Why You Should Automate Your Small Business
4 minute read time
Automation is a term used to describe the use of technology to perform tasks with a reduced need for humans to intervene.
Automation is either your favorite thing ever or a fever dream. Will robots and AI take over your career? Your life? The world?
No.
At least not for the foreseeable future. Even if the "automation takeover" will occur at some point, you might as well use the advantages of automation to your benefit before it becomes the new normal.
Automation is one of the most incredible ways to scale your small business, and automation is the future of social media, marketing, and the world. Today, I will share how to automate your business to help you keep working on the things you love to do and automate the dreadful tasks of the day.
Social Media
If you are a business owner and you do not have social media. You're already ten steps behind your competition. Social media is the best way to get your product or services in front of possible customers or clients. The best way to automate your social media account is to use a service like Zapier, HootSuite, or Later. All of these services allow you to schedule social media posts across many different social media platforms. They also have great analytics to show you the best times to post and which posts perform better overall. Out of those three, my favorite (but more costly) is HootSuite. It allows easy access to schedule posts across numerous social media platforms with a calendar view.
Email Marketing / E-commerce
Email marketing is one of the best ways to minimize turnover with your current clientele. If you own an e-commerce business, email triggers and promotional automations could cut your time down significantly. These automations could include abandoned cart emails, holiday sale emails, newsletter emails, and more. For example, if your customer purchases a toothbrush that you sell, it would be a good idea to set up an email automation that sends your customer an email asking if they would like to purchase another toothbrush every three months, so they are ready when their toothbrush needs to get thrown out. That's just one example. This method can be done in a couple of ways. Shopify has been improving its email automation services. It has gotten pretty good. MailChimp is one also a service that helps you create email automations and provides analytics with those emails. Of course, this will not work for everybody, but if you think outside the box, there have to be at least one or two ways to incorporate automation to reduce your time spent doing things you don't genuinely need to be doing and deliver more profit for your business.
Your To-Do List / Calendar
Automating your calendar is one of the most under-utilized ways of automation. It could be as little as making a yearly reminder to wish your favorite client a "happy birthday." This effortless task helps develop rapport between you and your clients. While there are many calendar and to-do apps and services, my preferred duo is Todoist and Google Calendar. These two services connect seamlessly, allowing me to turn my calendar INTO my to-do list. I use Google Calendar more than Todoist for automation purposes. For example, my entire morning routine consists of a couple of things:
Wake up
Brush teeth
Make Coffee
Check emails
Walk outside for 15 minutes
Marketing for one hour
Exercise for one hour
Shower (and shave every other day)
I must follow this every morning. Because these are daily tasks, I have set them as recurring daily through Google Calendar. No need to schedule them every single week since I know these are non-negotiable. I automate the calendar to assign these tasks to me. This tiny automation saves me around 10-15 minutes every week. While it may seem silly to think this little automation is incredibly valuable, adding the time it would take to set up my morning routines, weekly would be about ~520 minutes a year (~8.67 hours a year). That's a whole working day. If you get a bunch of little automations like the one I described going, you will save countless hours of sanity and have time to work on the things you genuinely love to do. That's not to say that you have to do exactly as I do; I am a crazy person and schedule every little thing in my day to maximize productivity. What works for me may not work for you, and that's okay. A service that I found particularly helpful in automating your life is Motion. The best part of Motion is that it replaces the need for multiple services to schedule your life with its built-in to-do list and calendar. It also has a scheduling service like Calendly. In short, Motion is like Todoist, Google Calendar, and Calendly built into one service.
Final Thoughts
Automation is the future of humanity. Whether you like it or not, humans will continue to automate their lives. I encourage you to research and figure out which automation tactics and services work best for your business. It's up to you to start now or get left behind. Even if you do not own a small business and ran across this blog post out of pure coincidence, I suggest you think about what you can automate in your life.
It could save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life.
