You never stop learning when you’re a leader or business owner. You may expect marketing strategy, industry, and product research to remain regular features of your work week.
But are you keeping up with the same technological developments? If you don’t, you can be passing on resources that could improve your life and boost your company. You can expand your company in six ways with the help of modern technologies.
Six Ways Tech Can Boost Your Business
Increase Visibility and Customers
The ever-evolving nature of technology enables businesses to connect with a greater number of prospective customers, around the clock, than ever before. Your company’s visibility can be increased much beyond the confines of your immediate community through the use of a variety of marketing strategies, including social media platforms, mobile marketing, a variety of content marketing strategies, and a great deal more, and frequently at a cost that is affordable.
Enhance Your Customer Relations
According to Forrester’s Cliff Condon in “2016: CIOs And CMOs Must Rally To Lead Customer-Obsessed Change Now,” the “Age of the Customer” is arrived. Modern consumers possess unprecedented levels of knowledge, sophistication, insight, and, yes, influence. To attract and retain the new “power” consumer, businesses must shift to a customer-centric, if not customer-obsessed, approach.
Thankfully, technology offers a plethora of options for making your customers a priority. Your company may monitor client information to learn more about their habits and requirements with the help of modern customer relationship management (CRM) software. You can use this information to send people messages that are more relevant to their specific shopping habits, or you can make broader adjustments to reflect trends in your client base as a whole. Increased revenue and customer loyalty result from a proactive and well-informed approach to meeting customers’ needs.
With the use of social media, you may rapidly communicate with customers through a plethora of different avenues. Similarly, you can provide exclusive deals and tailored product suggestions to your customers via mobile loyalty programmes and associated apps. These apps’ location-based features even let you send a user a targeted discount as soon as they step foot inside your store.
Offer New Ways to Sell
Accenture’s “Business Technology Trends Report” for 2015 identified “The Internet of Me” as a game-changer for forward-thinking firms, drawing parallels to “The Age of the Customer.” Customers nowadays expect the businesses they patronise to also have a strong online presence. Customers have a growing expectation for individualised interactions with companies and brands. “As commonplace items become available online, so too are experiences, giving rise to a plethora of digital channels permeating every facet of people’s life. The paper demonstrates how forward-thinking companies are modifying their approach to developing software, goods, and services.
When you can connect with your customers on a more personal level, you may find new and interesting ways to sell to them. Some of the most cutting-edge approaches to interacting with and selling to consumers include mobile ordering, contactless payment and loyalty programmes, “smart” items of all types, and social marketing. You may give your customers a one-stop buying experience with the help of these instruments. Many of these tools are available to small businesses now, including social selling and contactless payment.
Be Smarter and Faster
If you want to make sound business decisions, you must have a thorough understanding of how your firm functions. Online bookkeeping services like Xero, Freshbooks, and QuickBooks Online allow you to monitor your money instantly from any location.
Similarly, integrated sales systems make it simple to monitor sales across both offline and online channels, such as Shopify’s POS interface, inventory management tool, and e-commerce platform.
Increase Productivity and Collaboration
Using cloud services, you can store your files online and access them from any device. In “4 Technology Solutions Every Growing Business Needs to Consider,” Tor Constantino of Entrepreneur suggests utilising softphone software on a laptop or setting up toll-free calls to a cell phone to reduce phone expenditures. You can collaborate with coworkers all around the world by using video conferencing (like Skype for Business), shared documents (like Google Drive), virtual office environments (like Sococo), and other similar applications.
With these tools, it’s easy to keep in touch with a geographically dispersed team, business partners, or clients, no matter where they may be.
Streamline and Automate Routine Tasks
Using applications such as Xero, Freshbooks, and QuickBooks Online (all of which were previously mentioned), it is possible to significantly simplify and even automate a variety of business processes, including but not limited to invoicing, payroll, and accounting. In addition to saving you money and protecting you from making mistakes that may be very expensive, automation will also free up more of your time for you to spend actually managing your company.
What You Can Do Right Now
When it comes to incorporating new technologies into your company, it can be challenging to know how to get started or even where to begin because of the rapid pace at which technology evolves. The following are some considerations to prioritise as you move forward with your first steps.
Interaction with customers: To get started, add just a few social media profiles that you will be able to update and manage on a regular basis. After that, start a conversation with customers by replying to their messages and soliciting reviews and user-generated content.
Automation: If repetitive procedures like invoicing and payroll are eating up a significant amount of your time, you should think about automating as much of these tasks as possible with a cloud-based accounting solution.
Communication: Is it possible that your organization’s communication technology could benefit from an update? Make sure that your employees, especially those who work remotely even part-time, have access to the most recent versions of audio and video conferencing tools, as well as document sharing software. Think about switching to a system that uses softphones for your clients.
Make sure that your company possesses the necessary amount of speed and bandwidth in order to satisfy the growing demand for technological solutions. For additional details, please pay a visit to CoxBusiness.com.
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