5 tasks your business needs to automate

We all seem to be living in a world where people desperately need to save time. Many of my clients come to me saying ‘there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done’. My simple answer to this is to hire a VA and automate some of your tasks and let your VA take control of setting this up and they can continually monitor the systems too.

1. Social Media

Updating your social media is a necessary task, but when you have a lot of work on it can be difficult to find the time to constantly update this. HootSuite, Buffer or Meet Edgar are all great at scheduling posts to go out and Facebook and Twitter can even let you know what time is best to schedule posts for maximum exposure.

2. Timesheets

If you have a team of people you need a seamless way to track people’s hours in an easy to do way. Timely has a great app which allows your team to track their hours and will also alert them that they need to submit their timesheet, so you don’t have to chase them up, so saves you more time.

3. CRM's

Updating your CRM can be a real chore and time consuming too. ProsperWorks have come up with a great way of automatically scanning your incoming emails and it will then sort through and take the data that you require. If you have a VoIP phone it also has the functionality to log, and track sales calls that your business makes.

4. Email Marketing

MailChimp is excellent for creating eye-catching email marketing campaigns, but did you know that not only can you schedule your email campaigns, but you can also set up triggers.

MailChimp’s automation service allows users to create automated emails which will be sent when triggered by a subscriber's activity, or a certain date. You can use a pre-set automation that's tailored to your business goals.

5. Content Marketing

Trying to constantly find fresh and interesting content can take so much time it can become a laborious task. It doesn't have to be if you use Stackla which allows you to find content that is based on locations, hashtags, or images. This app really will save you a lot of time.

If you try some or all these automation services I would be really interested to find out how you got on with them. Also, it would be great to hear from to about what tasks you really dread or that just simply take up too much of your valuable time.