5 Critical Business Tasks You Can Automate for Your Startup

Getting a startup off the ground can be thrilling, but it’s also challenging. You might have a vision regarding how you want the startup to function, but it will take resilience and determination to get there. Along the way, you are sure to run into all sorts of challenges you must overcome.

Automation is one way you can make things easier on yourself. If you automate as many processes as possible, you can focus on other things that are impossible to automate but need your attention.

Let’s look at five automation possibilities for your startup. You might implement one or two of these or even all of them.

IT Task Automation

IT stands for information technology, and it encompasses several things. Under the IT banner, you can include computers storing data and also retrieving information. Your startup might require an IT specialist or several of them.

You can’t usually automate every one of your IT tasks, but you can for some of them. IT automation can help you in numerous ways.

If you’re interested in automating the IT tasks that technology allows you to, you can look into what the industry calls middleware solutions. Middleware, also called a webhook platform, lets you set up a conduit to connect systems that you can access programmatically and through the internet.

Your Social Media Posting

It’s almost a necessity for your startup to have social media accounts. Very few new companies or business initiatives can get along without them. You might be active on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and many others, depending on the products you’re creating or services you’re offering.

You might use tools like Hootsuite to automate your social media posting. With this type of dashboard, you can hire a social media manager who can create the content in advance. They might write the tweets and create the Facebook messages several days or even weeks beforehand.

If you need to be active across several social media channels, these automation tools can help you do that. Writing social media messages in batches and dispersing them at set times makes engagement more likely. You have a better shot at going viral if you post regularly rather than sporadically.

Your Blogging

You may want to set up a blog for your startup. If you create a business website and take it live, you’ll have features like an optimized landing page, an FAQ section, testimonials, and everything else a potential customer would expect to see. You’ll also want a blog since that’s a way you can create evergreen content and keep your site at the top of the SERPs.

When you hire a copywriter to write your blog posts, they can write those in batches and set up dates and times to release those blogs, the same as you would do for your social media. Once your copywriter creates several blogs for you, they’re free to work on other assignments. You can set them to work on your product pages or anything else you need.

eCommerce Reminders

If your startup is in the eCommerce arena, you’ll want to nudge potential customers who started to buy a product, but then they ultimately didn’t pull the trigger. In eCommerce, they call this shopping cart abandonment. It happens each day, across every website.

You want to automate the reminders you send the potential customer, and you can do that if you have their email address. If you send a reminder email telling them they have unpurchased items, a percentage of them will then buy from you. You can set up your email marketing software to do this automatically.

Customer Support

If we’re assuming that your startup includes an eCommerce element, there are various customer support elements you can automate. For instance, you can set up a customer care feature that lets them create help desk tickets they can send to you. You can then hire an individual or a team who can take care of customer concerns.

You can also create a chatbot that can communicate with customers and answer their more fundamental questions. This saves your help desk team from communicating with customers when they have a simple query. The eCommerce industry once considered chatbots cutting edge, but now virtually any fully functioning website has them.

You might also automate things like payroll, invoice reminders, customer emails, or paying bills. It all depends on your startup’s details, but the more you automate, the easier reaching your goals becomes.