5 Ways Your Business Could Be Automating Right Now

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February 26, 2021 Business

The pandemic has done and continues to do many things, good and bad, to businesses across most if not all industries. It showed owners and leaders that many people, though not all, are perfectly content to work from home indefinitely and are productive while doing so. The pandemic has made it clear that businesses must be ready and able to adapt their business model to changing market conditions, sometimes overnight.

It also greatly sped up the digital transformation and in particular the rate of small and large-scale automation, that was already well underway in a great many industries and forced it upon others. This has been the case for businesses of all sizes and at all stages of the growth cycle. Below are 5 ways your business could be automating right now.

Leveraging Excel

Microsoft Excel is one of the most widely used and simultaneously underutilized automation tools out there. If you haven’t taken something like an in-depth VBA class or spent time self-educating on the almost limitless possibilities of this program, you are not taking advantage of the unparalleled automation capabilities it offers.

VBA is Excel’s programming language and it is most famously used to create what you may have heard referred to as “macros.” These are programs that are often created and executed to automate data retrieval and organization processes, eliminating tedious manual tasks and ensuring the accurate importing of data for a wide range of business or personal purposes.

Social Media Automation

Your social media channels are an important component of your customer engagement and marketing. Many businesses don’t realize that you do not have to stop what you are doing every time you want to post something on Facebook or Twitter.

If you are in the habit of making several social media posts throughout the week, you could set up an automated posting schedule today using a program such as HootSuite which lets you write all of your posts at once and then release them at scheduled intervals as you see fit. This way you ensure you are on top of your social media game while attending to the more important strategic and macro-level tasks that should take up the majority of your time.

Blog Content

If you don’t have a blog that you are writing SEO-optimized content for on a regular basis, you really should, and if you already do, this process, like social media, is another thing you could be automating. Instead of allocating time each week to writing scheduled blogposts, if you already have the ideas and topics ready to go, you can write in batches and then automating their releases using WordPress.

Keep in mind, too, that there is a considerable amount of both research and anecdotal evidence suggesting that timing matters when it comes to content release, which varies based on your target market(s)’ location, your time zone and whether you are B2B or B2C.

Website Analytics

Website analytics, which is the data Google provides you on things like site traffic–where your visitors come from, how long they spend on page, at which point they abandon a checkout process etcetera–can also be automated. Instead of going into your reporting every day and scanning for the information you want, you can simply set up your analytics so that you receive a report in your inbox once a week telling you what you would like to know.

Customer Relationship Emails

Retaining your customers in a highly competitive global marketplace is no small task, so anything you can do to show them it makes sense for them to keep their business with you is worth your while. This includes things that are as seemingly mundane as holiday and birthday greetings sent to clients.

They don’t have to be elaborate. There are plenty of email automation features that allow you to create personalized templates that are automatically sent on select dates. This takes no time to set up and the impact they make could end up securing you renewed contracts and positive referrals.

Conclusion

Automating doesn’t necessarily mean massive overhauls to the way you do business or widespread redundancies. Digital transformation takes place on both large and small scales. Some automation efforts require significant time and money to implement. Others, like those covered above, are ones that you can put in place today, at no cost to you, which help chip away at your daily and weekly tasks, streamlining your workflows and reducing and systematizing repetitive, though by no means unimportant work.