Where are some of the areas in my business I can get some automation efficiencies Doctor Digital?
Doctor Digital Says
At the Digital Ready for Business program, we love us some automation and efficiencies. One of the common things our Coaches hear from clients is the frustration of the time that gets chewed up managing all of their digital channels and products when they want to be selling or creating or making content. As you get more confident with the digital landscape and managing your tools, you might find you are ready to set up some automation in your key business areas to help save you some time and hopefully money.
Here are four areas you can look to for some automation gains:
Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation is software that helps organizations automatically manage customer marketing operations across multiple channels and automate repetitive marketing and sales tasks. Marketing automation platforms use tools that streamline and simplify the tasks needed to support a marketing campaign. With marketing automation software, an organization can initiate a marketing campaign that targets its customers with automated messages using the web, email, social media, and texting. A variety of communications are sent automatically, based on instructions or rules that create workflows without the need to manually hit send for each email, campaign, message, or post. A good automation strategy, combined with good marketing automation tools, will identify the customer base, design the most appropriate content, and then trigger the marketing process. Automated marketing strategies take the manual labor out of digital marketing. They also support analytics, lead generation, and help improve the customer journey. Some examples of marketing automation software include:
OptinMonster – Best lead generation software
Constant Contact – Highly-effective email marketing tool
SendinBlue – All-in-one digital marketing tools
Drip – Marketing automation tool for eCommerce
HubSpot – Inbound marketing and sales software
Customer Service
Although you’ll probably always need (and desire) some real live folk to serve your customers, small businesses today have access to tools that can largely automate simpler forms of customer service. AI-powered chatbots, for example, can act as a front-line customer service resource by providing basic support and answers to your clients. CRM automation can also support a better, less labor-intensive workflow for your customer service staff. Basic customer support functions like ticket generation, quote management and account management are fairly easy to automate with cloud based CRM systems. By automating these simple tasks, you can free yourself or your peeps up for more important work that requires human decision-making skills. These platforms all rate well for customers service with a range of pricing and options depending on your needs:
Social Media Automation
Automating parts of your social media can really free up some time to let you create more quality content for that hungry beast. Firstly however, you need to have a process in order to automate. In other words, the starting point for automation is always having a social media strategy and a way to execute it effectively. Many businesses and marketers make the mistake of allowing the tool to define the process, but the idea of leveraging automation is to simply save time on the tasks that you normally do. Basically, automating your social media posts can help you schedule once and reap long-term benefits, get more results with less effort, communicate consistently and intelligently with your following. You will still need to write for your platform, customise your message and create compelling content, but once that's done, you can schedule it all out and let your platforms do the work. Automated tools can also analyze the data from your posts in real-time and report key metrics like engagement levels, impressions or reach. Some tools will also have customized reports so you can go deep on your engagement and what posts are really hitting the mark with your audiences. Aside from social scheduling, other forms of social automation could be using chatbots to respond to messages and getting notifications of social conversations. The follow platforms are well regarded for social media automation and worth a look to see if they meet your needs, if not, there are plenty of others to consider.
Business Automation Tools
There are lots of things in your business that are just better automated than manual. In this final category are a handful of essential tools that might just change your life - and your business for the better.
Calendly - calendar and scheduling tool.
Xero - accounting and bookeeping automated across multiple users.
Zapier - allows you to create automated actions between essential applications used by businesses in every industry.
Grammarly - automation tool for the grammatically-challenged amongst us.
WordStream - automation tool that simplifies pay-per-click advertising on Google Ads which can be unnecessarily complex.
So many helpful tools there for you to explore, you are sure to find some gems to get your business working while you are playing. If you want help getting ideas where you can optimise the digital elements of your business why not reach out to one of our Digital Ready Coaches and use their crack skills to support your business brilliance. Book a session here.
