A primary reason why a small business fails is a lack of human and financial resources. In fact, the function of a large team is often performed by one person, who not only constantly comes up with hypotheses, but also deals with sales, promotion and working with clients. The biggest trouble with this approach is not due to the fact that the team does not have enough time to do the job properly, but that there is not enough time to implement the strategic objectives. Given a constant drive of work and a permanent raising of current issues, it’s hard to find time to look at your project from a senior manager perspective and focus on what’s really important.
When you think about streamlining, remember that you’re not doing it to save time, but to save your time for the things that really matter.
You can spend the time you save working directly with your clients
The most effective way to seek information is not accumulate the number of likes under your posting, but communicate with your current and future clients. Spend the time you have scheduled for posting to write a thank you to the person who just bought your product. Or ask the person who didn’t buy why they didn’t. Or write a comment on your ambassador’s posting so that users can click through to your page. By scheduling automatic posting, you take away the headache of being in touch at a certain time, but instead you gain time to feedback, work through objections, and build new hypotheses. According to our surveys, automatic posting helps reducing your time allocated for working in social media by 4 hours. Just imagine at what speed your business will operate, if you spend at least 2 hours of the received time for direct work with clients.
You will get a database of your customers to analyze and work with
Automated platforms give you a lot of data to analyze your audience. In addition to figuring out the best time to post, and only increasing the reach of your publications by doing so, you can see who is most active in your news feed, which stories people watch the most, and which calls to action are most responsive. Knowing all of this, you can tailor your ads to your target audience. Do not overlook the founder’s personal brand: you can set up automatic posting to LinkedIn as well, and there you can also see which audience is interested in you and your product.
You will get new opportunities to promote your product
By getting a correct analysis of your target audience and their activity in your social media accounts, you will be able to see that perhaps social media are not an excellent tool for promoting your product. It’s no secret that social media is now overloaded with numerous advertising requests. The price per click is gradually becoming incredibly high, and the result often does not justify the customer’s expectations. With the help of automatic platforms, you can set up automatic campaigns in e-mailing resources or plan your communication with business customers in messengers. Keep in mind that social media networking sites are also used for crowdsourcing and as the social media management software or tools provide crowdsourcing features, it is expected to be one of the major factors to drive growth of the target market in the near future.
There are a lot of automated tools on the market to best benefit from social media. When choosing the right one, be guided not only by your budget, but also by the feedback from users in your particular market. Usability and final campaign performance metrics are key factors when choosing a partner.
Alex Bozhin is a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of marketing experience. Alex has successful experience in starting online projects from scratch and making them into a market leader.
Automation in business stock photo by Den Rise/Shutterstock
