When it comes to small business, it’s always better to work smart rather than work hard even though hard work does pay off. The truth is, every entrepreneur should work hard on their business if they want to make it grow. Since we live in the age of innovation, to drive growth and profit to businesses means to pursue that innovation.
When we say innovation, we mean technology and the gifts it has for all those busy business people looking for effective ways to increase productivity. Well, here is one word that echoes across the business landscape: automation. Automation is a way to get rid of repetitive processes by putting them on autopilot and shifting focus on more important matters.
Almost all businesses have more or less the same problem, which is not enough time and resources. Automation is the solution to that problem. It’s a way to make the most of the time and resources at your disposal by utilizing the highest tech solutions to automate and streamline your business processes.
The trick is to know exactly which processes to automate using the best automation tools that give proven results. Here are some ideas about how to make your small business efforts pay off using automation.
Automate Reports and Marketing Metrics
Back in the day, marketing metrics basically meant tons of paperwork and spreadsheets. Today, it’s an entirely different picture since modern technology made it so much easier to deliver the needed metrics in a predefined format.
Put simply, report automation is a simple process of scheduling existing reports, to automatically update and deliver them where needed, saving you time, efforts, and resources.
Instead of going through tons of data to find the most relevant information and then distributing it where needed, you can now automate these reports and spend your time on something more useful.
The benefits of report automation are:
- Freeing up time and resources.
- Getting report data in a timely manner with no waiting time.
- No manual intervention means no human error, which results in increased accuracy.
- Shifting focus to more urgent and important matters such as analyzing data.
- A cost-effective solution that is quick and easy to implement.
Streamlining Communication
Artificial intelligence can be helpful in driving growth to your business. Business metrics can be easily converted into data points that artificial intelligence can use to optimize many important things that determine the success of a company.
Well, one of those important things is streamlining communication and this is the best use of AI with chatbots, since the implementation of AI with chatbots can greatly help to promote better productivity and business communication.
Effective communication is essential to running a successful business and this is where streamlining communication can be of great use.
Open communication among your employees is extremely important and there’s nothing better than a proper automation tool with a user-friendly interface and online chat that will improve communication by creating conversation threads relevant to current matters to keep all the necessary communication in one place.
This is how you can make the best use of AI with chatbots, as this technology helps to create chats, track, send and create documents, schedule meetings, appointments and, pick one or more communication channels.
Chatbots can help you centralize tasks and communication and create defined roles. That way, your chatbot can act as a virtual business assistant that will route tasks to appropriate employees, while automating appointments and meetings. With such a system, you’ll always know what’s going on with your projects, tasks, employees, customers, and everything else related to your business.
Social Media Posting
Reposting old but relevant content is how businesses of today use social media posts to reach more people, generate more leads, and increase their conversion rates. The problem is, social media posting takes up a lot of time, regardless of whether you’re recycling old content or posting something new. To regularly post on social media, you need to keep that content organized and scheduled.
That means that you must be able to quickly schedule posts to different accounts, keep them stored in one place and ready for rescheduling. The best way to take care of this is by using automation to avoid all that trouble because you’ll definitely forget something – it’s just how things are.
Automating social media posts means publishing the most relevant content in a timely manner but with almost no effort from you or your employees. By simply scheduling posts with your automation tool, you can take care of this quickly and easily.
Customer Engagement
The way companies promote themselves will determine how effective they’ll be at reaching and engaging with customers. Marketing automation allows businesses to automate their workflows and tasks to increase their online visibility, presence, and sales.
This process includes customer relationship management, profiling, and engaging people to score more leads and nurture them. Once a business gets to know their customers and their preferences, the company can further engage with these customers by sending personalized emails with promotions and web recommendations.
This the best use of AI with chatbots, as these chatbots can be programmed in any way that suits your business needs.
Chatbot building platforms such as SnatchBot.me allow you to program your chatbots to engage your customers each time they visit your website. In fact, this is exactly how most advanced businesses use chatbots to generate more leads, reach wider audiences, and engage with their customers to increase sales and grow their business.
Invoicing and Billing
Now, all your efforts to improve communication, social media presence, reach more customers, and so on mean nothing if you can’t bill your hard work. This is where you need a hassle-free solution to efficiently manage your clients, projects, and resources but also project time. Tracking project status in real-time is the best way to be proactive and efficiently solve all problems before they escalate.
The power of automation is what you can harness to get paid online, create customized invoices and track projects much faster than before. A simple automation software will allow you to collaborate and manage your colleagues, clients, and receivables.
By automating payment reminders, and recurring invoices, even sending thank you notes, you’ll always stay on top of your billing and invoicing, while also providing your customers with multiple payment methods and a great user experience.
File Sharing
The key to becoming successful in what you do is by always looking for good ways to leverage technology to capitalize and stay agile in your business industry. With that in mind, centralized file sharing and file storage are simply crucial. That way, you pull up the most relevant information when needed and across multiple platforms.
Getting a good file sharing software with a wide range of useful features will help storage and share files quickly and easily, all while keeping your entire file system fully automated and organized. Archiving, version controls, folder organization, full-text search, document uploading, the power of technology, automation, and artificial intelligence will meet your specific requirements and branding needs.
On top of all that, it will keep your valuable business files safe and secure. Automated file-sharing software will allow you to receive notifications regarding new files and posts, create dashboards, manage workflow tasks, send emails, post comments while getting data export options, multiple file type support, and file previews.
By combining all these modern technology and automation tools, you’ll be able to take your business one step further than your competition and set an example of how to run your business using the most advanced technology to gain leverage and stay competitive in your industry.
