High-achievers and entrepreneurs are often so passionate about what they do but they tend to ignore the fact that they're working exceptionally long hours and taking on exceedingly heavy work loads. Sound familiar?
We’ve been there too.
We don’t have all of the answers but one tried and tested method to help dig us out has been:
Automate the busy work.
(And then pour yourself a glass of fresh mint tea (or wine).)
Have an amazing product? Stop spending hours on marketing and more time on doing, for example. More rest for you means you have more energy to focus on the good stuff; whether that’s more time perfecting your e-commerce product or going out and meeting new clients. Y,know – the real reason you started it all in the first place.
So, take a deep breath, turn on the kettle and eliminate your busy work already.
Here are three basic digital marketing tools you should be using to automate your business, right now.
1. Focus your social, and then auto-post it
You can scroll and scroll (and scroll) for hours on end reading up about the latest Facebook update or what you simply have to be doing on Snapchat to succeed. If you’re feeling overwhelmed then strip it back to just one channel. Pick one social media channel where your target audience is active and just focus on making that really really strong, then if you aren’t already, use scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to auto-post for you.
2. Trigger customer emails
You know that customer newsletters are a great way to connect with new contacts, boost loyalty or win people back. Are you automating the basic trigger sends already? Welcome emails, Happy Birthday emails, thank you emails, abandoned cart emails… whether it’s relationship building or conversions you’re after, automate the basics with tools like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.
3. Automate repetitive workflows
Admin – if you're a small business of one, likelihood is you're spending a lot of time your time on administrative marketing tasks. Automate it. From scheduling appointments (there’s assistant.to or X.ai), sending payment and invoice reminders to clients (there’s And.co or 17hats) to collecting customer data and automating general day-to-day workflows (there’s Zapier, HubSpot or CoSchedule).