Key takeaways:

• Leverage technology to enjoy business freedom
• What to automate? All the possibilities
• Know the pitfalls of automation
• Get started with these practical tips

How can you effortlessly increase your productivity and effectiveness as a business owner, so you can focus on what you do best?

Easy: Automation and Systems!

Simply put,

• Automation = the key to business freedom
• Systems = the secret to scalability

Business Freedom Through the Power of Leveraging Technology

Technology makes it possible to put many of your business functions on autopilot.

Chatbots, autoresponders, email marketing automations, scheduling apps, automatic payments, reoccurring invoices…and the list goes on.

You can even get really fancy and create integrations between these programs, so that one action or program triggers another.

Automate Your Business: The Endless Possibilities

Ahh, the possibilities…just for starters, here are a few that come to mind:

• Marketing
• Prospecting, sales & onboarding
• Operations
• Accounting
• Tech support
• Client appreciation

Your entire sales funnel and customer journey can be dialed in and automated, creating a repeatable, scalable process.

For example, marketing automation often lies in the front end of the funnel, prior to the acquisition. Pre-scheduled social media and email marketing campaigns can lead to landing pages where prospects can opt-in or register. From there, you can setup an automated process of delivery, follow-up, and sales that follows the opt-in or registration.

The sales and fulfillment process is often automated to help achieve the immediate gratification that most new clients or customers have come to expect. Once a lead decides to buy, they simply have to enter their info and payment, push a button, and voila: the automation takes over with confirmations, delivery, and post-purchase follow-ups.

Onboarding a new client can be time-consuming but getting this process right could mean a big difference in the long-term value of the client. Instilling confidence at the beginning has a big impact. With pre-set intake forms, you can ensure you collect all the info you need up front, and then the submission can trigger the next steps, such as workflow templates and communications.

Accounting is often a necessary evil for visionary entrepreneurs, so it’s a perfect opportunity to incorporate automation. Setting invoicing to reoccurring, and bills to autopay have become fairly common place.

Tech support has come a long way with templates for chat bots, email autoresponders, messaging widgets, helpdesks, and FAQ databases. There are so many means of communication these days, that incorporating a few autoresponders and support automation is a great way to save your sanity.

What’s not to love about automation? Know the pitfalls:

• It’s less personal
• Yep, there is a margin for error…
  • Human error is unfortunately not eliminated
  • Tech updates and errors are not impossible
• You need to have a review process for content & errors

As with anything, you can turn errors and shortcomings into opportunities – there’s no such thing as bad PR, right?

Promises, promises – automation is great, but…

Robots will do everything for you while you sip cocktails on the beach watching the waves crash against the shore…nice!

But as a business owner, you know that if it sounds too good to be true…that’s because it probably is.

Automation is great, yes. Yet it still involves an investment of time and money (and common sense) to get everything set up and running.

If you try to automate before you have ironed the kinks out of your system, you may find yourself re-working things sooner than you anticipated.

Automation progress – Start getting your systems in place!

You know the saying: The best time to start is yesterday, the next best time is today.

If you’re not sure where to start on your automation journey, consider these quick tips:

• Find processes and systems in your business that are already running well. These are the ones to automate first because there’s less chance for change in the near future.
• Automating a new process could prove too time consuming once you factor in adjustments and changes.
• Before you automate, run through a process manually at least 3-5 times. Or, hire someone that’s already run through the process and can tell you the drawbacks and help you with the process. This can help to avoid costly recalibrations.
• Convert your Scheduling process to include some automation.
• Set up an Email Marketing system for a future Newsletter.
• Connect your social media profiles to a scheduling platform so that you can preschedule a week at a time to maximize your efforts.

Marketecs has put together some great resources to help you get a better handle on automation so you can make it work for your business:

• Time affluence: work smarter, not harder: https://www.marketecs.com/time-affluence-work-smarter/
• How to increase business productivity: https://www.marketecs.com/work-smarter-increase-productivity/
• All about autoresponders: https://www.marketecs.com/autoresponders/
• List of popular automation resources – https://www.marketecs.com/automation-resources/

If the concept of automating areas of your business processes sounds great – but implementation feels daunting (or if you just want to talk about available options)…let’s chat! Schedule a quick consultation at your convenience: Click here to schedule