Life is busy when you work for a startup, so why waste time on small items than can easily be automated. Here are the top items which startup companies should be automating.
1. Automate your marketing
Many startups struggle to keep up with their online marketing campaigns and it can expensive to hire a social media specialist. No matter what the markets are doing, you always need to be marketing yourself and automating your marketing efforts is an efficient way to do this.There are many companies that provide automation software for small businesses and startups. Such software works by using data-mining to produce different ads in real-time to disseminate across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram, targeting individuals whose recent posts indicate they have a need for the particular product or service you sell.
2. Automate your sales tools
Sales are vital for every startup. Without streamlining their sales properly, startups just can't get off the ground as they can’t generate the capital needed to grow, to pay employees and to attract investors . Most startups generate sales online and accordingly the amount of administration and data management for sales teams is increasing. It is harder to keep track of data. Too many salespeople spend significantly more time setting up and managing their sales funnels and processes than they do actually concentrating on the vital business of closing deals. However this can all become much easier thanks to great range of clever and intuitive tools and platforms to help improve, facilitate and automate the sales process. For example, systems can provide email prospecting and sales automation tools which automatically sends out personalized emails and follow-ups to clients according to the time frames you want.
3. Automate your invoices
If you send out the same invoice to a client on a regular basis, it doesn't make sense to have your accounting department do the same job over and over again. What does make sense is to automate your invoicing. There are many programs like Freshbooks and Xero which are user-friendly and inexpensive. You can even program them to auto-generate email reminders when an invoice goes past due.
4. Automate your data-back ups
Ensuring your data is safe is critical, no matter what line of business you are in, but it can be an annoying, pesky and even time-consuming task you don't want to do and it’s easily overlooked. It's only when you lose all those files that you realize you should have backed up your work. There are many cloud-based services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Carbonite, that can ensure your files will automatically be backed up to the Cloud. Best of all, Cloud services will always keep your data out of harm’s way, even if your office files get damaged or hacked all of your files will be safe and sound. You can access them from any computer with an internet connection.