Five Ways to Automate Your Business
Automation is a game changer from a business perspective. It has saved the need for excessive manual labor and time and has made operations easier in a business. In addition, it has taken away human error from business operations and streamlined operations.
As someone running a startup, you need all the help and tools you can get to operate your venture smoothly and help it grow. However, like the rest, you operate on a limited budget and cannot automate everything simultaneously. You need to prioritize and then execute. We have compiled a list of ways you can automate your business and how it will be a practical step in its growth.
Best Five Ways to Automate Your Business
Automated Subscription
Is your startup model about providing a product or service for a fee? Is your startup a recurring service? If so, then a subscription mode of payment is best suited to create a revenue inflow for your company. It is a reliable and regular source of income for your company.
There are two subscriptions: upfront payment for the year or a monthly fee. Manually collecting these, i.e., a monthly newspaper subscription is bound to have human errors, not to mention time delays if people can’t or won’t pay on a particular day of the month. In addition, it causes a lot of operational errors.
Automating your subscription method is the best way to eliminate all of these problems. It will be regular and automatically deduct the needed fee from the client’s account at the right time of the month. BluLogix is a service for just this. If you want to look into some options and explore implementations, you can schedule a demo of BluLogix for more information.
Smart Advertisement
Gone are when you needed hefty budgets to run an expensive campaign to put yourself out there. With automated tech at your disposal, many of those costs have been significantly reduced for you. When creating and managing digital marketing campaigns, marketing automation could be beneficial for almost every kind of business. Marketing automation platforms can provide numerous advantages to businesses with multiple locations, such as franchises. The use of automated franchise marketing solutions will save a lot of time and money while also allowing marketing teams to work more professionally. After subscription, this is where your capital should be invested for your startup/business to grow.
Advertisement is all about using data collected from the market and creating targeted campaigns to convince customers to go for your product. The collected data lets you evaluate a strategy and build campaigns based on the audience’s preferences or product lifecycle. It isn’t easy to analyze and make sense of vast amounts of data. However, we now have automated learning tools like Google Ads to organize and make sense of the data and give you the results. Use them, save that time and possibly a human error for your company.
Furthermore, you now have social media and many other online platforms to conduct the advertisement part of your campaign. As a result, it is much more cost-effective; you can run the same campaign on conventional media platforms for a fraction of the price.
Search crawlers pick product keywords to put them on top for a certain search. Understanding how that algorithm works can be greatly beneficial as you will have to design your webpage and content according to that rank on platforms like Google. This strategy is an excellent win for startup businesses or those that have recently gone digital.
Incorporating IoT
Adapting apps and new developments from the Internet of Things (IoT) to your business can help you make smarter decisions to automate your business. Whether it is sales, marketing, or supply chain management, this adoption of workflows streamlines many work processes.
IoT connects all of your processes and data to work simultaneously. For instance, for any sale made online or in your store, any payment logged in a company computer will automatically update the total inventory with predictions and purchasing trends. In addition, the inventory will update automatically after assessing sold items while logging the cash flow. This method helps monitor your cash flow, review sale receipts, and identify loopholes that can help you cut costs.
Similarly, automation can help you enact a predictive maintenance regimen if you sell subscription-based software. This automation helps you monitor certain parameters and automatically send alerts to concerned teams to highlight issues before customers log reports and complaints. This way, you can keep your product running well while keeping customers happy.
Automated Communication
Startups that can not afford to hire a team dedicated to customer relations could opt for automated communication systems to cater to most customer-centric queries. This automation could be a chatbot software on your website, automated messages on your WhatsApp for Business, or an automatic bug reporting system if your mobile app crashes.
Moreover, automating newsletters, sending out emails, or uploading a social media post can get worrisome. All you have to do is schedule all this, and your software automatically sends it out to your subscribers. It is an excellent way of promoting any new service you are about to launch or giving a sneak peek into upcoming offers.
With regular, streamlined, and effective communication with technology, you can certainly expect to retain some customers and generate a substantial revenue stream.
Automated Accounting Systems
Automating your expense and income accounts can make the accounting process a lot easier for your business. It can help with effective receipt management, categorize receipts automatically, and make corresponding changes to your business financials.
There are several accounting tools that you can use to track business transactions. For example, QuickBooks Online is a bookkeeping tool that helps businesses keep track of their finances, regardless of scale.
In addition, connecting this tool directly to your company’s CRM can easily let you track customer payments and purchase history.
Moreover, other cloud-based accounting tools such as FreshBooks or Xero can automate credit control, purchase invoices, and bank reconciliation.
Conclusion
Automating your business can solve many problems while ensuring timely scheduling and recording all business processes and operations.
Automating your subscription service makes it easier for the business and customers. Since customers have the chance to choose their subscriptions and the business can automatically receive payments, which makes the process seamless for both parties.
Moreover, digital marketing tools like Google Ads and social media algorithms can help you successfully curate targeted campaigns. Similarly, incorporating IoT lets you manage your inventory effectively while improving customer service.
Automated communication and cloud-based accounting systems can save a lot of your time by automating standard business processes.
Following these tips can help you automate most of your business functions, making things easier to run.
