According to a study by Bain and VolvoMetrix, executives are on track to spend an entire day each week doing nothing but managing electronic communications. That doesn’t account for the time spent on meetings and other business tasks like marketing and managing details like invoicing. Fortunately there are ways to automate certain business tasks completely, or just spending a few hours a month setting up a process like social media and letting it run itself.
Here are some ideas on how to keep your business running smoothly without needing to be at the helm at all times.
Email Marketing
Keeping in touch with leads, past customers and current clients can be challenging. Now you can eliminate the need to continually follow up by automating your email marketing. Set up your campaign and determine when to deploy each email under certain conditions like when someone signs up from your website to receive more information about your business. You can also set parameters to follow-up with clients at the duration of your choosing. Tools like MailChimp and AWeber can help organize your campaigns and keep them running long after you hit publish.
Online Backup
Keeping your marketing, sales and inventory going is a big undertaking and often your website health can fall to the wayside. But if your site gets hacked or crashes, your business could tank with it. Set-up an automated backup system like Mozy Enterprise to instantly update your entire site without ever doing a thing. If your site crashes, you can restore the whole thing with a click of a button from just about any device. Or just restore the files you need on the go or after a document goes missing or has corrupted data.
Ordering Inventory
Don’t let ordering office supplies and inventory eat up your valuable time. Look over your orders from the past few months for supplies like ink cartridges and paper and determine how much you need over a set period of time. Next, set-up Amazon’s subscription service to automatically ship you a set amount of supplies during the duration of your choosing. And if you order supplies from B2B vendors, ask them to help set-up an automatic reorder system for your company to streamline the process.
Social Media Marketing
It’s true you can’t completely automate your social media needs like you can with your office supply needs, but there are tools to help set it and forget it. Take a few hours once a month to schedule out your social media posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus with a tool like Hootsuite. Set your messaging to go live on the dates and times of your choosing and then let Hootsuite do the rest. You can also set up streams to see who is responding to your messages and mentioning you in their feeds on Twitter and beyond.
How many passwords
Automate Passwords do you have between your invoicing software, web hosting, email, project management system, social media and automation tools? Streamline the process into one simple step by setting up all your passwords on a system like LastPass. Your password data is encrypted and decrypted locally before it syncs up with LastPass, keeping your data secure and accessible only to you. Or you can share your encrypted passwords with team members so they can access online tools like Hootsuite too. But don’t’ worry. AES 256-bit encryption technology means no one but you actually knows or possesses the password.
