Technological innovations have changed the way we live our lives in so many ways than we can imagine.
Technology is not just essential for day-to-day business processes, but it can also help individuals and organizations to achieve growth and success when utilised effectively.
Technology adoption is key contributor to business growth. It can help companies save costs, reduce effort, and get more customers. For example, you can use technology to eliminate repetitive tasks or streamline essential processes such as handling time off requests. In short, entrepreneurs may use technology growth strategies in business to outsmart competitors and boost revenues.
Below are five ways you can use technology to grow business:
Use digital technology for marketing:
In this era, digital presence is very important, not only for success, but often simply for survival too. The lack of a strong digital presence is thought to be a contributing factor in the failure of many SMEs, half of which are failing in their first five years of existence. With limited marketing budgets, SMEs need to be wise about how they utilise digital technologies for maximum impact.
They key is to develop a clearly defined digital marketing strategy, including your aims, your tactics and how you’re going to measure performance. Many companies are digitally active, but not following a defined strategy. This can lead to resources being wasted and opportunities being missed.
A good website will, of course, be essential for the vast majority of businesses. An effective website should be user-friendly, mobile responsive and optimised for search engines.
Also, channels such as social media marketing, Email marketing and pay-per-click advertising can be extremely effective. Digital technologies can accelerate business growth because they allow companies to reach a wider audience and build lasting relationships with customers to promote brand loyalty.
Use technology to understand your customers:
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 here. Customers are more informed, tech savvy, demanding and powerful than ever before. Businesses need to adopt a customer-centric, even customer-obsessed, model to win over and keep the new “power” customer.
Happily, technology provides a wealth of solutions for putting customers at the center of everything you do. Sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) tools mean that your business can track customer data to better understand their behaviors and needs. With this knowledge, you can tailor your communications to individual customer’s actual shopping behavior, or make more widespread changes to accommodate emerging patterns across your customer base. Being more informed and proactive about customers’ wants equals more satisfied customers, which in turn equals increased sales and customer loyalty.
Develop a mobile app for your business:
Mobile devices offer the most convenient way for customers to interact with your business. When developing the app, you don’t need to lade it with features. Just make it simple to allow customers to access your information, products, and services with ease.
Still, there are more ways to go Mobile such as using text messaging marketing and enabling mobile payments to ensure a feasible payment experience.
Bear in mind that having a mobile-friendly design also impacts your SEO in a great way.
Leverage the power of cloud computing
In the past, businesses would use programs and applications through software downloaded on their computers or servers to complete tasks. This is not to mean that it was inefficient. For the better part, this worked just fine.
But, cloud technology takes things a notch higher for your business. So, if you want to deploy powerful business growth strategies, cloud technology should be a top consideration.
Is cloud computing something new to you? Think of it this way. Do you update your Facebook status? What about checking your account balance online? Have you ever shared documents via services such as Google Dive or Dropbox?
If yes, those are all instances of cloud computing. Power your business by reaching the cloud to use solutions, such as Zoho, that offer a one-stop shop for marketing, invoicing, collaboration, and finance tools.
The benefit of the cloud is that you can manage your business operations from anywhere, anytime, and with any device. Using cloud technology eases your day to day operations, reduces costs, increases productivity, and boosts mobility.
It’s also the best backup and security tool for your files. For example, if you use cloud and you happen to lose your laptop, you can still access your data and files in the cloud.
Technology as a tool of productivity:
When starting a small business, it is often a given condition that one needs to invest in a variety of roles before he or she can get a team of the worker to delegate all these tasks. These roles include social media manager, HR manager, account executive, and marketing expert, and others.
Often, this can be a daunting task due to the amount of work an individual needs to do within a minimal time. However, with the judicious use of time management and productivity techniques, one can easily maneuver through these roles and work effectively on the business, gaining plausible and excellent outcomes.
There are many time-tracking apps and tools, along with productivity tools like to-do lists and calendars that one can use to deal with this kind of situation.
