
With 59% of business processes expected to be automated by 2022, people will have much more time and space to devote to creative tasks. Automation is playing an increasingly important role and is often facilitated by its easy integration with existing IT infrastructure.
We can classify marketing process automation into three categories:
- Operational marketing
- Customer loyalty
- Customer experience
Operational marketing
Marketing is full of repetitive tasks that involve multiple systems. For example, last week, we ran a process that helped us quickly determine who successfully completed our academy's certification courses to create a personalized diploma that is automatically emailed to each person who passes. Every marketing organization is aware of the amount of tedious work spread across multiple systems.
Customer loyalty
Today's CMOs play a more direct role in customer engagement. Marketing wants to use all sources of data to improve the accuracy of customer-facing efforts and the relevance of the content being used.
Customer experience
Perhaps the most exciting benefit of automated processes in marketing is the application of machine learning to the marketing funnel and customer experience. Decisions that are rule-driven in our workflow can improve over time, based on the experience derived from machine learning.
The following are some of the ways to effectively implement automated processes within the marketing department.
Operational marketing
Price and competition monitoring
Automated processes make it possible to track competitors' websites and prices in real time and receive notifications when changes occur. This can allow companies to adjust their prices accordingly, without having to browse competitor websites one by one.
Facilitate the transition from old to new solutions
With the growing number of sales and marketing software, from sales acceleration to marketing automation, companies are increasingly migrating from legacy systems to new solutions.
Transferring all this information can be difficult and time-consuming. But companies that choose to implement automated processes easily move information from one system to another, with little business interruption and no risk of human-attributable errors.
Social media monitoring
Social media has taken on significant importance, as it is the environment in which many promotions and other essential business steps take place. People no longer rely solely on traditional forms of marketing, but increasingly support their digital modality. Through the generation of automated processes, companies can be helped to monitor their performance in the social media world.
You can identify the reason why a particular post gets more "Likes" and shares based on how it compares to others; you can analyze its performance and, if necessary, make changes and adjustments to profiles and posts.
Extraction of marketing data from different formats
Considering that data appears in a wide variety of formats, from plain text to paper notes, it can be difficult to read and enter it all. With the adoption of automated processes, you can use Optical Character Recognition technology that allows you to read information from different sources and automatically enter it into your CRM system without losing accuracy.
Customer loyalty
Intelligence reports
It is time-consuming for companies to produce their intelligence reports and update them periodically. The easiest way is to create an automated process that can take care of this and generate automatic intelligence reports. It can help identify and highlight new market entrants.
Upselling and cross-selling
Send targeted messages to current customers in order to increase sales according to their profile, through cross-selling or up-selling, identifying what they bought and what related products can be offered to them.
Surveys
There is a period of a few hours, or perhaps a couple of days, when the image of your service or product remains present in the buyer's memory, which should be used to conduct surveys. You must strike with the hammer when the iron is hot. And there is only one way to do it, with real-time surveys, created automatically.
There are three use cases in which applying automated surveys is ideal. First, to get feedback on your service or product. The second is to get feedback on your site experience. And the third, and most important, is to make your customer feel valued.
Unfortunately, very few people pay attention to the most appropriate time to send a survey to their customers. And we believe this is a key element in improving response rates.
Customer experience
Store existing and new customer information
A notable use case for process automation is to store customer information in an organized and easily accessible manner. The automatic classification of different categories of data, as well as the simple and segmented visualization of data across the company, can save a lot of time and money, and allows us to leave the manual entry of this information into our systems in the past.
