Managing your business is hard enough. There are lots of things you need to take care of – creating product, managing employees, finances, billing, communication. And the list goes on. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could somehow automate the bulk of mundane work?
Well, you can. It’s 2017 and there are a lot of automation tools out there that you can customize so they’re tailor made for your business and needs.
So, let’s dig right in and see how they can help your business grow and scale.
1. Communication
Communication is one the largest time sinkers in business. Proper and organized communication leads to more efficient work, however, over time people tend to mix up different topics, and before you know it – everything is just one long conversation. Or, even worse, they over-bureaucratize things and suddenly you need to send 3 official mails for a simple question.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had a scalable tool, that lives in the cloud but you can also use it natively? One which allows you to create topic specific channels so you always know where to write, or look up for an answer? One that actually allows you to easily share files between colleagues?
It would be. Actually, it is. Try Slack. This award winning tool allows you to do all that and more. You can quickly add hooks and install APIs, interconnecting it with different web tools, allowing more efficient work. It’s free to use, with some limitation, and you can always go for the Premium version and use the full range of features it offers.
If you haven’t already heard for Slack or implemented it yet in your business process, it’s definitely time to do so. You’ll never look at office communication the same again.
2. Mail
Let’s be real here. Creating a quality list is extremely important if you want to grow your business. Whether you sell services, digital or physical product, a good list creates better rapport with your clients, generating more sales.
When choosing a mail automation tool you want something that allows deliverability and ease of use in automatically growing your lists. MailChimp is an excellent way to easily grow your list. It allows you to choose from various templates, create your own, has an extensive troubleshooting library and is one of the most recognizable email software out there.
The Basic plan is free and allows you to send up to 10000 emails to 2000 subscribers on a monthly level. Any more than that, and you’ll have to upgrade to Premium. The plans start from $10 per month, but with the current pricing plan, MailChimp almost ensures that you only pay what you need and use.
3. Social Media
Everybody knows that social media is an extremely important part of every business, whatever the niche you’re in. Simply, if you’re not there, you’re missing sales.
However, if you don’t have a dedicated person to manage your social media accounts, things can get messy. You need to be on top of things, on different media channels, using corresponding voice for that media channel, bringing fresh news.. every single day.
Thankfully, there’s a plethora of services and tools out there that you can use. One of them is Buffer which allows you to schedule, publish and analyze your posts from a single platform. You can create your posts for the week, schedule and forget until the next week. It’s an awesome tool to grow your social accounts.
The Basic plan is free, for one social media account and 10 scheduled posts at a time. For more, you’d have to convert to a premium account, which starts as low as $10 and allows you to connect 10 different accounts and schedule 100 posts.
4. Employees and Finance
Managing human resources is a group of tasks both tedious and time-consuming. And yet, many still do these tasks manually, or outsource some part of the work.
Automating payrolls, raises, managing leaves and days off, comparatively managing holiday season so that the work gets done.. The list goes on.
What you want, no. What you need is a robust tool to manage all of that and more.
Well, you’re in the right place.
1Clique is a robust cloud service with a handful of features, allowing you to automate your business from an HR perspective. Quickly manage payroll, pay-slips, leave days, give bonuses and personal office budgets. Save documents, and have a reminder notify you when you need to update them.
Also, 1Clique has different user roles, allowing your employees to manage themselves. This is really important as it makes unnecessary inter-office conversations obsolete.
We’re proud with the rise of effectiveness of our clients, but you can see for yourself as their words paint you a picture.
Contact us today to get a quick 20 minute demo by a professional, where you will learn how and why you can use 1Clique to save valuable time that you can be focusing elsewhere.
5. Projects and Tasks
Managing different clients and projects is hard enough as it already is. You need to stay on top of the game, track tasks for different projects over time, delegate them to team members and then check their quality once complete. It can be a hassle, as the pile of unsorted documents rises over your desk (or desktop).
In comes Trello, a user-friendly web service with a very simple analogy – it’s the digital version of sticky notes, with a couple of other power bonuses.
You can create different boards, each for every client or large project. Then inside, you can make different lists with correlating tasks, adding responsibilities to employees and tracking tasks over time.
Trello is great as it adds simplicity to otherwise complex job of project management. You can create business workflows for basically any type of business or project, customize it to your liking, and even add cute sticker notes at that.
Trello comes for free in its basic form, and has long over won the hearts of many business owners and project managers for creating order in their business flows.
There are many other web tools and services that could help you automate your business processes and help you streamline your business. These are just some of the few we use, that have won our hearts over the years.
If you feel like we should be adding something or would like to share your experiences with business automation, comment below and lets exchange words and best practices. 🙂