Microsoft improves marketing operations efficiency with Microsoft Power Automate

With nearly 300 employees plus large offshore teams to support marketing operations, the GDC creates tens of thousands of Adobe Marketo Engage programs per year and operates one of the largest Marketo Engage instances in the world to build campaigns, send the right information to the right leads at the right time, and track engagement. 

As the GDC rapidly expanded to cover the entire commercial portfolio of Microsoft products, they needed to reinvent operations and increase efficiency and cost savings. “As the Global Demand Center expanded to serve new products and more customer segments, we needed to add more vendor headcount and capacity to build many more campaigns. We’d already standardized our marketing tactics and processes, but the rapid increase in scope and scale of the GDC required more human investment,” says Jen Lightbody, General Manager of GDC Marketing Operations at Microsoft. 

Marketing tactics like creating ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and events required ongoing setup and support in Marketo by people who build, manage, and localize the campaigns. There was additional pressure to maintain service level agreements with the hundreds of marketers that GDC supports around the world. That required even more people to maintain speed of support across multiple time zones. And adding more people, of course, required more budget.

The GDC needed to figure out how to make marketing operations more efficient to keep up with the demand for innovation and growth while keeping the budget in check. Fortunately, this was exactly the kind of scalability challenge that GDC was set up to manage. 

The GDC in partnership with Accenture and Avanade turned to Microsoft Power Platform to re-envision the experience of creating programs in Marketo, creating an intake process through Microsoft Power Apps, program flows through Microsoft Power Automate, and improved customer service and support through Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. “We realized we could leverage automation functionality to do many of the tasks that are standardized, repeatable and well documented,” Lightbody says.

Building the ability to scale

For a typical marketing campaign, a Marketo program is created, organized into folders, populated with marketing content, and sent to pre-determined leads. That requires multiple connection points between Marketo and Microsoft platforms.

Marketo sends marketing communications to leads based on certain filter criteria. Users enter information about their project in a Power Apps intake form—things like the title of the program, the audience, and the geographical area. From there it goes into a queue where Power Automate picks up the job and begins the actual execution.

They rely on the robotic process automation (RPA) capability in Power Automate Desktop to bridge that gap.

Deciding when and how to automate

While efficiency and accuracy are shared goals across all projects, no two jobs are exactly alike. The GDC team created a framework to help them quickly decide the appropriate level of automation for each. 

“We’ve made a principled decision to use APIs wherever possible, as this makes our automations more resilient to other platform changes. In some cases where an API is not available, Power Automate Desktop bridges the gap,” says Andy Girton, Solution Architecture at Microsoft. 

After they’ve completed the program the team logs everything they’ve done so they can learn from past projects, identify trends, and track any issues with the platform. 

Bridging the gap between APIs and RPA

The team uses the Marketo API to perform as many functions as possible such as cloning, renaming, and moving assets. But there are a few crucial steps that can’t be done through the API. “When we start hitting some of the limitations of API’s where humans typically step in for non-creative tasks, we switch over to flows in Power Automate Desktop. It’s virtually identical to having a human do it, which makes it one of the most valuable tools in our automation toolkits.” says Jake Anderson, Robotic Operations Development Lead at Microsoft. 

A key element of program creation in Marketo is the ability to populate the right content from marketers to create assets like landing pages and emails. Marketers enter campaign content into a first-party platform, Global Content Studio (GCS). The GDC team created Microsoft Power Automate Desktop flows to seamlessly stitch together the workflows in Marketo and GCS.  

Power Automate RPA selects an available virtual machine from a virtual network, creates the gateway, and logs in. This allows a bot to run unattended automation that does not require the use of a team member’s computer. From the virtual machine, with the Power Automate Desktop low-code, no-code interface, GDC users drag and drop actions and desktop- or web-based recorders to automate workflows such as pulling in campaign content from GCS. The bot performs actions like opening a browser window, logging into GCS, opening an existing project, updating content, clicking validation and submission buttons (triggering GCS functionality) and even intelligently progressing projects to the next creative task where humans are needed. 

Once those steps are done the team performs QA on the individual assets.

In some cases, the team uses Power Automate AI Builder models to pull content from Microsoft Word documents. For example, one process requires content handoff in a pre-structured table. AI Builder’s entity extraction model fills in the gap, pulling content from the document to add it to Dataverse and populate Marketo tokens. 

Reducing privacy and compliance risks

While automation creates efficiency, it has another important role: accuracy. Even the most skilled workers are prone to the occasional human error, but in marketing communications these errors carry tremendous privacy and compliance risks for Microsoft. An incorrect selection in a dropdown menu or a typo in a freeform text box could lead to incorrect targeting criteria, sending communications to the wrong people and creating a privacy or compliance breach.

Evaluating and prioritizing new requests

As demand for their services increases, the team needs to build efficiency into their own process, too. They use a scoring system to evaluate and queue requests and a Microsoft Power BI dashboard that tracks the number and types of projects they’re working on as well as the runtime of each project.

Marketers add projects to the queue by filling out an intake form with information about how long it takes them to do the task and how often they have to do it. The GDC team scores the request and feeds it into Power BI so they can see all the projects weighted against each other. That gives them insight into the potential business impact and time savings and helps them assess the suitability and readiness of each project. 

The team also uses Power Virtual Agents for project intake. Stakeholders with an idea for an automation can use Microsoft Teams to chat with a virtual agent and answer a few questions, and the automation takes over to add the projects to the backlog for prioritization.

Invisible success with a valuable impact

Automation frees up the marketing operations team to do the type of higher-level strategic thinking, decision making, and troubleshooting that only a human can do. 

While time savings and fewer errors are measurable ways to show the team’s success, when it comes to the end users—content teams and marketing leads—the sign of a job well done is that it goes completely unnoticed.

“Stakeholders don’t understand all of the things that are happening behind the scenes with automation. Success means they don’t feel the impact of human capacity reduction,” Lightbody says. “The best result is that our marketing stakeholders don’t even know that any of this exists because they’re able to retain the same throughput as they were before.”

Future goals: Replicating results

During the past year the Global Demand Center has focused on program automation for the corporate headquarters team. “Our goal was to recover at least 25% of our capacity and budget through automation, we’re on track to be able to do that by the end of this fiscal year. One hundred percent of these standard programs—more than 1,200—now run through an automated process,” Lightbody says.  Now they’re looking at how they can apply what they’ve learned to other areas of the business.

Next year, the GDC team plans to expand these capabilities to support the marketing tactics of Microsoft’s field marketers, where volume significantly increases to tens of thousands. 

“The code we’ve written to do Marketo programs for our corporate marketers is very similar to what we’ll do for field marketers. Through modularization in Power Automate, we can re-use components to save time for future development," says Lightbody. “We’ll leverage all the learnings and some of the code to achieve the same results.”