Are you planning to start your own business? But have you thought it through?
During your startup phase, you would find it easy to put in manual effort to promote your business and hunt down the first customers. However, as soon as your little business experiences the growth spurt, it will not be long before you become overwhelmed with the manual processes, sales cycles, and tackling customer retention.
Eventually, it may lead to frustration or negatively impact your personal and professional life, but not when you take advantage of business process automation.
Studies have shown that more than 40% of big business owners have fully automated their companies. At the same time, 25% of the small businesses have already accelerated their business growth with business process automation.
So, to help you kickstart your small business and turn it into a big name, let us tell you all the reasons why your small business needs automation.
To execute business operations in a lucrative way and capitalize on your sales funnel, you must leverage the innovative business automation tools.
Even though automation has gained immense popularity, especially to speed up the sales process and eliminate human errors, many small businesses fail to acknowledge its importance.
When you first hear "automation," tech-fancy words like robots instantly strike your mind. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Whether knowingly or not, the good part is that you might already be using various automation tools.
For instance, a freelance writer might leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like Article Forger or Shine Ranker before they fully understand the concept of automation.
Investing in a powerful tool to up your sales strategy game may seem scary initially- but isn't it what businesses are about- taking risks? But once you know its long-term benefits concerning the sales cycle and customer acquisition, there will be no turning back.
Different marketing automation areas, like email marketing automation, can easily tackle various repetitive tasks without any human intervention. Not only does it save time, but it also cuts down costs.
Here are three ways that will show you how your business can grow with automation:
As per a study published by emailmonday (a marketing consultancy firm), 51% of the companies leverage automation regardless of the size or type of business.
Sales and marketing automation enables small businesses to automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it also allows the company to target a bigger audience and get more sales with enhanced operational efficiency.
Any small business can approach every potential customer via multiple automated marketing channels like websites, social media, and email. If you are new and just stepping into a highly competitive market, automation can help you with new leads.
Furthermore, it also enables you to provide 24/7 customer support using chatbots that can help you understand the customer's mindset and views on your marketing and sales efforts.
All in all, automated marketing campaigns improve sales conversion. Presenting another great reason why your small business needs automation.
Despite the innovation and advancement in accounting automation and technology, 72% of small businesses still prefer human accountants, as per the studies shown by Xero, a software company.
Given that times are changing, especially after the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic, automation in the accounting and finance sectors is now coming under the spotlight.
Tech-savvy payment processing, managing finances using Google spreadsheets, and automated tracking can accelerate business growth, reduce manual efforts, and reduce costs.
Background checks, interviews, scheduling, etc., are crucial elements when streamlining the hiring and talent acquisition process. The automation of the human resource or HR department can make the process a lot simpler, easier and faster.
Internal talent searches, sourcing, screening, interviewing, and evaluation of candidates can be handled by chatbots and AI (artificial intelligence) automated tools.
According to several studies, around 30% of companies face massive losses in revenue every year. And the biggest reason is human inefficiency. Not complying with deadlines, poor customer support, or deteriorating sales reps can flatten or lower your business's success plateau.
So, while you are still at it and finding ways to grow your small business speedily, automation should be your priority.
Even though your heart knows automation is the key to your business's success, your mind might still be playing tricks to make you believe that only humans can ensure an intelligent workflow.
To paint a more clear picture, let us help you acknowledge what automation can do. Here are some benefits that will want you to automate everything around you!
The process any company execute to find new customers and turn them into long-term paying customers via different sales and marketing techniques is called lead generation. This process requires hefty tracking of the customers, brand awareness and promotion, qualified leads, and lucrative deals.
Automating the entire lead generation process helps you improve your sales and rapidly grow your business by tracking multiple leads in one go.
Using today's advanced technology, around one-third of the entire sales and operational processes can be easily automated, as per research by McKinsey.
Automating the lead generation sector of your small business can help you with many things. With less repetitive and tedious tasks to tend to, your sales teams can focus more on "selling" and close more deals. Therefore, you get better sales teams productivity, a much faster sales process, and more sales in the pipeline.
If your sales cycles are improved, you can get better insights for lead generation and, ultimately, more satisfied clients.
Small businesses can seamlessly utilize customer service automation for better customer engagement.
With time and technology, users have become impatient and more demanding. They expect speedy responses in terms of their services. This is why customer service automation can turn the tables in your favor.
Automated tools like chatbots can perform their tasks more efficiently and 24/7 with no chances of human error. As the efficiency improves, more people are drawn to your business. Internet, particularly emails, has taken over the SMS or texts primarily used for customer service in the past.
Online, automated customer service enables you to deliver always-on-time and rapid responses to customers resolving their queries and problems the moment they arise.
Bots or other automated communication channels quickly accommodate every customer, no matter the severity of their issue. Fortunately, the customers do not have to wait in long queues to resolve their concerns.
Moreover, the company does not need to hire more people even if the customer influx increases. Bots are well-versed in tackling multiple things in one go without any hassle. Reducing stress on your team and clients can be a great reason why your small business needs automation.
Automating the content creation sector reduces the need for writers, editors, or any other human intervention from the content lifecycle.
In today's digital era, AI-driven content creation has successfully taken over the major parts of blog posts, articles, and copywriting. With more promising innovations, AI is soon likely to create videos and audios with prompt decisions and inputs from humans.
Moreover, content automation has shown better content flow and turnouts. It also enables you to customize your prospects and enhance the user experience. From content creation to distribution, content automation can boost sales conversion and accelerate the growth spurt for your small business.
As already mentioned, automation tackles repetitive tasks in a hassle-free manner, so you do not have to hire or train new people to scale your small business.
Automated tools efficiently increase consumer demand and the bulk in order volume. Moreover, automation allows you to meet competing deadlines while taking care of the inventory, order process, and even payment without human intervention.
Your company can easily scale up and comply with the market demand; it can also cut down the costs on many fronts of the business process by using automation.
With reduced labor costs and better work efficiency, your company can easily optimize its marketing budget and improve the ROI (return on investment), simply by taking advantage of marketing automation.
Even if you do not have a high budget, you can still use many pocket-friendly tools to automate your marketing campaign, advertising, CRM, and sales, targeting the audience and eCommerce.
It becomes easier to analyze, process, and organize customer data by using automation. And then, you can use that data to implement strategies and improves your company's sales.
Humans get tired, sick, and bound to produce errors- even if not intentionally because it is in their nature. At the same time, automation is free from such drawbacks' and can enhance the accuracy of several business processes.
Automation can do everything from using smart inventory tools to eliminate manual counting to using shipping and scheduling software for the right labels and error-free management.
During the stressful Covid-19 pandemic, while many people lost their jobs, others shifted to work from home or in a remote workforce. Remote hiring and managing businesses enable you to work with the right and talented people while cutting down many business expenses like employee hiring, electricity, workplace rent, and other office-related expenses.
Automation plays the biggest role in remote acquisition by seamlessly connecting everyone virtually.
Tracking the employee performance or project process manually can be draining and prone to errors. Automation ensures a smooth workflow and helps you track the ongoing projects while connecting and updating every employee to keep them all on the same page to improve collaboration.
Any business can get into big trouble if they fail to conform to the industry and government regulations, including tax compliance, customer information, etc., resulting in costly outcomes.
The best way to ensure that your employees follow and comply with all the regulations and expected standards is to automate the entire process. You can also personalize the automation process by adding more rules to ensure your small business's smooth, legal running.
There are so many automation tools that there are great chances you will get confused about what to choose. The best way to know what tools you need is to look into its offers.
Even though almost all tools offer a free trial period, to use the tools to their best, you need to sign for the paid versions.
To help you with your search, we have enlisted some of the popular tools in 2022:
It is a Article Forge copywriting automation tool that leverages machine learning and AI to produce high-quality, enticing content for blog posts, social media ads, marketing campaigns, landing pages, emails, etc. The best part is that you can write time five times faster in the same fraction of time as you would manually.
If you want to improve your website's visibility by ranking it higher on search engines with upgraded marketing insights, then SEMrush is your tool. You can use it for keyword research, SMM, PPC, SEO, PR, content marketing, etc.
Phantom Buster is a cloud-based data extraction software specifically designed to help businesses automate their marketing and sales processes, especially the new and small ones. Any company can use this tool to scrape user data from various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., and then save it in the cloud using the JSON or CSV formats.
Apart from the three discussed, there are many other tools beyond the scope of this article to talk about.
The world is moving faster than you can think, with innovation in technology and automation every passing minute.
Automation is gradually taking over the industry and will soon rule the world. So, if you do not bandwagon the "automation" trend right now, you will have a hard time surviving in the market and that's why your small business needs automation.
Yes, automation can improve customer services. As an example if a customer has a complaint, you can have an AI chat bot communicating with the customer to help resolve the issue instead of waiting for a representative to become available.
Business automation can be utilized on all aspects of business. The process of utilizing automation is where you reduce manual labor to complete a task and you utilize software or hardware to complete the task.
There are many types of business automation. There is software automation. Software automation could be Xero. The accounting software helps reduce the accounting labor. A robotic arm that helps construct the Tesla vehicles could be considered as hardware automation.
Ronald Osborne is an experienced business coach. With over ten years of experience, an MBA specializing in Finance, and several multimillion-dollar contracts. Ronald has been able to help large telecommunication companies, law firms, trade businesses, and everyday business owners improve their business and take it to the next level.
