142: Beyond the Basics: 5 Powerful Automation Tools for Entrepreneurs

Hello there.

Welcome to this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. Today we are going to talk about a glorious topic all about automations in your business. Doing less, working smarter, not harder. There are so many tasks that we've automated in the business that we used to do all manually, and so this one is going to save you so much time and effort. I'm so excited to cover it with you. I feel like so many times we drown in a sea of repetitive tasks. So we're going to talk about how to seriously change that for your work life. All through automation. In my business, I've used automation for everything from monotonous tasks to boosting productivity to helping the team really become more and more efficient. And so whether you're running your own show or managing a team, or just curious about how you might implement some of these tools in what you do, you're in the right place. Automation is here and it's pretty amazing.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

So you've heard me talk about automation before. We use a tool called Searchy to automatically transcribe all of our videos. We use ConvertKit to automate our emails, and our team uses Asana for task management and workflow. But today I want to talk about five other automation tools that you may not have thought about in your business. So we're going to talk about ManyChat, Zapier, ChatGPT, Google Sheets, and Help Scout. Those are the five that we're going to cover. And I'd love to invite you to just think about any repetitive task that you do and pause to see if there is an automation that exists in the world that could come alongside you and simplify and automate this task. Sometimes we just do what we do because it's what We've always done. And so a question that we love to stop and ask ourselves is, if we were starting today, would we do it the same way? Would we do it this way if we were starting today? And so many times the answer is, well, maybe not quite. We could systemize this or better refine this or put a better flow to it. I even use this in my own life. So I love to cook. I cook every night. Well, you know, unless I don't most nights. And I realized one day that for whatever reason, I was keeping something that I always use at the oven and stove area, like six steps away. And I just did it for, I mean, months, maybe years. I would walk across the kitchen and get it and then go back to the oven. And I just did it because that's where I always kept it. And so that's where it belongs, right? So I had to really stop and think about this from a flow perspective. And it ended up inspiring me to really revamp the flow of where I kept everything in my kitchen from a workflow perspective. So this is the same type of thing. How can we better systematize, organize and implement automations to benefit our work? So let's talk about the first one. It's mini chat. Now, I'm sure you've heard about ManyChat. I'm sure many of you are using ManyChat, but this is one that I knew was important, that I knew was awesome, that I kept hearing about over and over and over again, but I just had not slowed down long enough to look at it or figure it out. So we started implementing it earlier this year in January in my business. My goodness, what an incredible app. So in summary, manychat works alongside Instagram to automate sending things to your audience members. So it's based on word triggers and so you can set it up for a post or a story reply or a dm, where if someone says a specific word, you can set up an automatic trigger and manychat to send them, let's say a podcast episode or a link to a freebie or a link for more information. There's a lot that you can do with mini chat. You can even set up like, like long funnels that are set up on attributes. Like if this, then that we use it pretty simply. But the first thing is for visitor engagement and of course, conversion. So the simplest and most effective way to get your audience from social media to your website is to invite them to do that easily and without having to leave the platform. This is something that manychat does beautifully. The link is just immediately given to them right there inside the app that they're already using. The next one is lead generation, so it allows you to build funnels to capture email addresses and contact information by using their automation to populate a conversation with someone. Now, I think it's important to say that I don't love it when someone uses manychat and tries to pretend that it's them and not a bot. So I think that something that's really important is being very transparent that this is a bot. In fact, we have a couple of bots around our land and we always call them the Bonnie bot. We have a bot inside our course and our membership that is trained on all of the course and membership material. We call it the Bonnie bot because it's not me. And I don't want anybody thinking that I'm trying to, you know, make it seem like it is. So I think that's important when mini chat as well. But the main thing is that it gets your customer or your follower exactly what they want right then and there. So, for instance, if you wanted a link to listen to this podcast episode and you DM'd me, it could be days before I saw your message and responded to it. And with something like manychat, you can get it instantaneously. So I love it for that reason. And then you can also use it for things like customer support. You can set up automated responses that handle your most frequently asked questions. Maybe you do this about shipping or returns or product details. This will in turn just reduce the load on your support team. It's something that our team is working on and I think it's just a beautiful way to get some of those high level common questions taken care of. The next one is Zapier. I feel like whoever thought of Zapier is just an insane genius. This tool bridges apps and services between all sorts of different platforms. It's kind of crazy how many different apps platforms Zapier works with. And so if you're ever constantly doing the same thing, like exporting a list and importing it from one platform to another. In fact, if you're ever doing a repetitive task, I would say google that task plus Zapier and see if they make a zap for it. So I'll tell you about one that I've been using that I absolutely have been loving. So I do have a mini chat trigger set up called Coach when you are interested in learning more about our professional creative coaching program. And so I set up a mini chat Trigger to where it will automatically give you a link to the interest form. If you DM me the word coach but also I set up a Zapier for anytime someone completes the interest form, Zapier automatically brings an announcement into our Slack channel for the coaching program with a link to the person's Instagram profile and their form response so that I can go follow up with them and that I won't ever miss a form submission. Isn't that amazing? So it basically pulls Instagram together with Minichat, together with Google Forms together with Slack to keep me from dropping the ball. So love that one. Always worth looking into. Okay, picture this.

Have you ever spent hours scouring through your video or maybe your podcast content trying to find that one place that you said that one thing? Or if you've forgotten or never found it and you had to re record everything? I've been there and it's so frustrating and honestly a huge waste of time. But it hasn't happened to me ever since I started using Searchie. Searchie is the software that I use for all of my videos and all of my podcast content because it not only transcribes it, but it makes it searchable by key word. And so for you to see this in action, I have an example set up for you over on BonnieCristine.com resources again, that's BonnieCristine.com resources and you can actually play with Searchie and see how it looks on one of our videos. Because once you understand what it does, it's a game changer. I also host all of my workshop and my class, my membership and course material through Searchie as well. So students can search for any question that they have and go to the exact time and place where I talked about that one. And just imagine this. If I ever do a Q and A and they want to know if I answered their question, all they have to do is search for their name and see if I did or not. It's literally like having your very own personal search engine for your content. So no more wasting time scrubbing through your video or audio to find that one golden nugget. With Searchie, you can easily find what you're looking for in seconds. Just just type in a keyword or phrase and Searchie will pull up all the relevant content. It's a game changer for anyone who creates audio or video content. But honestly, that's not all. Searchie's new AI powered transcription and captioning tool makes it easy to create accessible content that everyone can get access to and with their customizable player, you can embed your videos and your podcasts on your website or social media channels in a way that looks and feels so professional. So if you are ready to take your video or your podcast content to the next level, head on over to BonnieCristine.com resources and just give Searchie a try. It's incredible. I think you're going to love it and I can't wait to see how it revolutionizes the way you create content.

Now, ChatGPT is something that's here to stay, something that's super fascinating. I've done a podcast on this before, so episode number 63 is all about how I'm using ChatGPT. As an artist and a creative entrepreneur, I would love for you to go listen to that because I think there's a right way and a wrong way to use ChatGPT. If you use it well and with integrity, it is phenomenal at speeding up your tasks and your efforts. So it's an AI search engine with human, like texts and responses. And my biggest way of using it is to really take something that I've already done organically on my own and then from there, quickening the work. So for instance, if I gave a presentation a year ago and I'm about to give that same presentation again, well, before ChatGPT, I would go sit and listen to myself for an hour and take notes. Well, now I can go download the transcript that I get from Searchie and copy and paste that into Chat GPT and have AI create a bulleted outline for me to follow again based on what I had done before. So it's not really adding anything to it, it's just quickening my work. And so what would have taken me probably a good hour and a half literally got down to less than like three minutes. So that is one of my favorite ways to automate some of those more tedious tasks, things that we've done before that we can speed up today. Now the next one is Google Sheets. And you might be saying, like, how do you automate in Google Sheets? We love a good spreadsheet. We use Google Sheets. I know there's a lot of different sheet type of apps and, and platforms. We have so many Google Sheets. So it's a data entry, you know, platform that includes multiple tools that can help you sort data. So I am a bit of a sorting nerd or a data collection nerd. So I really love keeping everything organized here. And one of my favorite just quick automations is splitting text into Columns to break out things like first names. Okay. So if you've ever had this need, it's like you have have a list of names. Let's say it's Bonnie, Christine, but now let's say you're importing it into something where you really need it to be. Bonnie in one field and Christine in a second field. There have been times where I manually separated these columns and that's really difficult. So now there's an automation right inside of Google Sheets. So all you have to do is select a column, go to Data, and then select split text to columns, and then you can choose whether you want it to identify it itself or use a space bar. But it has been such a great automation, something that I use all the time and it saves us tons of work. Okay. And the last automated system that we are huge fans of is called Help Scout. Help Scout is a centralized inbox for managing emails. Now, for many, many years, we used as a team Gmail. And so we would sort it every single day in Gmail. And if you do this, like we used folders and a sorting system and we used like labels and things like that. But if you can imagine there was still just some epic inefficiency, people laying eyes on the same email over and over again, us having to have a conversation offline about emails and that kind of thing. So Help Scout funnels all your inboxes into one place. So we have several team inbox accounts. They come into one place and Help Scout and then the person who's sorting the inbox can automatically assign those emails to different people around the team. Now, something that we love is that you can also add a note to that email that is only for the other team member, meaning the customer or the person emailing will never see that note. And it's really, really helpful when you have some kind of information that the team member needs to know in order to respond. Well, maybe it's a link to something or whatever. So we love that Help Scout also has lots of automations in place. So based on different attributes, for instance, we have an away message that goes up at a particular time on Friday and comes down at a specific time on Monday morning. We can also do things like have responses based on FAQs. We can also pull in data from other platforms like Kajabi, which is our CRM that will attach itself to our email information customer base. And so it's been one of my favorite platforms that we've used in our tech stack, Help Scout for email management. I would say if you ever have more than one person in your inbox? HelpScout is worth the effort. So that's a wrap about how we've used some different types of automation to really boost our productivity. I hope that you're feeling excited to maybe go try out some of these tips and tricks. If you found any of these ideas helpful, I would love to hear from you. I would love to invite you to Leave a review for this podcast. Just like one of those things where we think it's hard. I know you don't really know how to leave a review, but it can be really easy. All you have to do is go to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and click on Leave a Review. It would mean the world to me. I get to read them every single day and they make my day. So my friends, go over to the Show Notes for Today's episode@Propriecreative.com and grab a link to these different platforms and different automations that I've shared with you. We'll link them all up for you over on the Show Notes for Today's Episodes create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world and remember, there's room for you.