How Automation Can Transform Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Whether you’re an in-house marketing department or an agency offering marketing solutions to a variety of different clients, day-to-day digital marketing duties involve a lot of repetitive technical tasks that take time away from important, creative duties.
Monitoring progress on campaigns, compiling data, and building reports are all examples of tasks that make bringing your creative ideas to life difficult without the right support. In this case, we’re talking about automation, specifically RPA, also known as Robotic Process Automation.
What is RPA?
Now, you might be wondering, what is RPA and how exactly can it help streamline my day-to-day operations?
To break it down in simple terms, RPA is a type of software technology that utilizes “bots” to automate business processes typically performed by humans. These types of processes are repetitive and time-consuming in nature and often take time away from more valuable tasks within a business.
By implementing an RPA solution, rather than having a team of humans perform these processes manually, bots will be deployed to complete tasks in a fraction of the time and without errors.
What Are the Benefits of Automation?
A common question people have about RPA is “What are the benefits of having bots complete tasks compared to humans?”
For starters, when it comes to marketing, adopting RPA helps to reduce repetitive tedious tasks by nearly 80%. But that’s not all. There are so many other ways that RPA can help enrich your business and transform your day-to-day operations.
Below, we will outline some of the most significant benefits marketing departments and agencies typically experience when they make the switch to automation.
Increased Accuracy
Because automated tasks are not performed by humans, they are not susceptible to human errors. For instance, bots never get bored or tired and are designed to do exactly what they were programmed to do. When programmed correctly, RPA bots deliver results with 100% accuracy. The key is to ensure that all processes and workflows are fully optimized and error-free before automation is implemented so that the bots do not copy your mistakes.
Improved Productivity
As previously mentioned, RPA helps significantly reduce the amount of time human staff spends on repetitive, low-priority tasks.
Besides saving you time and money, this also helps to boost morale and improve productivity among your staff. Here’s why: Staff feel less productive when they are bogged down with boring, manual processes that do not feel important. When they are given the opportunity to work on more exciting, creative tasks, they feel more valuable and productive and tend to work harder.
Time is Saved and Costs Are Reduced
RPA bots are capable of completing tasks in a fraction of the time it would normally take a human. Plus, bots do not require breaks, sleep, or vacation, and can operate 24/7 – even on holidays! This means that when your human staff goes home, bots will continue operating behind the scenes.
Tasks are not only completed faster, but your business could also potentially save 40-70% in labour costs per business process, over time.
This is universally important for all companies, because when you reduce day-to-day operational costs, you can reallocate those funds towards developing, improving, and growing the company.
RPA Use Cases in Marketing
Now that we’ve gone over the key benefits that RPA can offer your organization, let’s take a deeper dive into the specific marketing processes that can be automated using an RPA solution.
Automating Bid Adjustments in PPC Campaigns
When running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign using Google Ads, RPA can be used to help automatically make bid adjustments. For instance, you can deploy RPA bots to schedule your Google Ads to appear at certain times and increase bids when purchase intent and conversions are typically high.
RPA can also be used to optimize bids depending on certain circumstances to ensure you are getting a higher return on your ad spend.
Automating Technical SEO Reports
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to ensuring your organization or clients are appearing in search engine results. However, when forced to manually conduct audits and build reports, the technical side of SEO can be incredibly taxing and take time away from crucial SEO activities like content creation. It can also be damaging to your link-building efforts (broken links or low-quality inbound links can take a while to detect manually) and cause difficulties when attempting to scale your SEO operations.
Fortunately, RPA offers a solution to this common issue and can be used to automate SEO/link-building audits and reports. RPA helps ensure your audits are running 24/7 and are automatically checking for issues so that problems can be detected and resolved right away.
Managing Data
For some, hearing the word ‘data’ can be distressing due to the amount of manual work that goes into extracting and managing large amounts of data. While the process of gathering and managing data is incredibly taxing, it’s also very important when it comes to your marketing efforts.
Whether it’s PPC campaign performance or SEO reports, data must be consistently gathered, analyzed, and integrated to ensure you are gaining crucial insights.
RPA robots excel when it comes to data collection and analysis, and can complete the work your staff doesn’t enjoy faster and with significantly more accuracy.
READ MORE: RPA For Data Collection & Analytics
Monitoring Social Media
Since its introduction in the mid to late 2000s, social media has become one of the biggest and most important components of most organizations’ marketing strategies. This is especially true for small-to-medium-sized businesses that rely on social media to communicate with customers and clients and relay important information.
But without a team in place that is dedicated solely to managing and monitoring your social media accounts, it can be difficult to monitor performance and understand whether or not your efforts are really working.
With RPA, however, bots can be deployed to keep an eye on your accounts and measure the number of interactions your posts are getting, the number of new followers you are getting, etc.
This can help you gather crucial insights so you can make adjustments to your social media marketing strategy that will help boost performance.
As you can see, there are so many incredible ways RPA can be used to transform the marketing industry as a whole. From managing PPC campaigns and social media to compiling important data for analysis, there’s no shortage of ways your marketing department or agency will benefit from automation.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch with our team of automation experts at Thrive Automation today to start your journey towards a more efficient working environment.
