Is your small business keeping up with the big boys? If not, you need automation, But how? First, it’s time to let go. Your business will grow when you decide to stop trying to do everything manually. You need to stop trying to be the superhero and take a new approach. And that approach is automating your business so you can meet your business goals quickly and efficiently.
Every entrepreneur’s dream is to be able to run a business on autopilot. There is severe competition out there that every business owner faces which results in a roller coaster ride on the journey to success. When you can automate even a few processes, it will help to free up some time so you can work on more essential things. But, what is this automation we are talking about?
Website Management and Hosting
Websites are not what they used to be in the early 1990s. These days, they do much more than show a 24/7 brochure. An effective website today will work like your own personal marketing machine. It should be able to handle a lot of traffic, pump out the conversions and maintain its weight when it comes to server bandwidth.
Websites that are well managed for growing businesses will not go without care, attention and maintenance. This is why you should invest in managed hosting to automate this aspect of your business. Managed hosting provides you with speed, security, no downtime, automatic updates, daily backups and expert technical support.
Email Marketing Tools
Tools for email marketing enable you to:
• Use Auto Responders
• Set Web Forms up
• Provide you with Email Marketing Reports (Click-through rates, open rates, etc.)
Marketing Automation
With marketing automation, you pretty much get everything you would with email marketing, but you also have the ability to set dynamic rules up for when behaviors or actions are indicated in your email marketing follow-up process. These types of automation tools are solid digital marketing platforms which enable businesses to:
• Do tasks that most email marketing solutions do
• Dynamically segment contacts
• Encourage solid email deliverability rates
• Send out the proper message to the right contacts at the right time
Contact Relationship Management
Setting up a contact management system (CRM) offers a lot of value to a business. Not many small business owners are using CRM for their business which is unfortunate since it allows a company to store customer and prospect data, manage workflow, and manage sales and a lot more.
The advantage of using a CRM solution can’t be understated. With CRM (and if you actually use it), human error is decreased (i.e. forgetfulness) when it comes to sales pipelines and managing workflows.
Social Media Automation
Although you are not able to automate pure engagement, real-time replies and genuine conversations with your customers, followers and fans on social media, there are other things you can automate. For instance, you can use tools like Buffer for Business or Hootsuite to schedule your updates.
Complaint Follow-Up Automation
No small business owner wants complaints, but they must be dealt with. You can handle complaints through automation which gives your immediate attention to the unsatisfied customer. It might surprise you how complaints seem to diminish just by having an email sent to the person with your apology for the inconvenience.
Outsource
Last, outsourcing is another form of automation. If you need something taken care of on a weekly or daily basis, you can outsource the task to another company or individual to automatically handle it for you so you don’t have to think about it and you know it will be done. It’s a great way to scale business.
