Looking to save time performing repetitive tasks in 2022? We’ve compiled a list of five business automation tools to try. Let’s take a look at them.
Zapier
What is Zapier? Zapier is a tool that automatically moves information between your web applications so you can focus on your most important work. It can look for arrivals in a shared mailbox and import them into a CRM system. It can monitor your website for blog comments and create a service ticket in your ticketing software. It can monitor your corporate Facebook page and automatically forward posts to your service team.
Zapier works with more than 3,000 apps and saves your team time by automatically moving data between systems. There is a free version available that allows you to test out automating basic tasks with paid versions, allowing you to build complex workflows and conditional triggers.
Calendly
What is Calendly? Calendly is a hub for professionally and efficiently scheduling meetings, eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth emails and allowing you to get back to work. In essence, it is an online meeting scheduler that lets you select several open times and then allows your attendees to pick the best meeting time for them—all without sending a dozen emails back and forth.
Calendly connects with Google, Outlook, Microsoft Office, and iCal, automating the scheduling process from start to finish. As meetings are scheduled, they are added automatically and directly to your calendar (or your team’s calendars), making scheduling meetings with outside parties easy and fast.
Calendly offers a free version, and you can step up to workgroup or enterprise versions from there.
Hootsuite
What is Hootsuite? Hootsuite is a social media and marketing dashboard that makes it easy to schedule, post, and monitor social media accounts all in one place. You can save time by scheduling posts across all your social networks with just a few clicks.
In addition to the scheduling engine, it features a social analytics dashboard that shows your top-performing content and gives personalized insights into why it is (or is not) working.
Hootsuite offers a limited functionality free version, and the paid versions scale easily up to a 10-person marketing team.
Airtable
Airtable is best described as an online database ready for you to create a no-code application on top of it. Some of the applications created in Airtable are Content Calendars, Digital Video Production, Project Trackers, Marketing Campaign Tracking, Product Launches, Event Planning, User Research, and many more.
Airtable includes templates to help you and offers a free edition to get you going on automating your process optimization.
Content Snare
What is Content Snare? Content Snare is an online tool for collecting content from clients, simplifying client communications and file transfers. Content Snare makes it easy to gather information or documents from your clients.
One of the best places we can think of to use Content Snare is during the onboarding process. Most businesses have several forms to have clients sign, documents to upload or other important data to be collected. Content Snare automates the capture of this data into easy-to-program workflows, giving your onboarding team a constantly updated overview of what still needs to be collected.
While the software does not have a free version, it does offer a free trial so you can get a feel for the product.
We hope you take a few steps toward automating processes this year. Good luck, and let us know if we can help in your workflow automation project.
This week’s post by Tim Malzahn, Principal Consultant at Malzahn Strategic
