Small businesses are awesome, but they do face one inherent problem- not a lot of manpower- or womanpower!

Small teams often have far more tasks than time, and when you’re spending much of the business day attending to repetitive tasks, it diminishes your overall productivity and stalls your company’s ability to move forward. In order to do more, you have to streamline your workflow.

You don’t have the option to add more hours to the day, so you have to find a way to cut down on the time-sucking tasks- that’s where automation comes in!

Automation software has come a LONG way in the past few years. Algorithms have gotten smarter and more accurate, and you could practically automate every element of your business if you wanted to. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

Not every process is a good fit for automation. If it requires a lot of creativity, problem-solving, or critical thinking, you need to leave that to your human team members. But if it’s simply a repetitive task that eats up a lot of time without requiring a lot of input, it’s primed for automation!

Here are some tasks that can easily be automated to save a TON of time for your business:

Email

• Use a business communication platform like Slack to keep up with your team and cut down on the sheer volume of emails crowding your inbox.
• Use your CRM software to organize new business contacts and send emails to make connections.
• Automate email responses to contact inquiries that come from your website.
• Automate referral requests to be sent to customers once a project or job is complete.
• Use software to clean up your email list and weed out low-engagement subscribers.

Social Media

• Automate post scheduling and cross-posting.
• Automate bulk image resizing and optimization.
• Automate analytics reports to measure the success of social media strategy and track engagement.

Scheduling

• Avoid missed or forgotten appointments with scheduling software that confirms appointments and sends reminders.
• Streamline registration for webinars or events by using automation software to collect registration info, send thank-you emails and reminders.
• Use automation to send and receive important documents, and handle invoices and payroll.

Think of how many hours you can save by automating these simple tasks that take WAY too much time! Automating your processes and workflows is one of the easiest ways to up your productivity and do more with your business.

If you want to learn more about automating your workflow and increasing your productivity, check out this week’s episode of Building Your Empire with SophieZo.