Four Automation Opportunities For Small Business Owners
By admin
Almost every business could benefit from automating at least some of its daily tasks.
As we’ve highlighted above, there are tremendous benefits you can gain when you automate your small business.
The first step to automating a small business is to identify tasks that you can automate.
The best tasks to automate are simple, repetitive and require manual efforts to carry out.
Social media updates are a great example of this.
Posting content to various social media sites one at a time, typically repeated more than once a week, is a prime example of what can be automated.
But the application is not limited to social media processes alone, there are four functional areas where a small business owner can use automation to save time, and money and increase productivity.
Want to know which areas automate can help your small business run more efficiently and what tools to use? Here are four (4) areas business owners can apply automation –
1. Marketing
There are many opportunities for automation in small business marketing, such as social media scheduling, blog scheduling, lead generation, and email marketing.
Business owners can collect leads automatically by offering digital products and have software like Mailchimp send personalized emails to each new lead, they can maintain consistency and save time by using tools like WordPress and Hootsuite to schedule posts to their blogs and social media accounts.
Marketing plays such a critical role in the life of a small business that these tools would help upgrade your marketing while making it less stressful.
2. Customer Service
I believe it is the dream of every business owner to treat each customer well, but time and resources are just not sufficient.
That is no longer the excuse for businesses that learnt to leverage automation at different levels of their customer interactions; collecting feedback, sending updates and reminders, responding to enquiries etc.
The fact is that automation is so prevalent today that even mainstream apps like WhatsApp and Instagram now provide the option of automated welcome and keyword-triggered responses.
Customer relationship management can be automated in more areas.
The business is better equipped to interact with customers at scale with tools like Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
Learn More: Automate Your Small Business Like A PRO
3. Administration
Small businesses depend heavily on their ability to handle administrative tasks well to run smoothly day-to-day.
As a result, business owners must integrate automation tools into various administrative tasks, such as employee recruitment, appointment scheduling, etc., to improve productivity and efficiency.
Simple tools like Calendly can be used to schedule appointments, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) like Greenhouse can help automate recruitment exercises, etc.
4. Accounting
One of the most stressful aspects of a small business’s accounting activities is that at the end of the month is payroll, and the larger the size of your employees, the more stressful it would be.
But payroll is not the only opportunity small business owners can leverage to automate their businesses. There are also receipt generation, order collection, bookkeeping, invoice reminders, etc.
All of which can be automated with various affordable tools. There are a few top payroll apps in Nigeria and others like Wave, Accounteer, Quickbooks and Zoho.
There are many opportunities for small business owners looking for growth to infuse automation into their business processes. I hope this article will inspire you to start looking for automation opportunities in your business.
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Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
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