For many small businesses moving forward, the main question is one of scale. To what extent should you use new technology to scale your business? Should you seek to move fast and break things like Facebook so (in)famously did? Does data analytics have a role to play in your business? What tasks can you ” and should you ” automate so you can have more time to scale the business?
It can be tough to do new things, but new tools can end up making your business operations easier. The easier it is to run your business, the more time you have to focus on innovating and doing things other businesses in your niche aren’t doing.
The Case for Automation
When you hear the word automation, it’s easy to picture robots doing menial tasks, or even replacing human employees. As a small business owner, you value your employees, and a great deal of your business’ image and success depends on them.
That’s why this isn’t about replacing your employees with bots; it’s about using tools that will help both you and your employees save time.
MileIQ highlights five types of time-saving automation tools:
- Email management: Employees spend about 30 percent of their time on email; an email management tool can help cut email time down so they can do other tasks.
- Text management: If you and your employees spend a lot of time fielding texts from clients, an automated text app can respond automatically to certain texts, cutting down on text time.
- Hiring: Why manually post openings to individual job boards? Automated recruiting software can post on multiple job boards for you.
- Payroll: A good payroll tool can sync up with your time tracking and accounting apps, enabling you to pay your employees in as little as 10 minutes.
- Mileage tracking: If you and your employees have to do a lot of job-related driving, a mileage tracking tool can help you take advantage of the fact that you can write mileage off on your taxes, and the payout for miles in 2018 is 53.5 cents.
All these types of tools do menial tasks for you by applying analytics to the task and executing commands automatically through algorithms. They help a lot with internal operations. But what about client/customer-facing tools?
According to Forbes contributor and marketing guru John Rampton, Marketing is one area ripe for automation. The key for small businesses is finding a tool that can automate many components of marketing at once.
Rampton goes on to highlight marketing automation tools that can do the following:
- Automate marketing efforts based on your specific goals.
- Automate email marketing campaigns, including A/B testing and alerts when a customer is exhibiting buying tendencies.
- Automate multi-channel marketing ” including email, mobile, social media, and digital ads ” through one platform.
- Track customer touchpoints with your brand.
- Help you maintain contact with customers to generate more leads.
- Automate the process of getting leads and following up on them.
- Consolidate and analyze consumer data so you can segment and personalize campaigns.
The platform you choose will depend on your goals. Particularly, Fusionsoft and ONTRAPORT focus on small business and provide comprehensive offerings in that regard.
Automation means nothing without analytics and the identification of a problem. In other words, if you haven’t analyzed your situation and didn’t know exactly which problems you want to solve, you’ll have a hard time pinpointing exactly how you should put automation to use. With that in mind, let’s look at analytics.
The Case for Analytics
Analytics software helps you have a more overt awareness through quantifiable insights. With analytics, you know with complete certainty which aspects of your business are struggling the most and which aspects are doing well. Then, you can make educated decisions about what to do next.
Analytics is especially helpful when it comes to multi-channel attribution, which is the process of determining where your leads are coming from. You could have multiple digital marketing campaigns in the works, but you also get a great deal of your business from word-of-mouth recommendations and non-digital efforts. Without polling each of your new customers, you won’t know which channel is the most successful and which is least successful when it comes to converting customers.
Multi-channel attribution will give you a good idea about which of your digital marketing efforts are working best. Then, you can hone in on your most successful types of digital outreach and stop spending time and money on the efforts that aren’t working. You can redirect the extra money anywhere. It’s a good idea to spend it on non-digital marketing that you know is reliable.
The key to any prebuilt solution is that it must help you make decisions, says Capterra’s Andrew Marder. For example, Marder continues, most Facebook buyers are landing on page A, but buying from page B. Those that land on page B are twice as likely to add something to their cart. That’s the kind of insight you need. Now you can actually do something ”you can drop more Facebook marketing dollars into promoting page B.
The nice thing about being a small business owner is you’re not dealing with a huge stream of unstructured, raw, big data. Instead, you’re dealing with smaller sets of data that can easily convert into business intelligence (BI). Data analytics software delivers BI in multiple areas. It can prescribe a solution to your problem, it can predict an outcome (or a problem), it can provide a diagnosis of an issue, or it can describe what’s happening now based on the data you have incoming.
You can apply analytics to marketing, inventory, and just about any area of your business you need help with. Then, you can automate next steps that don’t require a human touch. Through this process, your small business can begin to scale at a rate you could never have foreseen. Just how far can you go? That’s a question only you can answer, with a little help from business intelligence.
