When we as business owners think about “automation,” our minds are oftentimes flooded with images of robots, complicated algorithms and concepts that simply go over our heads.

The reality? Automation is, was and will continue to dominate the realms of businesses and marketing as we know it. There’s a good chance you’re already using automation for your business already; meanwhile, the degree to which new algorithms and technologies are emerging is staggering.

From saving time and money to ultimately building the most efficient business possible, automation is here to stay and entrepreneurs today need to understand just how they can leverage it. Below we’ve broken down four ways that today’s top companies are doing just that.

Keeping Companies Compliant

The purpose of any given software is to make our day-to-day tasks less daunting.

Some particular tasks, such as those related to keeping businesses in line with compliance and regulations, can be incredibly complicated with so many variables and ever-changing standards.

Luckily, many of the challenges of being a compliance manager can be quelled thanks to automation software. Whether it’s identifying inefficiencies or coordinating departments, algorithms via automation and machine learning can help put tasks under the microscope that we’d otherwise totally miss ourselves.

Supercharging Sales

If your business tracks visitors and leads with the help of a CRM solution, marketing automation is crucial for “filling the gaps” when it comes to customer information. For example, services like Zapier can integrate with your CRM to help enrich leads with information such as which types of content they landed on or how they’ve interacted with your business on social media.

By compiling these data points automatically, it makes the jobs of marketers and sales teams much, much easier when it comes time to close.

Encouraging Smarter Social Media

Despite being considered a staple of modern marketing, 60% of business don’t track their ROI from social media. This inevitably results in tons of time and energy wasted, although there’s no denying the expectation to share content, deal with customer concerns in real-time and drive leads from avenues such as Facebook.

That’s why tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite, which have built-in functions to both curate, schedule and promote content, are life-savers for companies looking to streamline their social presence. The ability to allow your entire time to operate within the same platform to promote content likewise helps build advocacy around your business’ social presence.

And on a related note, automation is giving marketers a major helping hand these days through strategies such as Facebook retargeting. The ability to remarket to leads who might otherwise never become customers is becoming more and more common and is likewise noted for a higher ROI than generic ads.

Curbing Cart Abandonment

In a world where approximately 75% of shopping carts are abandoned, automation in the form of autoresponders and behavior-triggered campaigns are essential.

The ability to automatically send messages that note lower price points or customer discounts represents one of the most cost-efficient ways that marketers can recover business that would otherwise be lost. Just about any email marketing solution worth its salt has built-in autoresponders: simply take the time to craft your campaigns accordingly.

“Automation” doesn’t have to represent some sort of far-off dream for today’s companies. Whether you’re running a small business or see yourself as head of a full-blown enterprise, consider the multiple ways that automation is improving the world of business and our lives as a whole.