A Day in the Life – Marketing

A marketing department can encompass many areas and responsibilities, including advertising, design, sales, internal and external communications, and media relations. The marketing team needs to respond quickly to requests and issues, and continually strategize to improve profits, products and customer relations.

How does the marketing department reach its goals with limited time and people? Microsoft Power Platform can help the marketing team by automating their day-to-day tasks, so they can focus on promoting the organization, its products and services.

Power Platform is made up of Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. Connected, they are a powerful tool to build end-to-end business solutions.

To start, you need a good understanding and list of your regular workday processes. You can set up tasks for an individual, department or entire organization.

Here are some marketing tasks that you can automate with Microsoft Power Platform:

1. Track and manage social media: The possibilities of automating social media are endless, including tracking your Twitter mentions or hashtags in Excel, keeping your team up to date with Twitter mentions and positive and negative posts, sharing Instagram photos or YouTube videos to Twitter, posting company news shares to Twitter and LinkedIn, saving photos from Instagram to SharePoint, tracking YouTube videos in Excel, posting a blog to WordPress once it’s approved in SharePoint, and uploading a YouTube video that creates an automatic WordPress post.
2. Automate your content creation for social media: Automate content curation for your social-media platforms by adding RSS feed items. For instance, you can use Buffer to selectively queue posts between different social-media platforms, including adding a feed item when it’s approved or without approval.
3. Automate email lists and campaigns: Automatically capture and organize data from different sources, including adding subscribers to your MailChimp list or adding a MailChimp list to SharePoint. Instead of a mail merge, you can also keep an Excel spreadsheet contact list and use a flow to send each person in your list a personalized email.
4. Stay informed about industry news: Keep your whole team up to date with industry news by creating daily RSS feeds that can scour sites, log the news to a list, and send a daily email or even a Slack message to your team.
5. Manage event registration: Create event registration forms and RSVPs. For instance, when you get a new registration, the system logs it to a spreadsheet, and it generates an email to confirm the registration and provide event details.
6. Track customer interactions for target marketing: Capture and manage sales and customer service-related interactions from prospects and customers to get feedback on products and services and create targeted campaigns.
7. Manage media and publications: Manage your media contacts, track publications and report, and create real-time insights on the daily data you gather. Here’s a great case study from Sarota PR about how it used Power Platform to create a tool called “Relations” to manage and track contacts, publications and data.

The benefits:

There are many great reasons to use Power Platform; these are the top three:

1. Return on Investment (ROI): A task that takes you six minutes each day, 261 working days a year, takes you 26 hours a year. If you use Power Platform and it takes you six hours to set up the task for automation, it’s a huge annual time saver, which allows you to focus on the bigger picture.
2. No need to purchase extra software: Most organizations already have Microsoft 365 subscriptions, so you already have many tools you’ll need to build automated workflows. Instead of subscribing to multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) products, you can build the ones you actually need.
3. The kicker to get you started with Power Platform: Microsoft has already created hundreds of Power Automate and Power App templates for you to get started.

The great part about Power Platform is you can continually adapt and grow your processes and create new ones when you need them.

We can help:

This is only the beginning. Now that you know just a few of the possibilities, you can identify marketing tasks to customize and automate your workflow for better decisions and processes within your team and organization.

We can help transform your digital workspace by helping you optimize your team’s day-to-day work experience with the best tools to get the job done. Contact us today.