We all know that technology and the internet have “leveled the playing field” in a variety of ways, and perhaps one of the most powerful of these is access to automation.
It wasn’t that long ago when only the big players could truly automate business processes. Today, everyone from the wannabe entrepreneur launching a new side hustle to the owners and managers of small and medium-sized businesses can strategically automate important areas of their operations.
Discover how many of these automation opportunities can be a good fit for your operation.
Marketing
Marketing is a broad category and the one with the most choices. As much as I love apps like Hootsuite and Buffer, they don’t really automate social media marketing. Granted, they make it much easier and give you greater control, but when we’re talking automation, we need to focus on tools, apps, and services that allow you to essentially “walk away” from them once they’re up and running.
Social Juke Box: Do you know how pop radio stations are automated? They schedule a playlist for days and times, and then, like your favorite shampoo, rinse and repeat. (Okay, they don’t rinse.) This is what Social Juke Box does. You set up social media posts once—or grab a free group of topical posts—and create a schedule, and then hit “play.” They loop until you stop them, or hit the end date you’ve programmed in.
Paper.li: Create a daily “newspaper” on the topic of your choice. This is social media based and very useful if you’re looking to build your following. When Paper.li creates a newspaper for you from curated social media content, it credits various original posters and often they will, in turn, follow you.
Operations
As much as we live in the Internet Age, we still need to accomplish real things in the real world and automation in your business’s operations can pay off handsomely.
Warehouse automation: Many of us have probably marveled when Amazon has hyped different aspects of its warehouse automation. However, you don’t have to be a player of that size to get onboard. In its company blog, Cleveroad looks at the movement and goods and the decision-making process when it outlines different levels of warehouse automation—low automation, system automation, mechanized automation, and sophisticated automation—and gives a great overview of various systems. Although adopting warehouse automation isn’t as simple as downloading a landing page from your favorite SaaS, it’s a must if you want to stay efficient going forward.
Employee scheduling: If there’s one universally unthankful task in business, it’s creating employee schedules. Fortunately there are apps for that, even a free one (When I Work) if you have 75 or fewer users. Different businesses have different scheduling needs, so you might want to find out what others are using in your industry and see how they like their systems.
Call centers: If you have teams working to create prospects over the phone, a predictive dialer can boost efficiency. CallTools offers once such service. It eliminates the time your reps would waste dealing with calls that don’t go through to a live person on the other end.