With the advent of the Internet, information technologies have reached a new level and allowed entrepreneurs to run their businesses differently and more effectively. Nowadays, many companies are not just actively using Internet technologies for business but are gradually improving standard business methods and transferring basic resources to the virtual segment. But what are the advantages of online technologies over traditional ways of doing business? And what high-tech business solutions are at your disposal?
Why Use Modern Technology for Your Business?
There are many good things that you can achieve by integrating Google technologies and other modern solutions into your business. You can automate numerous processes and increase your productivity; you can use fewer resources and improve product/service quality at a lower cost. Some digital instruments are good for attracting your target audience, company promotion, and experience exchange, while others are more for the effective establishment of the “back-end” processes at the organization. Let’s take a look at the key categories of digital tools that are true must-haves and see how to grow your business with these instruments.
#1 – Create a Winning Brand with Digital Marketing Tools
Outdated promotion methods have long been replaced by new Internet marketing technologies. Many companies today use Internet marketing technologies in their activities.
Unlike traditional methods of promoting products or services, the use of the World Wide Web provides a number of advantages:
- Instant access to information from anywhere in the world;
- The ability to search for the target audience around the clock;
- More effective methods of promoting goods and advancing the company;
- The reduced cost of investment in a marketing campaign compared with traditional marketing approaches.
Apart from main promotion channels, marketing, and content, assets have changed as well. The modern audience is no longer interested in reading long texts; people are up for easy-to-grasp data. And video marketing has proven to be an effective tool for that. As practice shows, users give preference to video clips and will hardly go on reading if the very same information is available in a video format. There are lots of programs that can be used to create video content; OpenShot, and VSDC are the most popular software solutions.
In addition to video editors to create mind-blowing or funny videos, the team will need screen recorder to record product or service usage guides, webcam recorder to record interviews within the team or with major industry influencers, video compressor to effectively embed video in email marketing, and streaming services to communicate with the audience during a live broadcast.
#2 – Use Digital Tools to Manage Projects Effectively
Product managers have to cope with multiple tasks at the same time. They need to think about the quality of communication within the team, keep track of employee probation periods, adequately allocate resources, evaluate tasks, motivate the team, and meet tight deadlines.
Even after a successful release, it is important to think about how to take team collaboration and project development to the next level. This is where project management tools, such as Trello, Jira, Miro, and others come in handy. They can facilitate PM tasks, increase the efficiency of processes, simplify workflows, and build a strong team spirit. Here are several categories of the key digital PM instruments you should be equipped with:
- Communication tools;
- Team management and product management platforms;
- Services for organizing remote communication and video conferencing;
- Services for working with documents (data storage, file sharing, data sync);
- Time tracking tools;
- Database systems;
- Internal social networks.
#3 – Effectively Communicate with Your Team Online
You do not have to be in the office every day in order to be aware of all the company news, share important information with your colleagues, and deal with your tasks effectively. Modern technology allows working online, and online communication tools make this process even easier and more efficient.
How can you (and your business) benefit from using online interaction systems?
- Collaborate from different locations – Even if your teammates are away, you can still continue working together, share important information, timely align on tasks, etc.
- Save time by eliminating the need to send unnecessary emails – Email communication has become a thing of the past. It takes some time to write an email, come up with the subject line, and find a target person in the contact list. What is more, some emails may mistakenly land in a spam folder and will never be read. . Sharing data via email has many limitations as well and is not always conducive to successful collaboration.
- Ensure data centralization – With online communication tools, you can store all the data you need in one storage that all stakeholders have access to, wherever they are.
- Establish real-time collaboration – Online collaboration apps allow you to work on a project in real-time by coordinating team members across multiple locations and see changes made instantly.
- Do project tracking – Online collaboration tools have tracking features, which allow you to track the status of a project in real-time, providing detailed reports of any activity and every event associated with this project.
With more and more companies choosing to have their offices in different parts of the country or even the world, the use of online collaboration tools, such as Slack, Teams, Skype for Business, is becoming more and more widespread.
#4 – Simplify Financial Processes with Fintech Solutions
Fintech technology has revolutionized the way organizations process and use their financial information. Small businesses need convenient all-inclusive services that can be easily customized. Banking products do not yet meet these requirements, and fintech companies offer custom solutions to the problem.
Take a look at such examples as contactless payments via Apple Pay, buying goods on Instagram, setting up an investment account, or paying taxes in one click – financial services are gradually becoming invisible and seamless. The customer (whether it is a business owner or an end-consumer) is making less and less effort to conduct transactions. Adding the fintech functionality to your service or application, you get a whole pack of benefits:
- Reducing the cost of doing business, in particular, on the number of personnel, office rent, etc.;
- Reducing the likelihood of errors;
- A significant increase in the speed of processing operations, automation of business processes, and a decrease in the processing time of customer requests;
- Increased efficiency since the financial accounting program does not require days off and holidays, does not get sick and works around the clock;
- Optimization of work processes based on processing a large amount of data, reducing the cost of organizing activities, marketing;
- Continuous improvement of the service quality;
- Introduction of new unique tools that increase customer loyalty, improve the quality of services provided;
- Creating new technologies that help to implement modern approaches in the work of financial institutions.
All in all, fintech solutions allow you to enter the digital space and take a confident position in it.
#5 – Use Web Analytics Tools to Work with the Data
Web analytics opens up endless possibilities for optimizing and improving not only the site but also the company’s business processes. The capabilities of analytics systems are essentially endless, and they can be applied in a wide variety of business sectors for a variety of tasks. No matter if you want to increase your sales, do the data clean-up in CRM, or know your top-performing campaign, digital analytics tools will come in handy.
The top four key tasks that are solved with the help of business analytics tools are as follows:
- The increasing income per visitor – You can easily increase conversion and average check by analyzing your target audience, their behavior, and purchase decisions;
- Reducing the cost of attracting a client – You can boost the efficiency of the advertising budget by implementing funnel-based attribution and objective assessment of advertising channels;
- Saving time – As the business grows, more decisions need to be made, and the time for each issue is reduced every time. Analytics helps you get data on your demand so that while reducing the time to resolve each issue individually, the quality as a whole does not suffer. Previously, you had to spend hours combining tables with data from different sources in Excel; now, you can build reports in Google Sheets based on data from Google BigQuery in a few seconds;
- Delegation without losing control – Your colleagues do not have your experience and can make mistakes that you have already paid for. By giving them the right metrics and visual graphs, you can help leverage your expertise and stay in control.
#6 – Perfect Customer Service with IVR, AI, Chatbots
The customer experience is undergoing dramatic changes, and modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and IVR, play a key role there. Customers have more options than ever before to purchase a product or service, which gives them a huge number of options. Only companies that are committed to delivering effective, positive, and memorable customer experiences will be able to meet customer needs and succeed.
Now, you can use and develop innovative technologies to ensure strategy personalization for each client. The current focus is on ensuring seamless, operational, and resource-efficient customer service. Of course, customer service will undergo significant changes and can be replaced by technologies such as virtual reality. But first, you need to understand the most significant consumer trends. Make sure your business stands out in a competitive market with a memorable customer experience.
Upscale Your Business
Thanks to modern high-tech solutions and digital tools, some business tasks and processes are easy to handle. You no longer need to wrestle with performance optimization, effective team collaboration, or gaps in your marketing strategy. By using specialized tools, you can resolve any problem with ease and will know how to take your business to the next level.