Is your business entering growth mode? You’re not alone. More small businesses in Australia reported growth throughout the last year than in any year since 2014. However, small businesses in Australia are still not keeping up with the growth and digital updates by small businesses in countries like Vietnam and Indonesia- where businesses are increasingly innovation-focused.
If you’re planning to scale in 2019, here are some of the top automation solutions that can help you achieve your goals:
Marketing Automation
Your marketing team has two main goals: Get your product or service in front of the people who need it and convince them to purchase it. Automation makes this easier, so you can run targeted campaigns, integrate all of your social channels, and personalise your target buyer’s experience.
Marketing automation allows you to reach the right people, stay top-of-mind, prevent churn, and fill your funnel with qualified leads.
Automated Sales Workflows
Your sales team is probably spending a large chunk of time making calls, answering emails, building reports, attending meetings, and following up with their leads. These types of repetitive tasks are necessary for your business to turn leads into customers, but the amount of time lost can be huge.
Most salespeople are only spending around a third of their time actually selling. Salespeople have unique skills and should be spending the majority of their time talking to customers and closing deals. An automated sales platform can give your team one place to put notes about leads, pull reports, communicate with colleagues, and more.
Email Automation
Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways in a wide range of industries to reach your leads and customers. An automated email marketing tool will allow your team to set up workflows based on certain ‘triggers’. This means you can increase your touch points, nurture your leads, and stay top-of-mind.
Send a welcome email to people who sign up to your company blog. Set up a series of emails for new customers- thanking them and giving them information about customer support. Nurture leads who have downloaded your whitepaper or asset and send emails with mid-funnel content to move them down the buyer’s journey. Notify your sales reps when leads have viewed a pricing page, and send emails to people who have abandoned their shopping carts.
The possibilities are endless.
Social Media Automation
Most businesses find that maintaining at least two or three social media platforms is necessary so they can achieve their marketing goals.
Unfortunately, managing these accounts is hugely time-consuming. This is where social media automation tools come in. These tools let you respond to mentions and messages with one click, schedule social media posts for all accounts, identify leads and influencers, and run analytics and reports.
Social media automation also allows you to schedule your posts for the times and days that your audience is actually online and most likely to see those posts.
Transaction Automation
Supply chain automation is on the way, which is a good thing because right now it’s massively inefficient for many companies. Business-to-business buying and selling relies on manual processes including invoices, purchase orders, emails, and approvals. Now, blockchain technology is beginning to remove routine tasks for employees, increase business competitiveness, and reduce costs.
Customer Service Automation
Customer support and customer service are likely to take up a lot of your staff hours. But there are plenty of tasks you can automate, streamline, and simplify. One way to do this is to build a customer portal and/or knowledge base so customers can get the information they need without needing to get in touch with your customer service team. You can also create support dashboards with triggers, ticket views, and automated systems to ensure customers don’t get lost and that they get their issues sorted quickly.
Interested in using automation to help your business scale? Get in touch today to learn how we can help.
