It’s no secret that automation is one of the major trends that most businesses have tried to incorporate into their business plans, most with some middling success. The problem becomes that many businesses don’t really have a strategy for building out automated tools for their business, so they may not be able to take advantage of the benefits automation can bring. 

What Do Businesses Automate?

Most businesses operate in a fashion where they assign people to do tasks and expect that they accomplish them for the betterment of the company. For businesses that embrace automation, however, many tasks that would have to be scheduled and carried out by humans, can now be done in a fraction of the time by a computer. The more a business can automate those tasks, the more they can spend their time and money on focusing their workforce on revenue generating tasks and providing clients with better experiences. 

These days, there are more options to automate business processes than ever before. Let’s go through the functions your business can address through automation:

Marketing

Today’s business has to have a plan to get their brand out in front of prospective customers. Here are three ways you can automate some of your marketing tasks:

• Social media posts - Social media has become a major benefit for businesses looking to enhance their reach. There are several platforms available that allow you to automate your posting to social media. One of the best ways is to have a plan on your message and use a content management platform to push out social media posts (to several social media platforms) over time. This way you can plan your message and then let the software handle the release of these messages. 
• Website traffic analysis - If you use Google Analytics, it’s relatively easy to set up reports with specific metrics that are delivered to people that need to know weekly. This tool keeps people from wasting time trying to pore over all the data. 
• E-commerce or event registration - One of the best automated tools a business can use is the tool that sends registered users materials they find useful. If you sell products or have events, customers and attendees can get all the information they need to consider new offerings and get event information without having to take the time to send individual messages to every recipient. 

Finance

Obviously, the financial aspect of any business is crucial to its health. Here are two ways you can set up automations to help with your organization’s finances:

• Payroll - Payroll is one of the costliest and more crucial parts of your business. There are automated tools that take payroll off your HR department’s plate and ensure that everyone that needs to get paid does. 
• Accounts Receivable - Your hope when you run a business is that everyone pays when they are supposed to, this doesn’t always happen, unfortunately. Today, there are tools that handle invoicing automatically to ensure that clients know where they stand, what they owe, and get messages in regular intervals to make it easier to collect revenue. 

Administration

Finally, automation makes it simpler and more efficient to run a business by doing the things that need to be done regularly to effectively run a business. These include:

• Data backup - We often talk about how important it is to have backups of your data available to restore from should something go wrong. Today, tools, like our BDR service, allow for automated backups at predefined intervals to protect your business from data loss. 
• Cut down on email fatigue - Chances are if you are using email as a communication tool for your business, that your staff thinks they get too many emails. Maybe they do. Today’s enterprise email solutions often separate emails into folders that can help people get the information they need without the massive time sink that is involved managing their emails.
• Task management - There are platforms today that help keep everything organized and moving efficiently by sorting tasks by priority and time. This makes scheduling much, much easier. 

Automation is helping small businesses grow. If you would like to talk about how to get the automated tools you should be using to make your business more effective, give the IT professionals at 415 IT a call today at (415) 295-4898.