Automate Your Business: Top 9 Growth Tips for 2020

Are you looking to free up some of your extremely valuable time and automate your business? If so, I want to share with you some of my favorite growth tips for 2020. Implementing these growth tips, I’m confident that you’ll unlock some valuable time that you can spend on the things that truly matter. 

Nine Growth Tips to Help You Automate Your Business

Whether you are the CEO of your company or have just started your own startup, one general truth is that you are going to be stretched for time. Working in the trenches, you’ll need to deal with everything from new features for your product or service to customer support tickets. Before you know it, it’s the late afternoon and you haven’t gotten to some of your mission-critical tasks for the day.

It is for these reasons why you should focus on freeing up your time. As your business expands and gets larger, you’ll discover that you have even less time. Because of this, working to automate your business is one of the most valuable things that you can do.

Instead of trying out different strategies to see what works, I want to share my top nine growth tips for this year. I have spent years finding and implementing these tips at Dubb. I have been extremely satisfied with the results. I’m sure you will too.

While you don’t necessarily need to implement all of these growth tips to automate your business, I recommend that you do so. Even though they may take some time to set up, I am confident that you will save a significant amount of time in the long-run. 

1. Automate Your Email

One of the most effective ways to automate your business is to focus on automating your email. 

Let’s face it: throughout our working days, most of us are spent checking, reading, and responding to emails. It can be a true time sucker—especially when we are sending the same sort of emails day after day.

It is for these reasons that you’ll want to look into automating your emails. There are plenty of ways to go about this. One of my favorite recommendations is to set up an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders are simple, yet effective tools that can ease the constant email barrage.

As just one example, you can set up an email autoresponder that sends a quick auto response when you’re on vacation. It can be as simple as a few lines explaining that you’re out, when you are returning, and who the sender can contact if they need a rapid response. If you are a solo entrepreneur who has a “contact” page on your company’s website or personal website, you can also create an auto response email. It can include everything from a notification that the sender received your message to hyperlinks of your online portfolio. 

Ultimately, there are few rules here. You can create email autoresponders for any type of situation. But by leveraging technology and automation in your email inbox, you will find that you have much more time to work on the more important things in your day-to-day life. 

2. Get Blog Post Ideas By Looking at Trends

At Dubb, we are believers in looking at trends to automate your content. The good news is that you don’t need to be a superforecaster to discover current and short-term trends. Instead, you can use any of the available digital tools that monitor and display subjects and ideas that people are talking about.

One of my favorite tools is Google Trends. If you haven’t already used it, Google Trends is a fascinating tool that can help you explore what the world is searching for. It is extremely easy to search for any term and compare it to others. For instance, if you work in the restaurant industry and are looking for blog ideas related to restaurants and Covid-19, you can insert different keywords and see the popularity of those keywords. While it takes some practice, you will find that Google Trends is an outstanding asset that can help you generate blog ideas. It can also help you stay ahead of the zeitgeist and metaphorically skate where the puck is heading. 

Another great tool that is similar to Google Trends is Exploding Topics. Exploding Topics is an effective tool because it shows you topics that are trending. While some may choose to select either Google Trends or Exploding Topics, there’s nothing stopping you from using both of them. By leveraging both tools, you’ll be in a much better position to create content that resonates with your audience. 

3. Leverage Social Media Scheduling

Social media scheduling can be one of the most effective tools to automate your business day. For as much as we love social media, the simple reality is that it takes time to draft and post social media content. Not only that, but we need to make sure that we are posting our social media posts at optimal times throughout our days. Even if we are in an internal meeting or with a client, our social media content needs to get out to our audiences.

This is where social media scheduling can be a lifesaver. You can automate a month of content within a few hours. Using a tool like Buffer, you can use the trending topics that you’ve identified to make social media posts that drip to your audiences. Buffer and other social media scheduling tools also provide insights on how your social media content is performing.  

4. Take Advantage of Email Scheduling

Closely related to social media scheduling, you can also use email scheduling to help you save time. Here, we are specifically talking about certain emails that you send as part of a funnel or drip sequence. 

As with social media, take some time to plan out the emails that you want to send in your drip sequences. A good rule of thumb is that you should send more generalized information about your business or product at the top of your funnel and more specific information as your target travels down your funnel. It is a good way to introduce your company while later presenting enough tangible value to show how your product or service will significantly improve your target’s life. 

Also, go ahead and automate a few high-value, personalized email drip sequences. Making these email drip sequences more personalized will go a long way in converting your targets into paying customers. Like many of the other tactics on this list, you are doing a good amount of upfront work that will save you substantial time in the future. You will give people interesting information while saving a ton of time engaging with prospects who are interested in working with you. 

In the end, scheduling apps can be great ways to connect with your audience while freeing up your time. 

5. Take Advantage of A/B Testing

A/B testing can be a great way to optimize your website in one of the most efficient ways possible. If you haven’t yet heard of A/B testing, it is essentially a user experience research methodology that consists of a randomized experiment with two variants. At the end of the experiment, you can determine which variant is better suited to achieve a particular goal. This goal can be anything from user conversions to downloads of a white paper or digital product.

Ultimately, A/B testing can be a fast and effective way of testing different versions of your website or mobile app. One of our favorite tools at Dubb is Google Optimize. It is a great place to have two or more different variations of your website. After running your chosen experiment, you can see the results and consequently update your website or mobile app to include the best-performing variation. 

Google Optimize is an extremely powerful tool. Using it, you can spend less time guessing at what your audience wants and more time creating a website or mobile app that your audience will enjoy.

6. Sync All of the Data on Your Technology Stack

In all likelihood, you and your colleagues have a certain technology stack. For instance, you may have Slack for communication amongst your team, Asana for project management, Dubb for your video communication, and perhaps Zoom for some of your virtual meetings. 

Regardless of your technology stack, however, you’ll want to use a tool called PieSync. PieSync is a tool that syncs contacts between your favorite cloud applications. Essentially, PieSync can save you valuable time when you are working with different applications in your stack. There’s no need to spend hours on manual data entry in each of your applications. Instead, you can simply use PieSync and spend more time on the things that truly matter. 

If you are a Dubb user, you’ll be happy to know that Dubb is on PieSync. Because of this, you can integrate Dubb into over 200 applications on PieSync. With PieSync, you can leverage everything from contact sync to customer journey tracking, so I definitely recommend that you check it out. You can also click on this link to learn more about Dubb’s integration with PieSync. 

7. Track Your Customers’ Journeys with Mautic

This is one of the more technical ways to automate your workflow, yet it can be extremely powerful. Mautic is known for providing free and open-source marketing automation software. It is a relatively unknown marketing tool. It requires users to set up their own servers and can be quite technical. This is probably why more users aren’t using Mautic.

That being said, Mautic can be a great way to track your customers’ journeys. Mautic can show you all of the activities that customers take on their journey, whether that is the moment that customers first hear about your business to the moment before they become a paying customer. 

By following the customer journey, you and your team can better understand the customer journey, make better decisions, and conduct better outreach toward your customers. This idea of automating your processes based on the customer journey is one of the most powerful things you can do to make your work life easier. 

8. Transform Your Video Content Into Blog Posts

This is one of our favorite time-saving tactics at Dubb. An easy way to save a significant amount of time on the content creation side is to create blog posts from the video content that you shoot. Not only does it take less time to generate content ideas, but you essentially have the baseline of a blog post in your recorded content. Yes, it takes some time to translate video into words, yet it is often much more time-effective than creating a new blog post from scratch.

At Dubb, we have introduced a feature that lets you take any video, upload it to the Dubb platform, and convert that video into text (for a small fee). This can be a great way to get started with an article for your company’s blog. Yes, you may need to do some additional editing and add keywords for SEO-purposes. Nonetheless, this feature is a time-effective way of getting blog posts onto your website. We encourage you to take advantage of it, as having a robust company blog can increase your visibility and standing in your sector or industry. 

Along with this, you can automatically generate closed captions from your videos by using the Dubb transcribe feature. Ultimately, what you can do is download a text file from your video and then take that text and convert it into a fully-written blog post. This is yet another way that Dubb makes it easy for you to create blog posts from all of your videos.

9. Create a Calendar Booking Page

A calendar booking page is a great way to automate your business. Instead of going back and forth with others to determine an amenable meeting time, you can simply let others find time in your schedule. You will certainly want to block off enough time in your schedule so that you aren’t flooded with bookings. That being said, a calendar booking page can significantly reduce some of the logistical nightmares that occur when booking meetings. 

You can use services like Calendly, Book Like A Boss, Acuity Scheduler, or others. From there, you can rely on a service like Dubb to have a video that invites viewers to book a time with you. The interactive calendar right below your video automates the entire process, allowing you to schedule meetings at scale. This power comes from the Dubb calendar integration, which helps you avoid back and forth emails, text messages, or phone calls with viewers who would like to speak with you. Everyone gets an automatic notification and they always have the link to the upcoming video. 

In sum, a calendar booking page is an outstanding idea and one that you should leverage sooner rather than later. 

Automate Your Business and Unlock More Time in Your Life

Using the tactics and strategies above to automate your business, you’ll be able to unlock a significant amount of free time in your life. As I referenced above, many of these strategies require an upfront investment. It takes some time to create automated workflows or track your customers’ journeys through Mautic. 

Having said this, I urge you to keep at it. Make these upfront investments and continue to tweak these automations as necessary. You’ll be extremely satisfied with the results.

Finally, if you are interested in leveraging Dubb to create workflow automations, I encourage you to click here. On that link, you will be able to sign up for Dubb, which can allow you to implement many of the automation strategies above. If you have any questions about Dubb or how it can help you find more time, you can get in touch with us by clicking here.