How Brands Can Start Leveraging Automation in 2023

Automation was crucial in refining business operations long before the pandemic. Many SMEs are emphasizing automation to boost their efficiency. With automation, startups and small businesses can take on corporations, prepare for crises, use resources sparsely, and get jobs done cost-effectively.

Research shows that the worldwide market for business automation could increase from an anticipated $196.6 billion in 2021 to more than $412.8 billion by 2030. This means there is a lot in store for brands looking to adopt automation across different industries.

Many sectors like IT, healthcare, education, banking, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and more leverage automation across different departments. This includes automation in marketing, sales automation, production automation, data analysis automation, and more

Modern-day businesses should consider hyper-automation as a viable strategy for the future. It's necessary for today's highly competitive global market.

Let’s cover the basics.

Understanding Automation

Business automation is a broad term that uses technology to automate routine, time-consuming, and mundane tasks. It aims to drive efficiency by freeing your employees from conducting roofing routinely-repeated processes by replacing them with predetermined actions that are done faster.

Such automation technology allows workers to concentrate on strategic planning and perform core business tasks. It minimizes the need for human involvement in complicated processes and reduces paperwork, ensures better service, reduces process costs in the long run, and offers efficiency.

What Automation Should Your Brand Consider in 2023?

Every business has unique technological requirements, depending on its challenges and goals. However, all businesses have a fundamental goal — to ensure revenue growth.

Companies are heavily using current intelligent automation trends to create and process massive amounts of data, automate their operations, and improve speed and efficiency.

Here's a list of business automation you should leverage in 2023.

Let's get started!

1. Sales Automation

Businesses can leverage sales automation that integrates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to ensure effective implementation. Such technology replaces labor-intensive human processes in the sales department.

It helps the sales team take charge of their key tasks and use automation tools for routine tasks. Sales' strategic and planning aspects can take advantage of automation to improve sales forecasting, propel channel sales, and more efficiently allocate resources.

For lead identification and qualification, automation tools help ensure effective pipeline management and drive future actions for prospects and existing leads. Sales personnel use automation for lead qualification, configuration, and quotation.

Sales automation also includes scheduling appointments based on the leads funnel. This help determines the efforts required to convert leads. For example, if the lead is fresh, then nurturing it over a sales meet (or call) requires different content than when the lead is ready to purchase. It prepares sales personnel to determine whether they need to inform, highlight advantages, show use cases, or seal the deal.

Once you grasp what business solutions to unlock through sales automation, it is better to devise the right tactics that help drive more sales.

2. Social media automation

As much as 58.4% of the global population is already active on social media, providing businesses with a vast and readily accessible customer base. Therefore, it is tough to write off the importance of social media in brand building as it needs businesses to leverage resources (finances, human, and technology) to their full potential. This starts with regularly updating social media profiles, providing useful content, and remaining accessible to the brand's followers.

Invest in social media automation that saves time and effort by enabling post scheduling, publishing content automatically, and managing customer interactions in real time.

For instance, automation analyzes what could be the ideal time to publish for someone else might not be the best moment for you. Constantly interacting with an online audience can improve social media customer service. But carrying out these tasks on different systems is challenging. Social media marketing automation can help in such situations.

Posting on the right day and at the right time can significantly increase the amount of attention the content gets. Automation tools help determine whether the busiest posting hours (in terms of engagement) are on a weekday, if your target audience is more active on the weekend, etc.

3. RPA for marketing automation

There are different fields where companies can implement RPA in their marketing processes. The following are the primary marketing processes that can be automated using RPA tools.

Companies can use RPA in their marketing processes across a variety of domains. RPA is useful in the following instances:

Data collection: marketers can use RPA to get client data by scraping it from publicly available websites. Web scrapers and RPA enable organizations to automatically gather customer contact information and update the CRM database when used in tandem.

Competition analysis: Unless you sell unique products, setting your product/service pricing requires competition analysis. RPA can help calculate the optimum pricing strategy for goods and services by considering the present economic and market situations.

It leverages price scrapping and crawls rivals' eCommerce and retail websites like eBay, Walmart, and others. Similarly, for services, it analyzes reviews and factors in the ROIs of current users to offer the best possible price.

Bidding: Automation ensures seamless bid modifications that help advertisers and marketers gauge their advertising' performance across channels and devices. Such data helps set the frequency at and appears on a given device, in a given place, and at a given time.

For instance, your brand may drop the price for tablet and mobile users in a campaign if you see the bulk of clicks on your advertisements come from a given device, like a desktop, at a specific time or vice versa.

Audience analysis: RPA frees advertisers and marketers from the time-consuming process of manually evaluating audience behavior and modifying bids to get their desired results.

For instance, the optimal time to run a digital ad campaign (to a specific group) is during the weekend, between 1 to 4 p.m. Here, RPA tools will automatically change bids and display ads to your target audience at predetermined times to increase impressions and click-throughs.

Using RPA tools enables collecting customer data to understand the client's requirements and aid the customer service team provide effective solutions. For instance, it helps leverage the power of optical character recognition (OPR) with natural language processing (MLP) for RPA bots to scan customer feedback and get relevant information from several channels.

Also, you get consumer data reports by sorting and tabulating the collected data about individual consumers.

For example, Cobmax's sales center partnered with a major Brazilian telco but failed to deal with the volume of calls. Partly because of manual and outdated systems. But, IBM's RPA technology helps speed up routine manual processes and reduce the likelihood of human error. The RPA technology helped reduce 50% of administrative tasks.

Final Thoughts

We are approaching the end of 2022, and this is the right time to start planning automation for 2023. To begin with, refer to tips from five marketers to run brand campaigns in 2022. Ensure that you plan automation tactics based on your business requirements. Making way for the aforementioned business automation solutions is crucial for your business growth in 2023.

Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all in leveraging automation. Therefore, driving the best results requires awareness and adaptation of current trends. Tailor the automated solutions mentioned in this post to match complex business requirements.