With the endless stream of tasks that come with running an organization, being able to offload them to technology is a major benefit. In the early years of automation, small businesses could only dream of adopting the technology. Today, there are many tools available specifically for smaller organizations – and they’re seldom overpriced.
In fact, many of today’s automation tools come at no cost at all or are offered on a subscription basis geared towards your budget and needs. Time is a valuable commodity and leveraging the power of automation tools can help you achieve more in a shorter period of time. Here are 6 tools small businesses can use automate their daily operations.
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Invoicely
This free tool is used by small businesses to automate parts of the invoicing process, such as sending recurring invoices and automatic payment reminders. Invoicely is also capable of automatically tracking trips, expenses, and tasks that are billed by the hour to help you optimize your budget and stay on top of finances.
IFTTT
If This Then That, better known as IFTTT, is basically what its name would suggest. You use it to create automation between different apps to eliminate the process of bouncing around between them for menial tasks.
For instance, you can set it up to automatically share your blog posts on social media when you publish them. Or, you can have your files automatically backed up on a separate cloud service to where you edited them. The sky’s the limit.
Constant contact
Constant Contact is a multi-channel marketing platform that aims to automate the email marketing process. While popular among larger businesses, it doesn’t have a free pricing plan and its highest tiers are too costly for most small businesses. A great alternative is Sendinblue.
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As detailed in this Constant Contact review, Sendinblue offers a free pricing plan and a variety of additional features, including transactional email management, SMS management and lead scoring among other key processes. Sendinblue also offers more automation features that will help you further streamline your marketing activities.
Calendly
TechRadar cited a study that reported 84% of businesses use more than one cloud-based video conferencing tool. From a time and cost-savings perspective, it makes perfect sense to opt for video conferencing. Calendly can further streamline the process by automatically scheduling appointments and adding them to your calendar.
Hootsuite
This is a popular tool that can help you automate many social media marketing tasks. Hootsuite is best known for its ability to schedule hundreds of social media posts at once across all your accounts, saving you a great deal of time. The software also contains an analytics dashboard to help you track your performance and create reports.
Grammarly
According to an Art + Marketing post, 90% of businesses now use content marketing. Given its importance in any small business marketing strategy, ensuring that your content isn’t held back by poor spelling, bad grammar or unintended plagiarism is imperative. Grammarly helps by automatically identifying mistakes in your content.
Effective use of these tools can save your business countless hours. This way, you’ll have more time to put towards real growth and progress.
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