5 things business owners should automate

For business owners and managers, balancing your core role alongside other vital responsibilities that go hand in hand with running a business can be a significant challenge.

There are a number of ways to overcome these challenges, from assigning tasks to others within the business to outsourcing a particular function. However, many business owners these days are choosing a much simpler and cost-effective route to ensure that certain tasks are completed, by utilising automation.

Automation can help towards making a business more efficient, improve customer service levels and ultimately attract new business. Below we have taken a look at 5 things that we believe all business owners should automate:

Invoicing

Most of the leading accountancy software packages will offer some form of automation when it comes to invoicing and chasing payment. This not only saves a significant amount of time in actually raising and sending invoices, but also drastically reduces the time-consuming (not to mention stressful) task of chasing for payment.

Social media

There are a number of tools out there to support businesses within their social media marketing. Scheduling software such as Hootsuite will allow you to plan out your social posting in advance; whilst this does involve some time investment, scheduling ahead greatly reduces the amount of time that this task takes you away from other responsibilities.

Communication

Whether by email, via your website or on your phones, there are many ways that you can automate your communication with prospective and current customers, ensuring that getting in touch with you is as simple and as easy as possible. Whether it is proactively starting a conversation with visitors to your site through live chat, automated emails keeping your customers updated or even automated phone systems to direct calls to the appropriate party.

Reporting

Most reporting software, including Google Analytics, allow you to send an automated report straight to your inbox on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. By creating a report that follows your chosen metrics, be it site visits, conversions, time spent on a page or any number of other aspects, and by sending it on a regular basis, you are more likely to read and analyse the data, and amend your strategies accordingly.

Data Back-Up

With the introduction of GDPR last year, as well as the vast increase in the volume and sophistication of cyber-attacks, backing up your data is vital. To ensure that this is done regularly (i.e. once a week), there are many pieces of software out there that can automatically back up your data and save it in a secure location.

How has automation benefited your business? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter, get in touch today.