Welp MagazineRunning a business is never easy. It comes with numerous tasks and processes to ensure that the business functions and grows every day. That said, not all tasks are equal. While some tasks are critical building blocks of your goals, others are repetitive, time-consuming, and can drain away from your resources and bottom line.
The answer to this is automation. It’s about setting up specific tasks to be implemented and completed with minimal intervention that can save precious time and effort. When thinking of automating tasks, make sure to partner with an expert to help you plan, evaluate, and implement your automation strategies. If you’re interested in using automation strategies, you can automation services like visit 1Rivet to know how.
That said, what tasks are the prime candidates for automation? Below, we enumerated some of the processes that you should start automating right now.
1. Marketing And Sales
Arguably, these are the most profitable uses of automation. Both marketing and sales are areas that still require manual input, but most aspects can be automated to increase productivity and increase your revenue.
For instance, email and content marketing are two areas that can greatly benefit from automation. You can use automation to curate fresh content, schedule, and send emails at strategic periods, as well as marketing tracking and reports.
In terms of sales, you can automate your sales pipeline, help with lead generation, and encourage repeat sales by automatically reminding clients about abandoned carts, suggesting new services and products, and so much more.
These are just some of the numerous tasks which you can automate to make your marketing, lead generation, and conversion more efficient and successful.
2. Data Backups
Cybersecurity is a growing concern for most businesses. From malware to insider threats, data loss or breach can significantly cost your business and damage its reputation. One of the best practices to ensure data security is regular backups.
However, regular data backups can be time-consuming. This is particularly true if you have lots of data that need syncing. Fortunately, you can easily automate and schedule backup duration. Some backup automation tools can even keep your business data connected to the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about updating portable hard drives or when saving a document.
3. Invoices And Payments
Cash flow is one of the biggest concerns of business owners. While there are numerous reasons for poor cash flow, customer invoicing and payment are two of the main culprits.
Most businesses still have manual invoicing and payment processes. They are stuck manually creating and sending invoices and following up on unpaid invoices, which are time-consuming and stressful.
However, you get paid faster by automating your invoicing and payment processing. Automation allows you to send invoices instantly, particularly if you have repeat clients, and even allows for scheduling follow-up reminders for unpaid invoices. By automating this process, you can free up your valuable time so you can focus more on beneficial tasks while ensuring a better cash flow.
4. Social Media Management
Businesses know the importance of having an active social media presence. Unfortunately, you don’t have the time to manage your social profiles consistently.
Using social media tools with automation capabilities allows you to schedule posts and promotions. This allows you to focus more on planning your social media campaigns and creating engaging content. Some tools even allow automatic interactions with followers including liking, commenting, or sharing relevant content.
Most social media tools also provide automatic collection and analysis of social reach and impressions across social media channels, generating real-time reports to help you tweak your social campaign.
5. Customer Service
Modern customers are more demanding than ever. They want a quick response to their queries and fast resolution to their issues. Automation can help streamline your customer service department, making them more productive while enhancing customer satisfaction and making them feel more connected with your business.
For instance, AI chatbots can engage and interact with customers when live agents are unavailable. You can also schedule or send an automatic email to respond to inquiries and issues. An automated help desk or answering systems also help customers easily find the answers they’re searching for or direct their messages to the appropriate department or employee for further processing.
Take Away
Automation can help simplify a business’s daily processes by automatically accomplishing tasks that you or your employee would otherwise have to complete manually. What was once reserved for giant corporations, automation is now accessible even for startups and small businesses, helping every organization to improve productivity and ultimately enhance their bottom line.
If you’re just starting with automation, consider automating the above areas first to streamline your workloads right away and gain more time for the more complex and important tasks for your business’s growth.
