11 Things To Automate In Your Creative Business

1. Social Posting

We use Tailwind for auto posting on both Pinterest and Instagram. The best part is that for a partnership like ours, we both use the platforms in different ways. Courtney plans out our feed visually, while Abbey crafts the captions. We also batch our reel content to make planning our feed so much easier!

2. Podcast Publishing

Podbean is our podcast host and they make it incredibly easy to plan out our episodes. Podcasting is another thing we love to batch ahead of time.

3. Blogging

Are you writing and posting in the same day? Or are you planning your content ahead of time? And please don’t tell us that blogging is dead. If you don’t have time to write content yourself, consider hiring someone to help. Then schedule your posting ahead of time.

4. Email Marketing & Funnels

Writing weekly newsletters for those early morning hours is important to make sure you hit your audiences inboxes early. We use Flodesk for all things email. One of the absolute best things to automate is your email workflows— welcome sequences, freebie resources, etc. We receive dozens of inquiries and responses from our sequences and it’s a genuinely, real way to connect with your new subscribers.

5. Scheduler

This was the one automation we didn’t want to implement. It felt like, for some odd reason, we were losing control of our calendars. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The number of back and forth emails from our new client inquiries was basically eliminated. Our leads can now schedule a time that works for them on a calendar we preset hours. We are currently using a scheduler within our CRM, Dubsado. We love it even better when the things we have to automate can live within the same systems. One less thing to invest in!

6. Client workflows

Once a lead turns into an official client, we issue a new project workflow in Dubsado that automatically delivers the contract, retainer and questionnaire. We can breakdown workflows by project type. There are so many things you can automate within Dubsado like payment plans and even booking strategy calls.

7. Email Signatures

An automated email signature is an amazing way to set expectations on when you will respond and what your work hours are. You can break out your signature to speak to each audience group with a direct message on what they can expect.

8. Auto-Reply On Instagram Direct Messages

Have you ever felt buried in Instagram DM’s? Are there consistent questions you get asked again and again? Could you set up an auto-reply to help save some of your time? Here is a great article on how to set this up.

9. Zapier

This tool has been instrumental on helping us keep people in our universe. If you have your audience engaging with you on another platform such as a course, masterclasses, a digital shop, you need to make sure to bring them into your list. Your email list is where you can collect everyone who is a hot lead. If there aren’t any direct integrations with your platforms, you can always use Zapier.

10. Bookkeeping

Systems like Xero and Quickbooks help simplify your bookkeeping, especially if you are managing this yourself. We did this ourselves for the first few years, and we are now immensely thankful for our bookkeeper who manages all these details for us.

11. Asana

Although this is not quite automation, it is something that saves us an incredible amount of time. Our client communication, client projects and internal processes all live here in Asana. We simply copy and paste client projects, import timelines into our Google calendars and set up reoccurring workflows for internal processes.

These are just a few things we automate in our business today. There are so many more and we’d love to hear what you automate in your creative business. Comment below and let us know! And if you liked today’s episode on The Duo On Air Marketing Podcast, don’t forget to leave us a review & subscribe!