Save Time Without Hurting Results
Anyone who has run or managed a business already knows how busy that lifestyle can be. There are always fires to put out, relations to manage, employees to guide, and a huge range of other opportunities, hassles, and challenges that must all be addressed. Given this fact of business, anywhere you can reduce time is great and fortunately automation can help.
The maxim that time is money is truer in the business world. Further, reducing time spent may also help you develop a better work-life balance and thankfully, marketing is one business process where you may be able to generate huge time savings. Quite simply, many business leaders are inadvertently “wasting” too much time on marketing and if you’re a small business owner or manager, the needs are going to be even higher.
Often, you’ll be tasked with managing just about everything, including generating content, running social media profiles, checking emails, and compiling marketing reports. The burden of these tasks can be reduced through a variety of methods and automation is one of the best methods for reducing these burdens.
Automation Is the Answer, When Done Right
We’re going to jump into specific tactics shortly, however, it’s important to highlight the underlying theme of each tactic: automate, automate, automate. Automation can be used to handle tedious, boring tasks, which will allow you to focus on higher value, more intellectually engaging challenges.
Automation can both save time and increase ROI. You might think that results or customer satisfaction will drop with automation and this risk is real. Poorly done automation can annoy customers and lower your measurables, however, when done right your measurables may increase. Automated tools can generally respond much more quickly than humans and by focusing on more complex tasks you can solve your customers’ most pressing pains.
If you’re still not convinced that you need to automate you’re going to waste a lot of time. Even worse, some of your competitors will almost certainly embrace automation because 51 percent of businesses are already using automation.
Automate Your Lead Flow Lists
Leads are fantastic! Every sale is a great sale, however, when you generate leads, you may find yourself needing or wanting to build a leadflow list to upload into your CRM. This is highly effective for managing relationships. It’s also time consuming and boring.
With automation, you can set up automated campaigns to send out emails and nurture leads. You can also set your automation tools to automatically compile the lists and even to upload them into your CRM. Automation tools can also be used to tie together various other marketing tools, like email campaign managers and content managers.
As a result, marketers and business managers can cut down on the time spent on tedious, often mind-numbing tasks and instead focus on more challenging tasks.
With automation, you can set up automated campaigns to send out emails and nurture leads. Click To TweetPersonally Focus Only on The Highest Value Emails
Many small business owners find themselves dreading the minute when they have to open up their email inbox and the inbox is often overflowing. In fact, marketers will spend an average of nearly four hours a week just sending emails. Mind you, this doesn’t include checking emails, simply typing up and sending. Small business owners probably count themselves lucky if they “only” spend four hours.
Marketers email inboxes are cluttered with junk and sometimes those marketers are responsible for that junk. Regardless, as a marketer/small business manager, you need to cut through the clutter and a simple way to do that is to set up your notification to only buzz you when specific people, say your customer fan list, family, and employees email you. Automation at its simplest and best.
Use a Chatbot For Customer Service and Other Needs
Customer service is one of the most time-consuming aspects of many businesses. Customers have questions, and it often seems that no matter how informational your website is, customers won’t find all the information or process their requests on their own. Luckily, you can set up a chatbot to handle many of the most tedious requests.
A chatbot is an AI-driven bot that can communicate with customers, providing them with information and answering basic questions. Advances in AI have produced chatbots that can be shockingly intelligent. No, they aren’t human just yet, but the gap is slowly closing. Generally, customers will be able to escalate problems or requests to a human being if needed, but often the chatbot can resolve the problem.
This way, customer service departments can focus on handling the more complex customer service requests and it’s not only more efficient customer service, but also better customer service.
Conclusion: Automation is Bliss
Marketers, CEOs, and small business owners are all short on time and automation can help by automating many of the simplest tasks, which allows you to focus on the higher value-added tasks.
No matter what, you’re going to have a lot on your plate, automation won’t change that. However, automation can help reduce workloads, which can be a godsend for many people. Staff morale may improve, customers might be happier, and your measurables may increase. Yes, automation must be handled the right way, but by customizing automation to fit you and your customers’ needs, you can utilize automation the right way, which is bliss.
