Category: Marketing Automation

As a marketer, you’re busy. And, even though you probably already know that automating tasks and workflows can free up a lot of time, it takes a lot of focus to set up, right?
Well, not necessarily.
With all of the marketing automation tools at your fingertips, it’s simpler and speedier than ever to streamline your workflows.
To maximize your automation strategy, we’ve compiled some of the best marketing tasks that you should automate in your workflow.

35 Marketing Tasks to Automate
Email Tasks
1. Delivering Content Downloads
One of the most effective areas of your marketing strategy to automate is email. As one example, you can set up automated emails to deliver content opt-ins such as reports, ebooks, and free templates.
This can be instead of (or as well as) triggering the download in the person’s browser. It also has the added benefit of enabling you to add a ‘next step’ CTA in the email body.

2. Email Newsletters
There’s a wide spectrum of what you can do to speed up the time you spend on email newsletters.
You can start by streamlining simple things such as creating email templates or easily duplicated header designs to speed up your production process.
But your automation options don’t end there. There’s plenty of options of complex automation you can implement to suit your specific needs.

3. Drip Campaigns
Email drip campaigns are a pivotal part of any digital marketing strategy. By automatically enrolling contacts in a campaign based on defined criteria (such as opting into your mailing list or purchasing a specific product or service), you can automatically send tailored content at set intervals.
Most drip campaigns work effectively when there’s a ‘goal’ for the lead to reach — such as subscribing to one of your paid plans. When they reach this, you can automatically unenroll them from this drip campaign and even enroll them in another one instead.
Here’s a simple example of a drip campaign made with GetResponse:

4. Smart Personalization in Emails
All top email marketing platforms offer personalization tokens to customize your content for every recipient.
Take a closer look at your automated emails and regular newsletters to identify where and how you can put them to the best use.
5. Cart Abandonment Emails
Savvy marketers know to keep an eye on leads that are nearly converting but need a nudge to cross the line.
If you have an ecommerce store, this can be enabled with an automated cart abandonment email, just like what Shopify offers:

6. Customized Email Campaigns
Rather than having email drip campaigns for only one stage of your funnel, take time to create customized email campaigns for the entire customer lifecycle journey. You can create campaigns that share:

Top-of-funnel content for new leads unfamiliar with your product or service
Middle-of-funnel content that mentions your product and shows ways it can help them to solve their pain points and reach their goals
Bottom-of-funnel content with a deeper product focus

When these three types of campaigns are used together, you can seamlessly guide new leads to become paying customers — at the right pace and without more manual work on your plate.
7. Email Follow-Up
Fed up of manually chasing people who haven’t got back to you? Many CRMs enable you to automatically follow up after a set interval (such as one week) so you don’t have to spend hours on tedious follow-up.
Lead Generation Tasks
8. Minimalist Lead Generation
If you prefer a subtle approach to automated lead gen, there are countless tactics and brands to inspire your strategy.
On their simply-designed website, podcasters and writers The Minimalists show that lead gen doesn’t have to be sleazy. It can be, well, minimal:

9. Website Banner Promotions
Got a webinar coming up or an offer expiring soon? Pin a minimally intrusive banner to the top of your website to feature an offer to visitors who land on your website.
10. Landing Page CTA’s
Ask yourself: how can you encourage your website visitors and blog readers to stick around and explore other pages?
This “New here? Click me” button on the bottom right of Marie Forleo’s blog headers is a good example of finding creative solutions to boost time-on-site:

11. Recurring Webinars
The online business platform Kajabi offers daily educational and Q&A webinars to provide trial users with more value.
This can be a really effective way to convert more people into customers — especially if you can introduce automation to boost ROI.
Many of Kajabi’s sessions are automated, including weekly sessions for ‘Create and Sell a Product’ and ‘Marketing Pipelines.’

12. Dynamic CTAs
One of the most powerful features in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is Smart CTAs. By adding a Smart CTA to your website — such as in a blog post or sidebar — you can display the most relevant call-to-action to every visitor.
You could promote a product-focused webinar to sales-qualified leads while showing new visitors a more top-of-funnel content upgrade.

14. Slide-in CTA’s
If you have created downloadables such as ebooks, worksheets, templates, or other resources, you can use these as a powerful tool for automated lead gen on your blog posts. One way to capture new leads and get more downloads is with a slide-in CTA connected to a form.
Social Media Tasks
14. Facebook Bots
An impactful and highly personalized way to automate lead generation is with a Facebook bot that guides new leads through a conversion process.
This example shows a simple use case that automatically delivers a content upgrade via Facebook Messenger:

15. Social Media Scheduling
A super helpful way to save time scheduling your social media posts in advance is with a social media management app like Buffer.
In your Buffer Analytics, there’s also a handy ‘Share Again’ button that you can use to reschedule the same posts that worked well the first time.

Content Tasks
16. Dynamic Content
With dynamic content on your website, you can boost conversion rates by automatically showing the most relevant content to each individual lead.
As one example, with HubSpot you can add smart content to your emails, website pages, landing pages, and templates.

After adding a smart content area, you can then automatically show different content based on:

Country
Device type
Referral source
Preferred language
Contact list membership
Contact lifecycle stage

17. Content Production Queue
Trello is one of the most popular and straightforward ways to manage your team’s content queue. But did you know it also provides a ton of options to automate project management, including keeping your content pipeline on track?
With Butler, Trello’s automation feature, you can create hundreds of rule-based and if-this-then-that automation to keep your content team on schedule.

SEO Tasks
18. SEO Site Audit
Not every marketing team has the resources to hire an in-house SEO specialist. Even if you do, there are many tools to help you streamline your SEO and stay on top of website problems and opportunities.
Although it’s not the cheapest on the market, Ahrefs is one of the most popular and feature-rich SEO tools to optimize your search presence.
As one stand-out feature, it delivers a Site Audit to crawl every area of your website, list all issues, and categorize these by type and priority level. You can then resolve these one by one and re-run the Site Audit when you’re ready to check for improvements.

19. Keyword Research
Another area where Ahrefs shines is keyword research. It’s super simple to track the keywords you’re currently ranking for, look for opportunities related to your relevant topics, and even identify what your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t.

Marketing-Sales Tasks
20. Upselling Customers
Marketing isn’t just about leads, it’s also about your existing customers. Automation is a powerful ally when it comes to upselling customers at the ideal time with products and services similar to those they have already gained value from.
21. Live Chat
Live chat has moved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for many businesses. Your customers and potential customers want to easily and quickly get in touch with you.
With live chat apps such as what Drift offers, you can create automated chatbots that are configured to bring in marketing leads, not just sales-ready prospects.

22. Lead Qualification
GetResponse is another handy tool for strengthening your marketing team’s bridge to sales and helping them identify quality leads.
With a marketing automation platform, you can make sure your leads are sales-qualified before proceeding through a pipeline.

23. Lead Scoring
With lead scoring tools, you can effectively track engagement and know which leads to follow up with or enroll in a workflow that’s further down the funnel.
ActiveCampaign makes it easy to reward points and deduct them based on specific behavior and engagement, such as when a lead downloads content or visits your pricing page.

24. Good-Fit Leads
ActiveCampaign also notifies you when leads are becoming more engaged. It automatically triggers email notifications and assigns tasks based on lead score changes.

25. Automated Product Demo Video
As an example of automated sales-qualified lead gen, Marketo gates its demo video behind a form to collect data from qualified leads.

26. Lead Assignment
With sales automation you can automatically distribute your new leads and deals based on:

An evenly distributed round-robin
Based on value (to ensure all sales reps get about the same amount of value over time)

27. Trial Extension Offers
If someone signs up for a trial of your product but doesn’t convert, consider sending them a trial extension offer.
This effective example from Kajabi is generous and highly personalized to encourage conversions.

Management & Organization Tasks
28. Contact Management
Your losing a lot of time in your workday if your business doesn’t have an automated way to organize contacts from all channels
Your answer to this is a cloud-based CRM system with built-in pipeline management and automation capacities, such as what Copper, HubSpot, and Pipedrive offer.
29. Inbox Filtering
You don’t have to reach inbox zero, but you can clear up a lot of the chaos in your inbox using automated inbox filtering. Here’s a quick WikiHow tutorial on how to use Gmail’s priority inbox feature.

30. Sync New CRM Leads
Two of the most important tools in your marketing stack are your CRM and email marketing app.
Your CRM works best when it’s at the center of your stack with contacts from other apps instantly synced. It’s also important to ensure that the right leads are in your newsletter list. You can achieve both of these goals by keeping your CRM and email platform in sync.
As well as syncing relevant new CRM contacts with your newsletter list, you can also instantly remove leads from your mailing lists if they opt-out in another app.
31. Marketing Reports
It’s easy to spend a lot of your workweek on reporting: finding the right data, creating visualizations, and sharing these with your team.
With tools like Google Data Studio and Supermetrics, you can connect all of your marketing data for reporting in one platform.
Here’s a free Google Data Studio reporting template that shows how you could automatically connect your data.

32. Updating Meeting Slides
Instead of manually updating Google Slides with the right data ahead of meetings, you can automatically sync charts and data views in Google Sheets with Slides (and Docs) to free up time and reduce scope for error.

33. Slack Reminders
If you’re a regular Slack user, you have lots of automation options to streamline your workflows. You can take advantage of this by setting up a weekly Slack reminder to prep for upcoming team meetings.
34. Team Progress Updates
Another example of how to take advantage of Slack automation is by asking for updates on important projects at the start of every week. Similar to Slack reminders, you can message your team on a recurring basis so you’re always in the loop.
35. Project Management
Like Slack, Trello is another app that you can quickly level up with automation.
For instance, if your editorial team has a content planning board, whenever a blog post is moved to the ‘Editing’ column on Trello, the due date is automatically updated and the right team member is assigned to make sure each piece is edited on time:

Data Tasks
36. Contact Data Enrichment
Do you find yourself having to manually find out information about a new lead? Use Clearbit to automatically enrich the data you have for every new lead that enters your CRM and marketing apps.
37. Automated Data Syncing
Manually exporting and importing data between apps will never be the highlight of any marketer’s day.
To free up time for what really drives your KPIs while improving data quality in all of your marketing apps, set up a two-way data sync between your apps. This will keep the customer data in sync not only across your marketing apps, but throughout your entire tech stack, too.

Look at any business and you will likely see customer care professionals on the frontline. Whether they are in customer service or account management, these people set customers up for success, keep them happy in the long term, and make vital contributions to the business’s sustainability.
However, despite its value, customer success is one of the most challenging roles at any company.
According to Pega’s ‘The good, the bad, the ugly: 2019 global customer service insights’ study, 79% of 70,000 customer service employees reported that they experience multiple pain points when doing their job. Customer service also has one of the highest turnover rates of all departments.
Why is customer service so challenging? 
Let’s review some of the common pain points for customer service teams below.
Common Pain Points for Customer Care Teams
Many common pain points cited in Pega’s study come down to a combination of poor tools and processes that harm the customer experience. These include:

Having to pass customers between teams and departments (a pain point for 43%)
Having to manually enter the same information in multiple locations (a pain point for 32%)
Having to prompt customers for information they’ve already supplied on another channel (a pain point for 24%)

These are problems for a lot of businesses, but the good news is that they are easily avoidable and fixable with iPaas.
How iPaaS Improves Employee Satisfaction
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) connects and integrates your business apps so you can keep data updated across multiple tools. It also provides an easy way to centralize data in one place, like your CRM.
iPaaS tools are great for improving customer experience, but they also boost employee satisfaction and reduce turnover – especially in customer-facing roles – by resolving the pain points that affect nearly 80% of these employees.
If you want to reduce the turnover of your customer service employees, read on for five common problems to easily avoid and fix with iPaaS.
Problem #1: Passing Customers Between Teams and Departments
As a customer, there are few things worse than being redirected to what feels like hundreds of different people in a business. In fact, 69% of customers expect a connected experience when they engage with a company, but few of them get it.
When you’re working in a business with disconnected customer service, it’s also demotivating for the employees. You want to provide a seamless customer experience, but the infrastructure isn’t there for you to do so.
The Solution:
Use an iPaaS tool to sync all customer data to a centralized CRM tool, so any team member can find timely customer data and take immediate steps to help the customer.
Problem #2: Manually Entering the Same Information in Multiple Locations
Repeating the same manual work again and again sucks. For many customer-facing teams, it can seem like part of the job to spend hours of your day inputting the same data into a CRM, project management tool, invoicing system, and Slack to share data with colleagues. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Solution:
Set up a two-way sync so your contact data can instantly flow to all of the right places. Set up rules to automatically attach the right segments, labels, and notes — and you’ve instantly saved your team a lot of time and hassle.
Problem #3: Prompting Customers for Information They’ve Already Supplied on Another Channel
One sure-fire way for a business to annoy its customers is to ask the same questions multiple times. 78% of customers expect consistent interactions across a company’s departments. This requires your employees to know what’s already been asked before — and what the answer is.
The Solution:
Store customer data properly the first time and sync it across all tools so anyone on the team can access it at the right time, no matter what system they’re looking at.
Problem #4: Using Outdated Tools That Hold Back Your Team
Despite all of the excellent cloud-based systems on the market, not all teams benefit from these products. It’s all too easy for customer care departments to remain stuck with a tool that no longer serves them because change seems like a lot of hassle.
The Solution:
Take time to pause and look at all of your business’s core systems from a bird’s eye perspective. Ask yourself: What tools are you currently using? And, how do they fit together?
Problem #5: Burnout From Lack of Automation
If your customer service and success teams aren’t using automation tools, they’re most likely overworked. Quite simply, automation provides a solution to the tasks that no one likes to do.
Think manually sending the same emails several times a day, judging when to follow-up with customers, and searching for the right customer data to pass to a coworker.
The Solution:
Add automation to your customer service processes. To get you started, here are some of the best tools for customer service teams.

All companies have ups and downs. There are times when new deals are closed daily, new prospects seem to be competing for your attention, and the phone just won’t stop ringing.
Then, there are those other times — when things are moving slowly, leads are scarce and you suddenly find yourself with a lot of extra time on your hands, perhaps not even knowing what to do with it.
It’s easy to get caught up in worry when business and lead gen slows down. That concern might also be valid, and it can help you make the right decisions for your business. A slow down in sales can be a kick in the butt to get more creative with the strategies you use to increase sales.
But if it’s a case of waiting out the slow period, why not also look for and take advantage of any opportunities during this time?

What to Do When Business Is Slow
If your business is temporarily generating fewer leads, it could be the ideal moment to fine-tune your routines and processes to get your company in perfect shape for when the tide turns.
Here are nine areas to focus on that will set your business up for long-term success.
1. Clean up your email list.
When was the last time you updated your email list? How many of the contacts there are real and verified, and how many are invalid or outdated emails?
We all know that feeling when what we thought was a precious lead turned out to be mickey.mouse@mickeymousecompany.com. Well, now is the time to clean your email lists from all those fake accounts, misspelled addresses, and redundancies.
Keeping your email list accurate and up to date will lower your bounce rate and improve your overall email campaign performance. Making sure your email list is in good shape also protects your IP reputation and increases deliverability.
2. Enrich and update your contact data.
What’s the state of your CRM system? Is your data fresh? Are all the contact details neatly filled out and updated recently? If so, great job! Your business is one of the exceptions to the rule that most salespeople aren’t big fans of admin tasks.
But what if your CRM system is in a bit of a mess? Well, you’re not the only one.
Considering that B2B data is a bit like fresh produce — decaying at a rate of 70% (!) per year — this is a task that many businesses struggle with.
The good news is that if you enrich and update your customer data, it will pay off big time once the wheels start moving again. Reliable customer data is crucial for the sales process and will help your team operate much more efficiently.
Now might also be the time to integrate your CRM with other systems, such as your marketing automation app, customer support platform, or VoIP provider.
3. Optimize your business strategy.
It can be easy to forget about your brand, marketing, and overall business strategies. However, they’re extremely valuable to update and remind your team of every so often.
When business is slow, it’s a great time to take a step back and re-evaluate your offer and positioning.
As part of your strategy check-in, you can also do a quick competitor analysis. Take care to identify the gaps in your competitors’ offerings. Those gaps might present new opportunities for your company.
Understanding exactly what it is your competitor is offering will put you in a better position — both in sales conversations and when you’re tailoring your own offerings.
You could even publish your comparison content on your blog or website to help your prospects make the best decision for their goals and pain points.
And remember, your competition is not static; new players bring new challenges and the market landscape is ever-changing.
4. Improve your SEO.
Whenever you have a little extra time on your hands, spending it on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is always a good investment. Doing so will improve your website’s ranking on Google and thereby bring new, relevant traffic to your site.
Start by doing a thorough content audit of your website to identify all opportunities to improve it. Review your existing blog posts and update them with internal links to new content and landing pages. A technical SEO audit will help your page perform even better.
Fix any broken links and add CTAs with new content offers. Make sure all your pages are in good shape with optimized page titles, meta descriptions, and alt texts for your images. SEMrush or Ahrefs are great tools for analyzing and optimizing your website.
5. Talk to your customers.
When was the last time you called up one of your existing customers to have a chat? Doing so is a sadly underestimated habit that has the potential of revolutionizing your business.
Communicating with your customers enables you to see your product through the eyes of your target group and often brings new and essential insights.
Book some calls with people using your product and listen to what they have to say. Chances are you’ll be surprised by the amount of useful information this simple gesture will generate.
Of course, praise is always welcome and when you do come across those who love your product, make sure to ask for a testimonial. But, there is even more to be learned from the customers who are less than happy.
Why are they not satisfied? Is there a problem with the product, or are they a bad fit for your offer? Perhaps it’s time to update your customer personas?
6. Improve your email workflows.
Ok, so lead generation may have slowed down. That doesn’t mean your nurturing emails have to do the same. Now is the perfect opportunity to optimize and build out your email workflows and make sure you’re doing everything you can to move your leads further down the funnel.
The fewer new leads coming in, the more important is it to take care of the ones you’ve already gathered.
Review your email analytics to figure out where in the customer journey you tend to lose most of your leads. That’s where you want to focus on improving performance.
Tweak your email content, experiment with your subject lines, and test out different CTAs to see what happens. Sometimes small changes can make a surprisingly big difference.
7. Expand your business network.
Business is all about relationships. And, when things are a bit slow, that’s when you want to get out there and form new ones. This can be done physically by attending networking events and by grabbing lunch with old colleagues. But it can also be done digitally, and that’s where you can scale your networking.
Get involved in business groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, invite new people to your network, and start conversations by posting content and interacting with other people’s posts.
Feeding and expanding your business network might be the quickest, most effective, and also the most enjoyable way to get new leads and deals. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are great places to start reaching out to peers and interact with people in your industry.
8. Guest post on other blogs.
Are there other companies that share your target group without being competitors of yours? Find businesses with offers complementing yours and reach out to them with guest articles for their blogs.
You don’t have to write everything from scratch. Remix your old content and pitch to publications and business blogs and guest posts.
Don’t be overly salesy, but make sure your bio links back to your website. This backlinking will strengthen your website’s domain authority. Being seen in quality publications and next to well-known brands will also promote your business and help to position you as a thought leader in your industry.
9. Set SMART goals.
When the pace slows, it’s an opportunity to revisit your business strategy and your goals. Ask yourself and your team:

Is there a need for changes?
Is your team aligned around your goals?
Have you managed to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals?

If not, now is the time. With a well-structured strategy and clear goals, you will find your way back to business more quickly and effectively.
It’s easy to get stressed when business seems to slow down and lead generation drops. But with the right mindset, you can use this time to improve your business. By focusing on these nine strategies, you will build a healthier and more resilient organization so that when things pick up again, you can really hit the ground running.

Think of a strong marketing team. Are you imagining a huge budget and a team full of qualified marketers? Well, for many businesses, that’s no longer necessarily the case.
The strongest marketing teams consist of marketers who know how to allocate their time and resources in the smartest way. With a poor strategy, even teams with enormous budgets can squander their resources and get lower results than a smart, small, and nimble marketing team.
It’s about doing more with less.

In the words of Paul Jarvis in Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business:

“Smart small businesses question their systems, processes and structure to become more efficient and to achieve more with the same number of employees and fewer hours of work.”

With a focused marketing strategy, it’s never been easier for small businesses to access the best marketing results — no huge ad spend or manpower required.
8 Steps to Building a Strong Marketing Team
From refining your focus to understanding your audience, here’s how to build the strongest small marketing team without increasing your budget or workload.
1. Understand your customers and what matters to them.
Effective marketing starts with a 360-degree understanding of your leads and customers and how you can give them the most value.
Remember that the most important people to your business are those who are already giving you money — your current customers. When they are happy, you have a tribe of people who will promote your business for you at every opportunity.
A 5% increase in customer retention correlates with at least a 25% increase in profit, according to Bain & Company.
By understanding your current customers, you can also understand the types of people you want to attract. Use a tool like the Value Proposition Canvas to define your core customer profiles and visualize the value you create. Then you can pivot your marketing and product to relieve pain and create gains for even more customers.
2. Focus on the 20% of the work that brings 80% of the results.
Where do your current marketing leads come from? Which marketing leads convert to customers? And which marketing channels are your happiest and highest-paying customers using?
It’s time to get crystal clear on where your marketing spend has the highest ROI. These are the channels, tactics, and strategies that are worth the most to your small marketing team.
By following the Pareto principle, your team should focus on the 20% of your marketing efforts that bring in 80% of the impact.
The marketing strategy with the highest ROI tends to be email, as explained in Campaign Monitor’s The New Rules of Email Marketing:

However, keep in mind that every single business and customer base is different. What marketing strategies can you prove work for you? Answer this to find the most valuable use for your restricted marketing budget.
3. Share value and offer solutions.
In her book Chillpreneur, entrepreneur Denise Duffield-Thomas summarizes her wisdom on marketing for small businesses in just a few words: “Share and make offers.”

“Share your knowledge, expertise, advice, tips, experience, horror stories, mistakes, and successes with people. And then, offer a solution.”

Although you can (and should) offer a lot of wide-reaching value with an inbound marketing approach — such as valuable blog posts and resources — the solution you offer to the right people can ultimately be your product or service.
After a personalized and carefully curated lead nurturing process, your “buy now” button is the end destination at the bottom of your marketing funnel.
4. List and audit all of your marketing projects.
Strong small marketing teams know that they can’t do everything. It’s impossible to follow every trend and best practice, especially when you’re marketing on a budget.
To understand where you can free up your marketing team’s time to focus on what’s most valuable, first identify what your team is currently working on.
What projects are running? What tasks do you and your fellow marketers have on your to-do lists?
With a project management tool, you can increase the visibility of what’s going on in your marketing team. This makes it much easier to assess what’s worth continuing to spend time on and what isn’t a priority for your team right now.
As an example, this Trello template offers a handy company overview that quickly shows everything going on from a high-level perspective:

5. Routinely question how you do things.
One piece of advice in Paul Jarvis’s book Company of One is to routinely check your small business processes and look for areas to optimize and ideally automate. He encourages business owners to ask:

“Is this process efficient enough? What steps can be removed and the end result will be the same or better? Is this rule helping or hindering our business?”

The end goal here is simplicity, Paul explains. “Having too many products or services, too many layers of management, and/or too many rules and processes for completing tasks leads to atrophy. Simplicity has to be a mandate.”
How can you simplify processes and introduce more automation? As an easy first step, look at marketing automation tools to streamline workflows and integration tools for automatic data syncing between apps. These are two of the best ways to improve results in your small business with less effort.
6. Check your marketing tech stack.
What marketing tools is your small business using right now? To build the strongest small marketing team, you need a strong marketing stack — or a selection of tools you use to power your marketing.
Most marketing teams see the best results when they put their CRM tool at the center of their operations. This centralizes data and gives an easy view of all of the contacts, leads, and customers in your sales and marketing pipelines.
With an all-in-one CRM and marketing tool like HubSpot, you can carry out tasks like email sending, marketing automation, and content management in one place.
Otherwise, your small business can use standalone tools and sync them with your CRM for seamless data flows.
7. Integrate your business tools.
One of the biggest advantages of integrating your apps is that it helps you do more with less — less time, less budget, and less people. A two-way data syncing solution can connect contact data between all of your business tools — in your marketing team and beyond.
Not only does this streamline your processes, but it also solves the time-consuming problems of data silos and messy CSV imports and exports. It’s an easy solution for your marketing team to…

Leverage all available customer data for marketing campaigns;
Automate data management
Segment email lists based on the latest data in all apps
Immediately update opt-ins and opt-outs across all tools

8. Follow a business-wide philosophy of doing more with less.
Doing more with less doesn’t just apply to your marketing team. You can build a small and mighty sales team or customer support team by refining your focus on where the results come from and creating super-streamlined processes.
What other processes can you streamline, automate and spend more or less time on across your small business?

How many cloud-based apps do you use with your business? Five? Ten? Fifty? You probably use more apps than you realize.
The most important apps in your stack probably include:

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool
A professional services automation (PSA) tool
An accounting package

As an IT or managed service provider (MSP) business, you need to track prospects (marketing), turn them into clients (sales), provide services to those clients (service delivery), and bill them (accounting).
For this process to work efficiently, each app needs accurate data, and this data needs to be consistent across your tech stack. This is easier said than done.
Many IT businesses spend an inordinate amount of time manually moving data from one app to another — often bringing along typos and mistakes that come with manual input. This leads to inefficiency at best and costly mistakes at worst.
So, how can you successfully link your cloud-based applications so that they work to the best of their ability? Read on to find out.

Why You Should Sync Data Between Apps
If you want to avoid manually uploading data, you need to make sure those apps talk to each other. This means syncing data between them.
This is sometimes done via a manual process, or exporting data from one app and importing it into another. But it’s best if you look for automatic processes: systems where changes in one app are automatically synchronized with another.
Think of the relationship between your remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool and your PSA tool.
If you had to manually add each new workstation and printer to your PSA configuration, you could spend a long, long time keeping data between your RMM and PSA up to date.
Yet this is what many IT businesses spend their time doing.
The most progressive MSP businesses don’t handle their app data in silos. They understand the value of automatically sharing it between apps.
Synced Data Makes You More Efficient
Syncing data between apps makes your staff more efficient by keeping everything up-to-date at all times.
If your MSP business has linked its RMM and PSA tools and a client adds a new workstation, then your RMM tool discovers it and automatically adds that configuration to your PSA tool.
The PSA tool then makes that data available to Service Delivery, avoiding the embarrassing scenario of a client calling your helpdesk, only to be told: “Oh, we didn’t know about that PC…”
Once your PSA tool knows about a workstation, it can then tell your accounting package to bill for work.
This is incredibly important. IT businesses can face an enormous amount of lost revenue where MSPs are simply not billing for workstations they are supporting for their clients. This is one of the main reasons that IT companies need to sync data between their cloud apps – to increase their billable revenue.
Keeping Every Department in Sync
Setting up automatic synchronization between different apps means that every department in your business is aware of the latest data.
For example, you might use a CRM to track sales opportunities and leads, and use iPaaS to automatically synchronize your CRM with Google Contacts two ways — so any contacts that you enter into Google Contacts are synchronized to your CRM, too.
Once a prospect has been converted into a client, there’s no retyping data — that information is automatically updated in both apps.
When you’re ready to bill that new client, your accounting package automatically has all the information it needs, thanks to data synchronization.
No missed billing. No mistyped data. Just a set of applications that work together. It’s so simple, yet so effective.
Building a Stronger Tech Stack
Take five minutes to do a quick audit of your IT business. List the cloud-based apps you use to manage your business on a day-to-day basis.
How many of these apps are synchronizing their valuable data to the other apps you use? If you’re not synchronizing data, and instead are relying on manual methods, then you should expect to lose time and miss revenue opportunities.
Instead, it’s important to realize that this data is the lifeblood of your business and needs to be freed from the silo it is currently trapped in. Synchronize your data and watch the efficiency of your business rise, along with your profits.

Marketing for your new startup is exciting. You’ve put time and effort into creating your product or service, and now you need to make sure your market is as hyped about it as you are.
In this three-step guide, we’ll cover the essential components for creating asuccessful marketing strategy and help your startup grow faster by capturing the attention of the right people: ideal customers.

Messaging, Buyer Personas, and Positioning
Before you start thinking about marketing tactics, you need to build a solid foundation for your brand and messaging. This is a step many startups skip, which, along with a lack of user research and market demand, can be a reason nine out of ten startups fail.
After ensuring there’s demand for your product, get clear on these fundamental questions before planning your marketing strategy:

Who are you helping? Before you start marketing your product, you need to define your target audience. And within your target audience, go further and identify your different buyer personas.
What problems are you helping your customers solve? What are the pain points and challenges that you offer a solution to? Define this thoroughly; getting this one right will determine whether your marketing message resonates with your ideal customer or falls flat.
How are you helping your customers? It’s no coincidence that we’re talking about the how after the who and the what. Starting with the how is a classic startup mistake that will set you up for failure. As tempting as it is to dive into the details of your product, the harsh truth is that nobody will care unless you first answer every prospect’s most important question: “what’s in it for me?”

Once you have the answers to these three questions, it’s much easier to craft compelling marketing messages that effectively resonate with your ideal customers. This provides the framework for any startup’s successful marketing strategy.
A Three-Step Guide to Marketing for Startups
Below is our framework for an effective marketing strategy for your startup. Think of it as the foundation you can build upon and add to as you scale, bringing in new tactics such as email nurturing and other marketing automation.
1. Optimize your website.
To get your marketing strategy underway, the first thing you need to focus on is optimizing your website.
With great search engine optimization (SEO), landing pages designed for conversions, and a blog to drive traffic and build trust, your website will become a marketing machine in its own right.
Get your SEO right from the start.
Pay attention to SEO at the beginning of your startup’s journey and you’ll reap the rewards later.
Make sure you identify which keywords your prospects are looking for so you can start building your site and your content to rank for them.
Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush are great for this and can be used both for checking which keywords your competitors use and for auditing and improving your site.
Optimize your site for lead generation.
Once a visitor lands on your site, make sure there’s a next step for them to take. Offer something of value to incentivize visitors to leave their contact details.
If you’re stuck on what to offer, a download of a white paper or free trial of your service are classic lead magnets. Once you have their email, you can reach out to prospects and nurture them down your sales funnel with automation and personalization.
Blog and guest blog.
Did you know that a B2B buyer on average consumes 13 (!) pieces of content from a provider before deciding to purchase?
To build trust with your prospects, it’s essential to showcase your expertise and build credibility by publishing useful and valuable content on your website.
Guest blogging on other sites is also a cost-efficient way to drive traffic and get exposure.
2. Design a social media marketing strategy.
Once you have your website in good shape, social media is the next arena to conquer. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, so where should a startup begin?
Choose the right channels.
Where does your target audience like to hang out online? If you target Gen Z kids, then maybe TikTok is the place to be. And if you’re selling a B2B product? Then LinkedIn is probably a better channel.
Choosing your channels thoughtfully with your key personas in mind will help you create more targeted messaging and avoid spending time on channels where ROI is low.
Provide value.
When you’ve chosen your channels and platform, it’s time to consider what to publish. Your guiding star should be to help, not to sell. In social media, people tend to filter out or block anything that feels too salesy.
Aim for content that is either educational, inspiring, or entertaining, depending on your product and your target audience.
Interact with your audience and influencers.
There’s a reason social media is called social media. These are not platforms for one-sided communication; one of the keys to success is interaction.
Always respond to questions and comments as soon as you can, and interact with the influencers in your industry to build relationships and awareness for your startup.
Experiment with ads.
Advertising can be tricky to maneuver, so start small to avoid spiraling costs. Start by targeting the most low-hanging fruit and experiment to see what works.
Trial and error is often the best way to go, starting with minimal spending and amping up only when you begin to see real results.
3. Recruit customer ambassadors.
Create systems for referrals.
The best marketing you can get is happy clients recommending you to their peers. It’s the type of marketing that is the most trusted, the most effective, and the least costly.
Start building processes for referrals into your funnel from the beginning, such as offering active clients incentives for referring new sign-ups.
Leverage testimonials and case studies.
Social proof is gold in marketing. Research shows that 91% of people read customer reviews and 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Testimonials and case studies are highly effective ways to leverage happy customer stories at scale. And they are well worth the investment. A well-written case study is one of the most influential pieces of marketing content you can produce and can be leveraged in all stages of the sales funnel.
Start early and collect testimonials from happy customers. Then write case studies describing how your product is helping them.
Now that you have a baseline marketing strategy to build off of, let’s talk about how to properly scale it as your business continues to grow.
Preparing to Scale: Experiment, Measure, and Iterate
When building a marketing plan for your startup, be prepared to continually experiment, measure, and iterate.
Experiment
Traditional marketing campaigns are a dying breed. Today, the most successful businesses are the ones who are continually tweaking and adapting, allocating funds where they get the most bang for their buck.Being agile and adapting is vital.
Measure
It’s also important to get your core KPIs in place early on in your startup’s marketing journey. These should be closely aligned with your overall company metrics (and stay that way as your startup scales).
Choose a few important KPIs to focus on and visualize these transparently and accurately in your reporting dashboards. These can include:

Number of marketing leads by channel
Conversion rate by channel
Cost of acquisition per channel

To get quality data that informs actionable insights, avoid getting swamped by vanity metrics that don’t matter, sync data between your apps, and create a culture of data integrity at your business for optimal accuracy.
Iterate
Don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy trap: you can always pivot away from what’s not working, and often a startup should do just that.
Learn from your experimenting, and make sure to document what you’re doing as well as the money you’re spending on different channels. This way, new hires won’t have to reinvent the wheel, and you’ll be able to track your expenses and measure ROI.
Remember to start by defining who you are helping, what you are helping them with, and how you’re doing it.
When you have your story and messaging in place, it’s time to move on to the channels you use to communicate it: including your website, social media, and customer-generated content such as case studies. And, don’t forget to document your results to keep learning and tracking performance along the way.

You probably have thousands upon thousands of contacts in your database. With all those contacts to keep track of, you need all the help you can get when it comes to managing your vast contact network.
But what does contact management mean for businesses, exactly?
Contact management is the process of recording contact data for individuals and businesses in your organization’s network — including suppliers, customers, leads, partners, subscribers, and more — and managing your interactions with them.

This contact data can include information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, job titles, etc. Anything you might need to actually contact that person. But it can also include information such as a person’s stage in their customer journey with you, their subscription status, interests, demographics, the list goes on.
Contact management is not as simple as keeping contact information on file. – You need to make sure all this data is properly organized so you can fully utilize it. Managing your contact data properly involves many important best practices, such as:

Introducing company-wide standards for data entry and maintenance
Performing regular data cleanups
Choosing the best apps to store and manage your contact data
Centralizing your contact data in one tool, such as your CRM
Segmenting your data to send the most timely and relevant messages to each subset of your audience
Optimizing the ways you collect data to make sure you only collect data that matters to you — and that collection is done according to privacy regulations
Creating reporting workflows to make the best decisions informed by high-quality data

Syncing your contact data two ways between all key applications

It may sound like a lot of work, but it pays off. A highly efficient contact database will not only make life much easier for you and your team, but will also empower you to provide integrated and seamless customer experiences.
Collecting and storing high-quality data is absolutely critical if you want to know your customers. Understanding their needs, interests, and history with you enables you to provide a personalized and relevant service — and personalization is the secret sauce to better customer retention and satisfaction.
So how can you implement a best-in-class contact management strategy and reap the rewards? Read on for some tips and tricks to managing contacts at your organization.
Organizing Your Contact Database
Before anything else, organizing your existing contact database is an essential first step. It’s likely that over the years you’ve gathered data that is outdated or no longer valid, as well as a lot of duplicates or data that you’re not supposed to keep due to privacy regulations such as GDPR.
This data is doing nothing but cluttering your database. So, before implementing a new and improved contact management strategy, start by carefully looking at the contacts you already have and go through the following steps:
1. Back up your data.
Your business is built on the strength of your customer data, and the last thing you need is to lose this data. In order to organize your contacts, you will need to do a lot of editing and deleting, and this means that mistakes could happen.
That’s why it’s best to back up your data before you get started. Most CRMs and contact management tools allow you to back up your data, but if yours doesn’t, try exporting this data in a CSV file and save this file to your desktop. At the very least, if the editing process goes wrong you’ll be able to go back to this file and start over.
2. Pause any active integrations or syncs you may have.
If you already have a type of integration in place to sync contact data between tools, make sure to pause this before you start cleaning up your data. This ensures that you don’t receive incoming data into your contact management tool while you’re trying to organize it.
If you don’t have an integration in place yet, hold off on implementing this until after you’ve prepared your database to make sure you get the best results from your sync — we’ll get to this point in the process later on in this guide.
3. Remove duplicates.
Your CRM or contact management tool may already have an option to find and merge duplicates. If so, use this function to remove any duplicates you may have in your database.
This works differently for each tool, so the best thing to do is to check your CRM’s knowledge base to find out how your tool detects and merges duplicates. If your software doesn’t have this option, you can also use a de-duplicator tool such as Dedupely.
4. Delete outdated or incorrect data.
This includes emails that keep bouncing back, phone numbers with invalid formats, incomplete addresses, etc. It can also be contacts you know your business doesn’t need anymore, such as contact data for unqualified leads.
If you don’t have a huge database yet, you may want to go through your contacts manually, but there are ways to do this automatically. For example, Experian Data Quality has some powerful data validation programs that allow you to verify contact data in bulk.
5. Manually scan your contacts.
Once you’ve merged your duplicates and gotten rid of invaluable data, your database will be in pretty good shape. But in order for it to be absolutely top-notch, you’ll need to go over it with a fine-tooth comb.
This step will obviously take some time, but if you implement company-wide data entry standards and make a commitment to quality data, you’ll only have to do this once.
Once your database is properly organized and your contacts all have valid, consistent, and up-to-date information attached to them, you will have a solid foundation upon which to build the best contact management strategy.
Next up, an important step: choosing the best contact management software for your business.
Choosing the Best Contact Management Software
If your business already has a CRM system or contact management tool you’re happy with, you can skip this step. However, if your current application isn’t cutting it for you, you haven’t found the right tool yet, or your contacts are stored all over the place, choosing the right contact management software is potentially the most important thing you can do for proper data management.
You need to pick an app to act as your central contact database and source of truth. For solopreneurs or freelancers, a simple tool like Google Contacts or Outlook will work just fine.
However, for anything from very small businesses to large enterprises, it’s highly recommended that you pick a customer relationship management (CRM) tool as your central contact database.
CRM systems offer great features for organized contact management, including (but not limited to) storing prospect and customer data in one place, monitoring interactions with customers across multiple channels (such as phone, email, voicemails, meetings, live chat, etc.), and tracking customers’ journeys and movement through your pipelines.
How to Choose the Right CRM
There’s a multitude of CRMs out there to suit businesses of every shape and size. Here are some things to take into consideration when choosing your ideal tool:

What is the size of your business? Some CRMs are made for businesses that want to grow, like HubSpot CRM, whilst others are a better fit for larger companies.
How do you want to scale your business in the next few years? It’s not just about the current size of your business, but also about how you want to grow. Make sure you pick a system that scales with you and won’t become a bad fit a few years down the line as your business grows.
What is the budget you have for a CRM? A good CRM fits nicely inside your budget and you won’t end up paying for features you don’t need.
How does it integrate with your business’s other tools? The best SaaS stacks work together, with data flowing between all applications. That’s why it’s crucial to sync your contact data two ways between your CRM and the rest of your business tools to always have accurate and up-to-date information everywhere. Make sure your CRM can integrate with tools like your email service provider, accounting tools, VoIP provider, customer support software, and any other tools that store contact data.
What features do you want from your CRM tool? The range of features each CRM offers can vary a lot. Think about the features your business needs, now and in the future – this may include a visual overview of your sales process, customer journey overviews, marketing automation, reporting and analytics, calendar and scheduling features, company and contact insights.

For those who are just starting out with CRMs and want to test the waters a bit, there are many tools that offer a free trial period where you can experiment with all the different features and functionalities a CRM has to offer. If you’re not sure yet exactly what kind of features your business needs, this trial period is also a great way to find out.
A golden tip for finding the best CRM tool for you is to visit software review websites such as G2 and Capterra and check out user reviews. On these websites, you can filter your choices based on market segment (small business, mid-market, enterprise, etc.), language, pricing options, and available features. That will already be a great place to start your search and for narrowing down your options.
Best CRM Providers
Some popular CRM applications in the market include:

HubSpot CRM: This free-forever CRM is a great pick for businesses with a limited budget and that want a tool that’s extremely easy to use and deploy. There is a wide range of extra features you can access for sales, marketing, and customer service teams by adding paid Hubs to the CRM.
Pipedrive: Pipedrive is a budget-friendly and easy-to-use CRM tool that focuses on small businesses and sales teams.
Salesforce: Salesforce is a powerhouse tool that offers a huge range of features and a world of possibilities, but at a higher price point. It’s a good option for rapidly growing or large businesses, but might be too complex and costly for smaller businesses.
Nimble: This is another budget-friendly solution for smaller businesses that offers great ease of use and a quick setup.

Once you implement a CRM system, it will be that much easier to manage your contacts by making your CRM the central contact database for your business and the heart of your tech stack. By having a centralized contact database, you can:

Find key contacts and insights in one app
Make it easy for all teams to find data, without needing to have login details and training for lots of tools they don’t need to use
Eliminate information silos between departments

Processes for Data Entry and Contact Management
To streamline how you handle your data, it’s important to introduce company-wide standards for data entry and management.
You may want to assign one team or individual to be responsible for the quality and management of your data. They’ll need to ensure that everything that enters your database is up to code according to company policies and strategy.
For instance, they can check that all the necessary information fields are filled in when a contact record is created, that there are no duplicates before a new contact is created, that everyone else in the organization is following the rules, and that all data is entered with consistent formats.
If having one person or team be responsible for data management isn’t feasible for your company, make sure to train all team members on where and how to correctly input and update data. A few important things to teach your team when it comes to data management include:

In which app they should enter new data
When and how to update contact records
Which information fields to fill in when creating or updating a record
How to check if a contact already exists before creating it
How contact data flows between tools

Of course, this is different for each organization and will depend on the specific processes your company implements. It will also depend on the tools in your tech stack.
Documenting these processes is just as important, so that all new hires can quickly learn how to handle data at your business. In addition, if a person responsible for data management leaves the company, their successor can easily get up to speed by checking documentation.
By introducing company-wide protocols for data entry and management, you can significantly reduce the amount of low-quality, outdated, or duplicate data in your system — and managing your contacts will become infinitely easier.
Gathering Valuable Contact Data
By now, you have a good idea about how to organize the contact data you have — but how are you getting this data in the first place?
Optimizing the channels and tools through which you gather customer data is essential for the upkeep of your contact management strategy — otherwise, after tidying everything up, you may have an influx of bad data coming your way and messing up your databases all over again.
In order to build your database with quality data that leads to actionable insights, being systematic about how you collect data is vital. To get this right, make sure to follow these steps:
1. Analyze and optimize the channels through which you collect data.
First things first: start by making a list of all the channels you currently have in place to gather data. This may include social media, customer surveys, landing pages, website forms, sign-up forms, emails, and mobile apps, for example.
Then, look at each of them individually and think about how you can optimize them. For example, if you have a form on a landing page full of unnecessary information fields, remove these from the form, and only collect data you actually need. You might also want to standardize data formats in these forms, such as by only allowing email addresses with a valid format and phone numbers with the right amount of digits.
To make sure all this data ends up in the right place, double-check that the information collected by these channels is flowing into the right apps and that these apps, in turn, are properly connected to your CRM with the appropriate tags and labels for each contact.
Last but certainly not least, make sure that you are gathering explicit permission from everyone in full accordance with data protection laws. You’ll need to implement an opt-in that lets subscribers give explicit permission for you to store their data and send them different kinds of emails, including product updates and marketing communications. All of the major email marketing platforms — such as Mailchimp or SendGrid — offer full compliance with data protection regulations.
Not only will this help ensure that you stay compliant with the law, but it will also help you build a high-quality contact list with people who actually want to hear from you. Trust, security, and privacy should be integral to your contact management strategy from the start.
2. Offer value in exchange for data.
If you want to gather as much valuable information as possible, you need to create opportunities where your customers want to give you the data you need. One of the best ways to do this is by giving them free downloadable content in exchange for their information. This can include ebooks, white papers, checklists, templates, guides, and even offers and discounts.
This free downloadable content can be offered in a separate landing page, a website pop-up, or an email survey, for example.
3. Make sure this information goes to the right tools.
If your new subscribers go straight into your email marketing tool, syncing this tool in real-time with your CRM ensures that these new contacts appear instantly in your CRM as leads. This information will then enable you to begin a lead nurturing campaign and maximize your leads-to-customers conversions.
Also, if you’re in a business where you meet a lot of new leads in person, you’re probably likely to enter their contact details on your phone. By syncing your phone’s address book with your CRM, this new contact is instantly visible to your entire team.
Integrating Your Contact Data
Now we’ve come to the holy grail of contact management: integrating your data.
For your contact management strategy to yield the best results, the data in your different apps can’t be isolated from one another. All these apps collect contact data in different ways, so without integrating them, you can end up with lots of different databases that take a lot of time to manage separately.
By integrating them and keeping your CRM as the centralized contact database for your business, contact management gets exponentially easier. Automated contact syncing keeps all of your contacts up-to-date, accurate, and enriched between your business apps and devices.
By syncing your apps, you empower every team in your business with easy access to critical data. That way, employees will be better positioned to focus on strategic tasks and stay productive rather than spending their time on tedious and repetitive manual processes — and bad data will never stifle your progress again.
The Best Way to Keep Your Contact Databases in Sync
If you previously tried to keep your databases in sync by importing and exporting CSV files, you know how frustrating and time-consuming it is.
In a growing business, your contacts quickly get outdated with this method, as well as increasing the likelihood of duplicating contacts across apps — not to mention that it takes a huge amount of time to do this constantly and results in a lot more frequent cleanups.
Instead of using CSV files to try to keep your contacts integrated between apps, try an automated, two-way syncing method. A tool that specializes in contact syncing can keep your contacts flowing between your databases two ways and in real-time. So, every time you change or update any contact data, that change is reflected in your other apps, too. This also applies to data that was created before the sync was set up.
This solution is also fully automated, which means that after setting it up once, the sync is kept up without you needing to do anything. As the final piece in the puzzle of your contact management strategy, syncing your tools will make sure that your contacts are kept up-to-date, accurate, and secure — and without you needing to lift a finger beyond setup.

How big is your business’s database? From the moment someone becomes interested in your product or service and long after the purchase, you’re collecting data — and it can multiply fast.
Thanks to cloud-based platforms, even small businesses have access to a broad variety of tools to gather massive amounts of information. But it’s easy to fall into a “more is better” trap when really the quality of your data is most important of all.

After all, collecting large amounts of information is less of a challenge than managing data efficiently and ensuring its quality. Then, and only then, can business owners make data-driven decisions such as how to:

Pivot your business to match consumer demand
Offer the best customer experiences
Introduce new products
Personalize marketing content
Scale effectively
Channel your budget

Let’s examine the two biggest obstacles of data management and how to use technology to overcome them so you can make more data-driven decisions.
Obstacles of Data Management
1. Overwhelming Amount of Data From Different Sources
According to the 2020 Blissfully Report, the average small business uses 102 different apps and a mid-market business uses an average of 137 apps.
Your marketing team needs at least one tool for lead generation, email marketing, and automation. Meanwhile, your sales team uses a CRM and your accounting team manages your finances with another piece of software. Then there are apps for smooth business operations like GSuite or Outlook, your ecommerce store, surveys platforms, and VoIP.
All these applications contain relevant customer and lead data from interactions with leads, prospects, or customers at different stages of their journey.
When you are choosing applications for your SaaS stack, you might choose an all-in-one solution to reduce complexity and connect various data sources to offer a wider scope of customer data. For instance, marketing automation software can take over your lead generation, capture, scoring, and nurturing throughout the customer journey.
Integrated systems or hubs exist for other areas of your business like sales, finance, or ecommerce. But as your business grows, you’ll likely adopt more tools on top of them to add functionality and handle additional customer touchpoints.
These tools have their own way to store data and the problem is that most of them are not really “talking to each other.” The lack of communication between apps leads to a major data management challenge for businesses of all sizes: data silos.
2. Data Silos
Cloud software has made a lot of things easier for businesses: you can work anywhere, stay up to date on every device, and not rely on hardware updates. But even when you are using cloud-based applications across your business, most of them are not natively integrated.
As a result, little fragments of customer data are isolated within these applications. When that happens, you have a data silos problem.
Data silos can be kryptonite for businesses. They make it impossible to have a 360-degree view of your customers when your data is isolated. Since each one of your teams is looking at their own particular subset of data, decisions will rarely be aligned and definitely not driven by the data that matters to everyone.
Even when there is good communication between teams, sharing quality data has its structural challenges. Many sales teams are accidentally spending time on leads that their marketing colleagues have already identified as cold.
When native integrations are not available, the best way to have the right data in the right tools is through third-party integration services.
For example, using an integration solution can help you align different departments in your business by having:

The right marketing leads and their qualification data in the CRM
The right customer attributes collected by a CRM available on a marketing tool

Integrated Data Is Essential for Data-Driven Decisions
Collecting massive amounts of data is no longer the problem. Today’s challenge is managing data efficiency and avoiding silos.
Integrated systems and synchronization solutions allow you to have the right information available in the right tool at the right time. Then, and only then, can you have a clear and complete view of your customers. This enables you to use data to illuminate the best path forward rather than making decisions based on gut feeling or past experience alone.
Additionally, data synchronization brings your teams closer together and aligns their view of the customer. Having your tools “talking to each other” can also leverage something very valuable for all businesses: time.

A far cry from its early days on factory production lines, automation has entered into our organizations and found a place in the operations of every department — and it isn’t going anywhere.
Combined with robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), automation takes care of the mundane tasks we’d rather not spend time on, the work we don’t want to mess up with human error, customer interactions that require instant responses and so much more.
While automation has been evolving at lightning speed over the last few years, it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. As we automate more business processes, we’re on the path of an interesting long-term paradox: despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. So how is it affecting our work?
Here’s what the future of automation looks like — and how your company can start getting ahead right now.

10 Automation Trends to Watch for in 2022
1. Automating High-Quality Experiences
Right now, the low-hanging fruit for automation is boring repetitive work. Automating front-office functions is harder, but this will become more accessible in the future as automation becomes more intelligent.
More organizations will soon be using technology to automate quality customer experiences. However, this doesn’t mean that customer support roles will become obsolete any time soon. After all, 30% of customers still say that not being able to reach a human representative is the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer experience.
2. Marketing, Sales, and Success Alignment
73% of sales teams say that collaborating across departments is critical or very important to their overall sales process. Automation makes it easier for organizations to be aligned. Many CRMs can now facilitate contact handovers and data sharing as a contact moves from marketing lead, to sales lead, to customer.
3. Automation as a Vital Part of CRMs
Three-quarters of sales professionals use technology — usually a CRM — to close more deals. Despite this, today’s salespeople spend just 34% of their time selling and more time catching up with admin and data entry.
As sales and marketing teams realize the potential of automation to tackle repetitive tasks, more of the top CRM tools are developing powerful automation features. These will enable companies to automate routine tasks to speed up sales cycles, send personalized marketing messages, and proactively resolve customer service cases without lifting a finger.
4. Automation for Greater Personalization
The best customer interactions are personalized. After setting up audience segments based on certain criteria, customized messages can be automatically sent to the right people at an ideal time.
5. AI Will Become Easier to Deploy
If AI was ever more at home in sci-fi movies than our offices, that’s no longer the case. AI is increasingly a part of the business tools we know and love, from CRMs to email marketing tools.
In the future, we may not even realize we’re deploying AI — it will simply look like better customer experience, sales, or marketing.
6. Business Chatbots as Full-Time Agents
Live chat software has a 73% satisfaction rate as a way for customers to interact with businesses. Chatbots can also save businesses up to 30% in customer support costs.
While today’s businesses mostly use live chat to facilitate real-time conversations between consumers and business representatives, more companies are setting up chatbots.
With bots, companies can provide answers to frequently asked questions and even resolve issues without a team member’s involvement. Increasingly, the best chatbots serve as full-time customer support agents. The key to a bot’s success is intelligence, which still has its limitations but is improving fast.
In the future of automation, bots will become more useful, more intelligent, and may soon incorporate voice functionality.
7. AI for Automated Decision-Making
Decision-making is tiring. You need the right data at your fingertips, to look beyond your biases and get agreement from other stakeholders. AI will increasingly provide a solution to this, delivering high-quality data that can help inform the best decisions.
While some decisions can be instantly acted on with automation, many will — and should — go back to humans for consideration from an emotional and empathetic side.
8. Automating Data Collection and Reporting
Automating data management is essential to ensure data quality and integrity.
However, reporting doesn’t have to involve confusing Excel exports and hours spent manipulating data. By consolidating all of your customer data with an iPaaS solution, your tools can deliver more accurate reporting with the information at hand.
9. Automation Across a Company’s App Stack
Businesses have more tools than ever before at their fingertips. In the future of automation, more companies will have a Head of Business Systems role to oversee their huge number of tools — and this position will hold a vast capacity for impact and change.
More than ever, the SaaS tools we choose will help our businesses become more productive, profitable, and impactful. For best results, companies will connect their tools to enable automated two-way data syncing and greater accuracy.
10. RPA Helping Businesses Become More Productive
RPA, also referred to as ‘robotics’ or ‘robots,’ is defined as the automation of rules-based processes with software that utilizes the user interface and which can run on any software, including web-based applications, ERP systems, and mainframe systems. This could include opening emails and attachments, moving files and folders, or filling in forms.
Going forward, RPA is likely to become a more standard part of our workflows, whether via stand-alone tools, features of the tools we’re already using, or integrated apps.
Is automation changing work as we know it?
The short answer is yes. Between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced by automation and need to find new jobs by 2030 around the world, but economic growth, rising productivity, and other forces could more than offset the losses, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute.
The role of automation is to take care of the tasks that machines can do better than us — and at least for the near future, this doesn’t include creativity, management, or friendly 1-1 human interaction.
When we automate our business processes, we don’t have to lose the human sides of marketing, sales, service, and management — it can free up more time for them.
For best results, create an automation strategy that helps your team focus on their most important work. Choose automation tools that free up time, connect your overall tech stack, and boost productivity as well as morale.

The more billable tasks you complete, the more money your agency makes. The less time you spend on admin and non-billables, the more you can spend on valuable client work.
Productivity equals profitability. But being productive is easier said than done, especially as you scale your agency.
To help you out, here are some of our favorite productivity hacks for digital agencies to get more done in less time, whether your agency makes money from digital marketing, SEO, web design, or other skills you’ve turned into a business.

How to Make Digital Agencies More Productive
1. Delegate tasks that someone else can do better.
Many agencies start this way: you’re a lone consultant monetizing your skills, and business is good. In fact, you’re bringing in too much work to deliver yourself. You either have to turn down clients or overstretch yourself unsustainably. But eventually, you decide to distribute the workload by hiring someone else. Soon enough, you’re running a digital agency.
Being able to delegate is crucial for any business — whether it’s hiring those first few employees or knowing what to outsource later. One of the best productivity tips for agencies: if a task is time-consuming and doesn’t require your team’s skill to do it well, find someone else to do it. Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork make outsourcing easier than ever.
2. Use price elasticity to your advantage.
This isn’t a productivity tip — but it will help your agency make more money. It’s the easiest trick in the book: raising your rates.
As an early-stage business with a steady stream of happy clients, you should be raising your prices regularly — around every six months. This is because of the economic concept of price elasticity.
A can of Coca-Cola is an elastic product: if a shopkeeper increases their prices unreasonably, customers won’t buy it. They’ll get something else instead, like a can of Pepsi.
But your agency’s work is a value-driven product: it’s more inelastic. If your clients are getting value from your work, they won’t leave when you raise your prices.
That said, you should be careful when raising your rates –—and you have to be certain you are delivering the value to back it up — but your best clients will likely pay more to continue working with you. It’s generally easiest to test the water with new clients before letting your existing clients know, however.
3. Carve out focus time.
You wake up to a flurry of Slack notifications. You open your laptop and emails flood in. Then the phone starts ringing. How can you focus on the work you’re paid for with all this going on?
The answer: with focus and intentionality. Building a productive and profitable agency with clients that love you requires a ton of focus. It means sitting down at your computer, turning notifications off, and concentrating on the most important task until it’s done. No checking LinkedIn, no email checks just in case, no keeping Slack on in the background.
Serious, unglamorous, and ruthless focus is your secret weapon against the competition — and it’s what’s going to drive in more profit.
4. Know that doubling your team doesn’t double results.
When you hire more people, there’s a very real chance that your productivity will stagnate or decrease — at least to begin with. That can even apply to your profits, too.
There’s a value to staying small, as Paul Jarvis celebrates in his book Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business — your business is more nimble when it’s smaller. It’s usually more productive per employee as well.
If you’ve decided to scale your agency, do it with full acceptance that it will change your team’s culture and productivity; in many ways for the better, but with some losses too.
5. Identify where your results come from.
You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. It suggests that 80% of the results will come from 20% of the work.
In your digital agency, it might mean that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your projects. 80% of your hassles and headaches can come from 20% of your clients. 80% of your work will probably happen in 20% of your day.
To make your digital agency more productive, drill into that 20% — the projects, clients, and time where the results come from, and on the flip side, where the problems surface. Recalibrate your business to make space for more of what works.
6. Choose tools that speed up invoicing and payments.
The end of the month rolls around, you’ve done lots of work, your clients are happy, and everything should be well in the world. But you’ve got to send your invoices out.
Getting paid is easier said than done. Sending out invoices can be one of the most time-consuming parts of your agency’s workload, especially if you don’t have good billing software on your side.
Find tools that track your time and your billables so you know exactly what to charge. The best platforms should make it easy to create an invoice with the right info per client, including address, currency, and payment details.
Some of the best invoicing and accounting tools for digital agencies are:

Quickbooks Online: The most respected financial software on the market, although it can be overly complex for small agencies that want to keep things simple. Time tracking is available from $40/mo in the Essentials plan.

Freshbooks: Optimized for freelancers and very small businesses, Freshbooks can be a good fit for smaller agencies, too. It offers built-in time tracking functionality and integrations with payroll providers.

Xero: At the sweet spot between complex and simple, Xero is beautiful to use and a powerful addition to digital agencies.

7. When you’re in a position to turn down bad clients, do it.
As a digital agency, it can feel like you’re not meant to turn down work. That’s a total myth. The most productive and profitable agencies say no to work that isn’t for them. It can take a while for your agency to be in a position where you can afford to say no, but when you’re less desperate for clients, you should. Look out for:

Bad fit clients you know you’ll struggle to service well
Clients that are a nightmare to work with — you’ve either worked with them before, or you can see the tell-tale signs
Clients that refuse to pay your usual rates and insist on discounts

8. Sync your contact data across apps.
As time goes on, your agency’s data on past, present, and future clients can quickly become unruly — and you have enough to do without having to sift through that.
To help get things under control, set up two-way syncs between your apps to make your data play nicely across all of your agency’s tools, including your CRM, helpdesk, accounting tool, and email marketing system.