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The fact of the matter is, digital transformation is affecting your business as a freelance creative whether you like it or not. New software and services are being released all the time that help you manage administrative tasks easier with less manual work, help you control your costs and get to know your customers better with less manual effort, all of which ultimately gives you more time to concentrate on the creative and strategic side of your business.
If you are hesitant to start upping your automation or you don’t know where to begin, below are some automation tips for a growing freelance business.
Customer Feedback
Your customer feedback is the insight into what you are doing right and wrong that can make or break your business. If you aren’t meeting a real market demand and satisfying the needs of your customers, your freelance creative business is pretty much dead in the water. But collecting and processing customer feedback, especially as you grow and take on an increasing number of clients, gets tedious.
There are some great customer feedback automation tools out there that can help you do things such as respond to negative and positive customer feedback, as well as create prompts asking clients you have just completed a project for to leave you a review on either your social media, website or both.
Social Media Announcements
If you plan on growing your business as a freelance creative, at some point you are going to have to consider SEO, and particularly a regular content publishing schedule. Doing good keyword research and writing long-form blog content that addresses or expounds upon issues and topics in your niche is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy as a freelance creative, but having a regular publishing schedule can eat up a considerable amount of time.
Luckily platforms like Pixpa and WordPress offer you the option to autorelease content throughout the week or month. It is usually best if you are able to write several articles at any one time and then stagger their publishing dates depending on how often you feel like putting out new content. The goal, however, is to put out regular new content that you can announce on your social media channels and provide your current and potential clients with a constant stream of thoughts, musings and useful/interesting information that is keyword optimized.
Expense Tracking
Expense tracking is one of the most tedious and boring parts of running a small business, and it will eat into your creative time and tasks if you let it get out of hand. As you grow your business, your expenses will likely grow with it as you take on most costs in order to increase your revenue. The worst part about expense tracking is that this is something that is never actually finished, it is always ongoing.
Look for a program that allows you to sync all of the various accounts that you use to make purchases for your business–credit cards, business accounts etc.–and that also allows you to easily import things like digital receipts from any vendors or subscription services you might use.
Invoicing
Invoicing is another one of those tedious administrative tasks that you don’t get paid for and which can end up taking up a lot of your time, especially as you start to grow and take on more clients. Depending on the work done, an invoice could take you 20 minutes to put together and proofread. The more efficient thing to do is to invest in time tracking with invoicing software that allows you to create templates that you feed client information into and which then auto-generates your invoice based on fees and prices you have established.
There are a lot of great invoicing apps to choose some, some of which are especially made for small businesses which, as a freelance creative, you most certainly are. Even when using an invoicing app, it is always a good idea to go over any invoice you generate before sending it off to the client.
Task Management
Task management refers to all of the various things that you need to be doing throughout the day to run your freelance creative business. When you work for yourself, there is no manager letting you know how to best go about handling what’s on your plate for the day or week, so it is up to you to organize and execute.
There are a lot of very popular task management tools out there to help you strategize and plan your day. Most have both a free and a paid premium version, which you might want to consider as you start scaling your business and need to take advantage of these apps’ additional functionalities.
RECORD KEEPING
In this era of remote working, what most businesses are lacking is the record keeping of the SAAS tools and apps they are using. They do not pay attention to have all the data of different tools they are using at a single space.
However, keeping this data at a single place can boost the efficiency of expense and utilization analysis of your business. With a SaaS system of Records, you can easily run audits on access of every SaaS tool to determine who can access the tool.
Moreover, you will be able to analyze data on the usability of a tool as well. There are many other features, for example auto-renewal reminder notifications and identification of shadow IT – details of shadow applications with no contract, or employee expenses.
So, you can make more informed decisions about the entire tech stack you are using for your business.
Conclusion
Automating is part of growth in the digital era and you neglect it at your peril. While it can often seem like there are too many software and product options on the market to choose from, and you need to be selective about which ones you choose and how you evaluate their pros and cons, with some perusing and strategic thinking about how and where you should be implementing automation, you can have many of the tedious, manual components of your business completely taken care of.
