Three of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. Whatever you business is, it’s important to consider which tasks you can automate in order to save yourself time and money. The following contributed post discusses this and is entitled, The Business Tasks You Can Easily Automate.
* * *
Automation not only gives you and any employees you may have, more time to concentrate on the kind of work that really needs a human hand and brain and less time on those menial tasks that are necessary, but which are not, perhaps, the best use fo anyone’s time. Not only that, but it can often boost efficiency, and both of these things combined will help you to save money where you can, and potentially make more through greater levels of productivity and creative thinking.
So, I’m sure you’ll agree that it makes sense to automate, right? But where to start? Here are some things most small businesses can easily automate:
Social Media
Social media is obviously a vital part of modern marketing, but it can be pretty time consuming if you let it. Luckily, there are tools like HootSuite which can help you manage your content more efficiently by enabling batch writing of posts, which can then be scheduled and posted at the proper time. Of course, if you have the budget you could always outsource to a social media manager instead, which may be even better than automating.
Online Ads
If you use paid online ads to generate traffic for your business, and you aren’t already, you should think about using some or all of the Top 50 Adwords automation scripts to automate many of the processes such as controlling and interacting with your data. It will free up heaps of time while ensuring that your ads are up and running and doing exactly what they need to be doing for your company.
Email Responses
Okay so you probably don’t want to go down the route of automating all of your email responses because, quite a lot of the time, your customers will need an actual human response that is tailored to their situation, and failing to give them one could land your company with a reputation for bad customer service! However, there are lots of aspects of email contact that can, and probably should be automated such as read receipts/acknowledgements and answers to the most commonly asked question for starters.
Bookkeeping
Unless you’re an accountant or you’re the only small business owner in the world who has heaps on time on your hands, don’t even try to do your own bookkeeping. There really is no need when there are numerous apps and software packages that can do the bulk of it for you just as well, and quite possibly even better!
Recruitment
Sorry, they haven’t invented a robot that will interview candidates for you yet, but there are programs such as ZipRecruiter that will take your carefully crafted job description and post it on all of the best job websites around the web, so that you don’t have to bother uploading it a million times or contacting a million different recruitment companies yourself.
Research
Don’t waste hours looking for the latest research in your niche when you can simply set a Google Alert to tell you everytime car manufacturing, digital sales or HR policy is mentioned anywhere online!
Automate the simple stuff, like this, first and your life as a small business owner will be so much easier. If you can then automate more complicated processes, well that will be of even bigger benefit to you and your bottom line.
