Business Automation Software: Is It Worth the Hype?

Do you ever wish you could clone yourself or magically sprout extra hands? While science hasn’t quite caught up with our wildest multitasking fantasies yet, there’s a solution that’s just as magical: business automation software! With these nifty tools, you won’t need extra hands or hours to see amazing results. Just delegate, sit back, relax, and watch as your work gets done!

Business automation software refers to applications and tools designed to streamline, automate, and optimize business processes and workflows. These solutions help reduce manual intervention, improve efficiency, and enhance productivity by handling repetitive tasks, managing data, and facilitating seamless communication across various business functions. 

Business automation tools are cool, that’s for sure, but do they really work?

Yes, but you don’t have to take my word for it. I dug up a bit and found these stats from Flair HR:

• Automating tasks could save employees about 240 hours annually, and leaders believe it could save them 360 hours.
• Marketing automation boosts sales productivity by 14.5%, with a 12.2% decrease in marketing expenses.
• 31% of business leaders acknowledge that automation software brings cost-saving benefits.
• 88% of small business owners say automation enables competition with larger companies.

Okay, let’s not keep you in suspense any longer. It’s time to serve up the automation tools.

Top Business Automation Tools:

1. Brand24 for online performance monitoring
2. Zoho for anything and everything
3. Zapier for workflow automation
4. Mailchimp for email marketing automation
5. Asana for project management

01 Brand24 for online performance monitoring

Free 14-day trial.

Do you do marketing, social media management, or PR? Or maybe you are a business owner who wants to know how their company performs online.

If so, Brand24 is the right business automation software for you.

It is a media monitoring tool with AI capabilities that focuses on:

• Finding and collecting your online mentions
• Measuring your (company’s) online performance
• Reporting sudden changes in your business reputation to prevent PR crises

But to finish here would be to stay on the surface cause Brand24 can do so much more than that.

Let’s start from the main dashboard of the tool – your Mentions Tab.

As you can see, every mention has its sentiment assigned (positive, negative, or neutral). This allows for conducting a sentiment analysis and comparison of your results between different periods.

What about the exclamation marks on the Mentions&Reach chart?

This is our great pride at Brand24. It’s the Anomaly Detector, our unique feature that you won’t find in other media monitoring tools. 

This intelligent automation not only informs you that your number of mentions or reach suddenly changed. It also analyzes all your mentions from a certain day to give you the reason behind the peak.

Isn’t that great?

For a deeper understanding of your online performance, go to the Analysis Tab. It holds two crucial metrics: 

• Presence Score – comparing your online presence to other companies, showing how recognizable your brand is
• Reputation Score – indicating your online reputation based on the proportion of negative and positive comments your brand gets

If you don’t have time for an in-depth analysis but want to check on your brand health quickly, go to the Metrics Analysis tab.

Its multiple automation features allow you to catch a glimpse of your metrics. This way, you can quickly check up and react immediately when negativity spreads around your brand.

Thanks to the user-friendly interface, you can be sure you will get all crucial insights.

The textual summary gives you an immediate overview of your performance. If you see nothing worrying here, you can happily stop at this stage, knowing that your company is performing well.

However, you can also investigate further and learn:

• Emotion Analysis per platform – which platform produces the most mentions, and what is the dominant emotion?
• Social media dominance – which data sources produce the most mentions?
• Sentiment analysis – are your mentions mostly positive or negative?
• Negativity sources – which platform produces the most negative comments?
• Reach sentiment analysis – is your reach positive or negative?
• Reach dominance of sources – which sources give you the broadest online reach?
• Reach efficiency – which platform is the most reach efficient?
• Impact on AVE – which platform has the biggest impact on your AVE?

These insights are critical for your social media management and reputational marketing processes.

For instance, if you see that TikTok is your most reach-effective platform, you can leverage it by posting there more often. This will quickly increase your brand reach, online visibility, and brand awareness.

If you see that X (Twitter) is your biggest source of negativity, tackling this issue would be a good idea.

First, you need to find the reason for the platform negativity, and then you can implement solutions to solve it.

To examine your negative Twitter results, go back to the Mentions tab and use the filtering on the right-hand side.

Another thing you can do is check the Topic Analysis tab. Again, you can set the filtering to negative sentiment and see all the topics that generate the most negative buzz.

With this insight, you can focus on releasing relevant content that addresses the most urgent issues.

Or you can employ a reverse strategy. Filter out the positive topics and try to leverage them on your social media. 

Another solution would be to look at the problem more closely – which individuals produce the most negative content about you?

Influencer Analysis holds the answer.

With this insight, you can start a twofold strategy:

1. Invite people who speak positively to be part of your marketing campaigns to reinforce their testimonials.
2. Contact the authors who speak negatively and address their concerns. They may have had a bad experience with your company and never received compensation. It’s never too late to fix your mistake. Depending on the nature of the problem, you can offer a promotional code, apologize, or simply acknowledge the feedback and promise to reflect on it.

Another great automation is the AI Brand Assistant. Ask him anything about your project. He knows it all.

And last but not least, Brand24 automates the process of competitor analysis.

You simply set up a media monitoring project for each of your competitors and can effortlessly compare them.

This saves you time and ensures you know your industry position. Additionally, in case one of your competitors suddenly grows, you can react quickly and keep your leader position.

Finally, there are email notifications that you can set up in your project settings. 

With them, you don’t need to check your panel daily for brand insights. You get them directly on your email with personalized frequency.

Key features:

• Mentions monitoring and analysis: Know every single word people say about you online.
• Sentiment Analysis: Do people talk about you positively or hate you? You’d better know that.
• Anomaly Detection: Know the reason for a sudden buzz in one click.
• Metrics Analysis: Get a summary of your online performance. And if your results are great, you can show them to your boss and request a pay rise. : p 
• Emotion Analysis: How is your audience feeling? Do they express sadness, admiration, anger, joy, disgust? 
• Influencer Analysis: Find the perfect influencer for your brand in seconds.
• Topic Analysis: Know what your audience discusses and hop on trending topics.
• AI Brand Assistant: Ask anything about your brand performance or strategy planning, and he’ll tell you. 
• Competitor Analysis: Snoop on your competitors and outrun them before they realize.
• Email notifications: Know when your reputation is at risk.

02 Zoho for anything and everything

Zoho is such an all-encompassing tool that I don’t even know where to start.

They offer several business automation tools for different departments.

The Zoho ecosystem will be useful for sales, marketing, customer service, finance, human resources, project management, and your business as a whole.

Basically, they have something for everybody.

They only don’t offer media monitoring, social listening, and deep AI-powered insights about your online performance, so for those, you should stick with Brand24. ; )

But besides that Zoho has so many automation features that I could write a whole book about it.

Thus, I will focus on their flagship products.

First off, there’s the Zoho CRM. 

It is an advanced analytics tool for tracking customer interactions and organizing customer data. With Zoho databases, you can easily track customer behavior and improve operational efficiency.

It also supports lead management, streamlining business operations and the sales process.

Zoho Desk solves the problem of customer retention by providing 24/7 customer service. This tool joins artificial intelligence and human work to solve customer issues. 

This way, you can reduce errors in your business processes and show your customers that you care about their experience.

Last but not least, Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting platform for growing businesses.

It helps you by automating business processes connected to financial transactions. 

You can schedule, plan, and automate payments and set personalized alerts.

Additionally, with this tool, you can automate sales processes by managing foreign transactions and offering currency exchange automation capabilities.

I see only one downside to Zoho. This ecosystem is so vast, with so many applications to choose from, that you may simply miss out on some options.

But you can always start bit by bit. It’s definitely better to start with small automation and add more later than not to automate your business processes at all.

Key features:

• CRM for customers relations management 
• Mail for email automation
• Desk for customers service
• Books for accounting
• People for HR process automation

03 Zapier for workflow automation

Zapier is a workflow management tool that will help you automate repetitive tasks.

It can perform rules-based tasks, which means you can create processes, and Zapier will execute them.

The tool integrates with over 7,000 apps, enabling automated document management, social media management, and lead generation. 

Let’s take a look at the process below.

The best thing about it is that all the process steps are entirely customizable, meaning that people with very distinct needs can find Zapier helpful.

And why should you use workflow automation tools?

Thanks to them, you can focus on human intelligence tasks like strategic planning or creative thinking while all the repetitive tasks are taken care of outside of your intervention.

Key features:

• Wide integration
• Code-free solution
• Conditional logic and process automation with multi-step zaps
• Collaboration automation tools

04 Mailchimp for email marketing automation

Mailchimp takes customer communication via email to the next level. It helps you drive conversions with personalized, user-friendly emails sent to the right people at the right time.

Mailchimp segments your audience and delivers in-depth customer data. This empowers you to optimize your email efforts to drive growth and conversions.

But insights about your customers and optimization are not all. 

Mailchimp also measures your performance and lets you know how much your efforts are paying off.

Key features:

• Email scheduling
• Email performance analytics in real-time
• Personalize content features

05 Asana for project management

This project management tool is a must-have if you want to track your team’s work progress. You can add tasks, assign them to owners, set deadlines and priority levels, and see how work proceeds. 

Asana offers ready-to-use templates that automate the task management process. 

Additionally, thanks to clear scheduling, owner assignment, and prioritization, everybody on your team knows what they should focus on. 

This helps to streamline processes of task scheduling and completion, maximizing your team’s results.

Key Features:

• Project management dashboards
• Collaboration features
• User-friendly drag-and-drop interface
• Highly customizable environment

What are the markers of great business process automation software? 

• User-Friendly Interface: A well-designed, easy-to-navigate interface will minimize the learning time and bring immediate results.
• Customization: You should be able to customize workflows and functions according to your needs.
• Collaboration Tools: Your team should be able to share an account or project and collaborate.
• Real-Time Analytics and Reporting Features: To feel confident about your business processes automation, you need real-time processes and notifications that will alert you about anomalies and errors.
• Data Security: The business automation tool should guarantee your data security.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Integration: That’s a great addition to business automation tools as it allows continuous software development and improvement.

And guess what? Brand24 has all of them! : D

Conclusion

Business process automation can get your company to the next level if implemented thoughtfully. 

Many solutions are available, so the choice may be difficult at times. Fortunately, all the best tools offer free trials, so you can test them without commitment. 

Personally, I recommend Brand24 for your online performance measurement and management. This kind of tool is indispensable in today’s digitally oriented world. 

Sometimes, a few bad reviews can escalate to a serious PR crisis. And as we all know, it’s better to be safe than sorry. 

So don’t think any longer and start your business process automation with Brand24.

Final thoughts: 

• Business automation software gives you a competitive edge over others in your niche. By streamlining time-consuming processes and tasks, these tools allow your team to focus on strategic planning and human intelligence projects. This way, business automation tools contribute to increased productivity and faster results. 
• Try my favorites: Brand24 and Zoho! Both the tools have a free trial, so you can test them without commitment.
  • Brand24 is the best AI-powered media monitoring and social listening tool. Thanks to artificial intelligence, Brand24 automates your online performance measurement and management. Like no other media monitoring tool, it saves you time by providing actionable insights and alerting you when your intervention is needed.
  • Zoho is one extensive ecosystem. It can cover multiple business needs with just one centralized solution.