Automate Your Business: Incorporate Systems That Work For You
Do you find yourself perennially buried under a pile of never-ending business TDLs? If so, then it’s probably time for you to streamline your work in such a way that your productivity is maximized despite minimal intervention on your part. Wondering how to derive maximum results when your involvement in your tasks is in fact going down? The magic word is automation! Automation is your answer to simplifying complex processes that might otherwise demand more of your time and effort to successfully tick off a task from your checklist. Introducing automation to business management could unlock the power of getting things done faster and in a more seamless manner, thereby allowing you to devote the extra time you have in ideating and strategizing to better your business prospects. Because, like most entrepreneurs, you should ideally channelize your energy on working on your business instead of working in it. And to better understand how to automate your business and which aspects to focus on when you delegate your work to specially designed automation tools, read this blog!
The Benefits Of Business Automation
There are many ways how automation can be of benefit to your business. And before you begin to work on putting aspects of your business on automation mode and get on to identifying areas that you might want to automate (we’ll come to that in a bit), it is important that you understand how it can benefit you. In this section, we shed light on some of the perks that come with automating your business.
- Boosts Productivity: When you automate a process, you potentially lessen your chances of depending on the productivity level of your resources. Automation tools allow you to set the timeline of your tasks according to your business needs. Thus, helping you get the work done faster and in a timelier manner. Moreover, it also minimizes the likelihood of errors, thus, boosting productivity.
- Improves Responsiveness: Since every substep of a task is automated, the responsiveness also improves. You no longer have to manually begin working on a subtask and provide feedback before moving on to the next step. This narrows down the waiting time between each task.
- Effective Time Management: What was once done manually could now be completed with the command of a click. A task that probably took hours could be accomplished in half the time, thanks to automation. This is the level of power automation brings to your business systems. It allows effective management of your time so that you can utilize your time and resources elsewhere.
- Reduces Costs: Think of all the finances that were earlier pumped into maintaining extra resources to get a job done manually? Automation could help you put a curb on those expenses. That is a major dip in operational cost. All those funds could now be parked under savings or invested toward other aspects like business promotion and increasing your brand visibility.
- Minimizes Errors: “To err is human.” But when you automate your business, you practically minimize or eliminate manual intervention from various business systems, thus bringing down the scope of mistakes and human slip-ups.
- Increases Efficiency: By introducing automated business processes, you could get a clearer idea of what is going on at which stage and how far that task is from completion. More visibility into the process accounts for improved communication, better task management, and seamless collaboration. Therefore, raising your business efficiency.
Common Business Process Automation Areas
1. Email Marketing
The success of your email marketing campaign can have a direct impact on the number of leads that you generate for your business. However, operating a large-scale or even a medium-scale business means exchanging multiple emails on any given day. And trying to manage this complex process manually could make you susceptible to errors. But when you choose to automate your business’s email marketing, you free yourself from keeping a tab on new emails, scheduling them, monitoring their response rate, and so on.
There are many email automation software available that can make the entire process hassle-free and super quick for you. Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend, Benchmark, and Autopilot are some of the examples of such software. These email marketing automation tools could help you perform many functions such as nurturing leads, checking email activity, advanced segmentation, response rate report, sending and scheduling automated emails, etc.
Related Read: Effective Email Marketing Tips To Get More Leads & Sales
2. Social Media Management
Social media marketing is the need of the hour for any business that wants to maximize its reach among clients. You can use different types of social media platforms to market your brand, expand your business reach, and generate more leads. However, managing all the different social media platforms and keeping track of your posts on all these platforms could eat up a sizable chunk of your time. And most importantly, your content has to be effective, well-thought-out, and posted, keeping accuracy in mind – because we all know that in today’s time, a social media goof-up, be it tagging the wrong handle or posting the wrong photo, could be bad news for your brand image. Therefore, let social media management tools do the mechanical grind for you while you invest your time in more productive business aspects.
Now, there are a variety of social media automation tools out there that could help you perform multiple actions such as building strategy, post automation and scheduling, managing user engagement, social media planning, etc. But it is important that you take a deeper look and go with a tool that is more suited to meet your business needs. Sprout Social, Planoly, Hootsuite, Buffer, SocialPilot, Sendible, and Loomly are some of the automation tools that you could check out.
3. Marketing
Marketing is one of the most integral pillars of any type of business. And social media management and email marketing are just some of the aspects of marketing. But, if you are looking to invest in automating your entire marketing process, including many of its subtasks such as auto-scheduling, analytics, managing and monitoring ad campaigns, and email marketing, there are several options that could help you control it all through one single automation tool.
Marketo, Omnisend, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, and AdRool are a few examples of tools that you can use to automate your business’s marketing. However, a word of caution, to make marketing automation work, it is also crucial for you to figure out when to opt for it and even then, closely monitor various aspects. To find out whether or not marketing automation is for you, take a look at these marketing automation statistics to get a better understanding.
4. Finance
Managing your finances can take up a lot of your time, but it is one of the most integral aspects of your business that needs a constant watch. Therefore, automating this part of your business can help you be more productive all the while monitoring important data with accuracy. Moreover, it allows you to securely store the data and easily retrieve information whenever required. Xero, Microsoft Dynamics GP, BackLine, Zoho Books, QuickBooks, and FreshBooks are some of the accounting automation tools that you can opt to use.
5. Customer Service
Automation can go a long way in personalizing the user experience for your business website. From chatbots to quick automated responses, there are many tools that can be used to elevate your customer service experience. In addition to that, these tools can also help you gather accurate data and product history in times of handling any query or case resolution. This can drastically decrease the number of customer calls as the resolution rate increases for text queries. This saves the efforts and time of human customer service resources for complex resolution actions and cases. Zendesk, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Olark, HubSpot Service Hub, and Intercom are some examples of customer service automation tools.
6. General Data Management
In general, many day-to-day office tasks require data storage and management – be it attendance data, employee information, performance and expense statistics, etc. Manual management of such a vast directory of data can increase the chances of human errors, data loss, and even compliance issues. However, automating this aspect of your business not only simplifies the process but also keeps everything, no matter how complex, in check.
Different Ways You Can Automate Your Business
Now that you have a better understanding of which aspects of your business could be automated, it would also be helpful to understand how it all works. There are multiple ways in which automation works – through automation tools and artificial intelligence-driven software. Automation tools are often pre-designed and built to perform a certain task, be it uploading, scheduling, or monitoring something without human interference. These tools can help you make a complex task run on its own, mostly without any coding knowledge and input from the user end. On the other hand, AI-driven software majorly help you with the analysis of data. So these software are often used to automate processes where along with data management, analysis as well as an understanding of that data are required.
Further Read: How To Drive Traffic To Your Website: A Guide For Business Owners
Every business is different and has different requirements as per their target market, product and service base, and operations. To figure out where you stand in the growth process, we suggest that you first analyze whether you want to upgrade your processes and scale up your business or bring a thorough change in the way you operate those processes. Every little detail needs to be taken into consideration before deciding on automating a particular segment of your business. Because for business automation to yield optimal results, it needs to be well-planned and carefully executed.
At Fotoskribe, we aim to help businesses like yours grow their online presence by delivering smart and meaningful content that engages your audience. And we do it in a way that gets Google’s attention.
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