The business world is one of various industries and sectors, each bringing its own products or services to the table. For the most part, there are overlaps wherever your look, with businesses big and small vying for the attention and custom of their target demographics.
Within each of these companies are hundreds of people working individually and as a collective to ensure that tasks are completed. These tasks provide the continued and effective running of the company and contribute towards its overall success.
At the same time, it can often appear tedious that many of these tasks require some oversight to be done. If you are a small business, you might not have enough people or enough hours in the day to ensure that someone overlooks each task.
While some tasks might not significantly impact your business’s overall success, there are others that will. Naturally, as a devoted business owner, you want to do what you can to ensure these tasks are completed to the best possible standard, no matter how tedious they may be.
However, driven entrepreneur, you have found yourself in the right place at the right time. Detailed here, you will find the ultimate guide you need. Making a note of some helpful resources for you to consider, automate those tedious tasks and focus your attention on other vital parts of your company.
Marketing Automation
Marketing techniques have undoubtedly changed over the years and have adapted to the new world we find ourselves in today. Increasingly driven by technology and related aspects, you can expect to find and receive marketing messages through various avenues. Each tailored to target you differently, bigger businesses automate this aspect of their business model.
Particularly if you have thousands of customers through your doors each day, you simply do not have the time in the day to email them each individually while managing and overseeing the other aspects of your company.
Implementing a software or programme into your company would automatically send marketing emails and posts to those signed up. This frees up time you would previously have spent addressing this task. While it might not be tedious to every businessperson out there, it can certainly appear that way to a vast majority of people!
Marketing can be time-consuming, and this is not just restricted to the one-way communication channels of emails and other related avenues. We will talk more about this a bit further on.
The marketing strategies in your business are paramount to your success. Take time to get it right, and your efforts will soon come to fruition. At the same time, the marketing tasks within your business are not the only potentially tedious tasks that exist. This leads us to the next point.
Managing Internal Company Information
Ensuring the organisation of data and information within your company is critical. Both when handling information relating to your business itself, but that of your customers, you must do what you can to remain compliant with specific data rules and regulations. Not to mention, ensuring the information is presented in a way that is easy to read.
Spreadsheets and Excel are often used when managing and maintaining information within companies. Businesses big and small will collate information relating to the company and contain it in one manageable area. For the most part, this works well and enables businesses to group specific details in one place and easily compare it.
At the same time, this can be a bit of a time-consuming process. Mainly if you are a small business, you might not have the time to continually manage and maintain this upkeep. This is a process within your business model that can be automated.
Visual Basic for Application (VBA) coding is one method of doing so and can be linked with Excel to fully automate any tasks you might have on there. This minimises the time you would previously have spent picking apart the information and managing the tasks yourself.
Learning how to manipulate and write the macros and VBA coding needed for automating this process can be challenging. Using services and resources from organisations like Excel Off the Grid will make the overall process that bit easier.
Sales and the Generation of Leads
For the most part, this is an element of business that seems somewhat challenging when contemplating how you can automate it. Not to mention, in an increasingly technology-driven world, we don’t want to be faced with a computer at times like these, when we would simply prefer to talk to another person on the other end.
While we recognise that is very well the case and that it can seem challenging, there are ways around it. Implementing a platform to automate part of the sales process will make the overall journey a lot smoother. At the same time, the time you would previously have spent guiding customers and clients through the buying process can be spent on other essential tasks.
Using a fully automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system within your business model will enable you to automate your company’s buying process and generation of sales. Guide your potential customers to the CRM system to complete their sale while you have a designated person to find said customers, which will further help speed up the process.
CRM systems enable authorised users to monitor the progress of a sale; you needn’t worry about losing out on a sale should someone get confused throughout. Have a designated sales representative in your business monitoring this progress, and you will have a foolproof system on your hands!
Social Media Posting
In this day and age, creating and scheduling social media posts can appear one of the most time-consuming parts of running a business. While it might not seem like it to the more traditional folk out there, this is an entire job in itself and takes a lot of time, effort, and resources to complete.
Not to mention, there must be a social media strategy behind any decisions you make, for you want your efforts to come to fruition and to be successful. Implement software like Hootsuite or something similar into your day to simplify the social media scheduling process. Platforms like these are often free to access and can be linked with all leading social media networks.
Set aside a specific time each week to organise any posts you want to upload moving forward. Rather than taking some time each day, you will be able to schedule and automate the entire process with the click of a button.
At the same time, software like this enables you to monitor the engagement with your posts; you would be able to see the type of content that your customers and audience prefer the most and whether there are specific times of the day when customers are online and active.
Use this information to the best of your ability moving forward and ensure that your social media efforts are as successful as possible.
We hope you have thoroughly enjoyed this piece and are leaving us feeling enlightened about what practices within your business you will be able to change and alter to free up some time. While we understand that some business owners might be apprehensive about automating aspects of their company, it is certainly worth considering as we edge ever further into the future.
