Have You Embraced Automation and AI Yet?

I don't know about you, but I've sort of ignored AI up until now but when I started to look at automation and productivity tools for business, AI sort of crept onto my radar whether I liked it or not.

Automating a business by using productivity tools saves time and therefore money which is always a welcome benefit to any business owner. I guess the key is to weigh up the cost of the tool itself against the financial benefit to the business and of course customers.

As a business grows, it's almost impossible to keep up the level of service if you try and do everything yourself and many businesses have failed because they've tried to do that and the result has been poor reviews and a loss of customers.

Using productivity tools therefore speeds up the process without losing the quality of service if you choose carefully and find the right tools for your business and ultimately, your customers.

What tools are there that can help a small business?

I've been having a look at he marketplace and the first one that I found was Keap and an automation handbook for businesses. This is a great starting point to understand how automation can help you onboard a new customer and keep them engaged. Doing this manually is time consuming but by automating it, you can simplify the process and reduce the time needed.

One way to grow you business is to have ambassadors or influencers who can promote your brand in return for a small commission. Again, you can manage this using a productivity tool which integrates with social media platforms etc and reduces the time spent to promote your business via your network. One tool to help you with this is Roster. Roster gives you everything you need to connect, engage, reward, and measure your influencer marketing in one place.

Now that you have customers onboarded and ambassadors working to promote your business, how are you going to create and manage the content and keep up with everything?

You've guessed it, by using another productivity tool!

One platform that helps with content creation is Storychief. This is a single content marketing platform to analyse, plan, collaborate and publish content fast. Getting content out there in a timely manner is key and again helps with productivity and just getting stuff done and out.

Another one that I've come across is Notion. Notion has an AI assistant which can help you to generate content as well as manage documents, create workflows and keep your team members engaged and working together to support the business.

One of the challenges of having employees or freelancers is that they all need to communicate and now that many of us do hybrid working, we aren't all in the same office at the same time to chat about the work that we are doing or how we can help each other. Using a platform like Notion will help solve that problem and keep everything engaged and communicating.

Online courses are another way of sharing information and customers often like to be able to work through something in their own time rather than attend a face-to-face course. There are lots of platforms available but one that I've come across recently is LearnWorlds. This software enables you to promote an online course directly from your own website which is a big plus. We all want more traffic to our websites so linking everything together will tick that box as well.

It also helps our customers if everything is in one place. They only have to remember or bookmark your website and not go looking for content on other platforms. I now do that with the Steer Your Business podcast. I write a blog post for each podcast and then link it to Spotify. It drives more traffic to the website as well as the magazine and as potential advertisers like to know website data, it helps with that as well.

As your business grows, you might be thinking of hiring staff. There are also tools to help with this to make the whole process easier. One I've come across is Breezy HR. You can manage the whole process in one place which in itself is less time-consuming and enables you to keep track of everything from the advertising to the onboarding.

That is a bit of a whistle stop tour of some of the productivity tools available for you to look at. There are lots more to consider to help with different tasks in a business.

Every business owner will pick a different combination so there is no right or wrong answer to which tools work best for a particular business. Often it comes down to personal choice and how they work for you.

Have fun trying them out and let me know how you get on and which ones you prefer - or what's missing so that I can have a look at some more in another article.