Technology has already transformed the way we build and grow businesses, reshaping global industries from top to bottom faster than anyone could have expected – and democratizing the world of business in ways no one ever would have thought possible.
Think about this for just a moment.
It’s now possible to build a multinational company serving millions of clients worldwide from your back bedroom with nothing more than a laptop, internet connection, and a dream.
At the same time, especially in uncertain economic times like now while we are dealing with a pandemic, it’s critical that we find ways to leverage technology as efficiently as possible.
We need to be able to grow our businesses when things are rough and rocky, leaning on technology to maximize all of our resources while cutting costs as much as possible.
As Nathan Abadi has put so simply, “Technology is the lifeblood of any business especially in the times we currently live. At Excel Capital Management we use technology to Excel over the competition through both AI and automation. This lets us run lean with a high capacity. I have put together a few items we use regularly to keep up with the every changing financial landscape and stay efficient”.
Below we highlight 10 ways your business could be taking advantage of technology to boost your results, improve your bottom line, and build towards the future – even in the middle of a global pandemic.
Build Your Business with Smarter Marketing
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing gives you the ability to reach out to millions of people worldwide almost instantly without having to spend a small fortune, transforming the kinds of marketing campaigns you can capitalize on (as well as dramatically boosting the frequency at which you can market to people, too).
Your business needs to be leveraging auto responder tools, email marketing campaigns, and other email marketing solutions that weave into your sales funnel as often as possible.
Smarter Analytics Regarding Customers
Of course, your marketing is only going to be as effective as your understanding of your market, your message, and how the two match in a way that gives you a competitive advantage.
This is why you’ll want to leverage the power of Big Data and other analytic tools to really analyze your market and your perfect prospect at the most granular levels possible. The more you know about your customer the more laser targeted your marketing and advertising is – and that means it’s more effective (and you have more money coming in).
Mobile Marketing Solutions
Mobile marketing tools have exploded in popularity over the last decade or so, ushered into fruition because of the near universal spread of smart phone devices.
Google reports that mobile ad spending is expected to hit $247 billion in 2020 alone, with mobile advertising accounting for nearly 25% of business marketing budgets (and growing).
If you aren’t taking advantage of mobile marketing solutions right now the odds are pretty good that you’re going to be losing out to competitors that are. If they get too much of a head start it may become insurmountable (though you could do the same to them if you move quickly).
Improve Productivity Across the Board
Manage Projects Better
Project management solutions like Slack, Trello, and Basecamp help you and your team keep your eyes on the prize, so to speak, in ways that traditional project management solutions never could.
A lot of these applications are free (or nearly so), have proven to increase productivity or businesses large and small, and provide a whole host of tools and tech that facilitate better conversations, improved collaboration, and better accountability across the board.
Manage Customers and Clients Better
CRM tools are hugely important in today’s hyper competitive business world where you need more “touches” with potential prospects as you move them through carefully curated and strategically systemized marketing funnels – all in an effort to convert complete and total strangers into paying customers (and ideally repeat clients).
Without a CRM to make heads and tails of your customer list, to be able to easily identify where people are in the sales process and what needs to happen next, everything sort of falls to pieces.
Use AI/Chat Bots to Free Up Human Resources
Artificial intelligence and chat bots in particular make it a lot easier for you to rely on machines to handle a lot of your customer service communications to great effect.
This in turn frees up a lot of your resources and a lot of your key people to focus on other higher leverage tasks, helping you to build and grow your business while still taking care of your customers and clients at the exact same time.
Streamline Communications Throughout Your Business
Better Internal Communications
Another cool advantage of tools like Slack is that you’re able to facilitate improved internal communications across your team, not only making it easy for everyone to get a hold of everyone whenever they need to speak to someone specific – but also keeping records of those communications so that things don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Knowledge Base for Training and Support
On top of that, many of those internal communications can be turned into dedicated knowledge bases designed to help get new hires up and running in your company (immersing them in the information they need as well as your company culture).
These records can also be fine-tuned, edited, and used as a sort of “self-support” system working hand-in-hand with chat bots and AI on the customer support side of things.
Support the Wellbeing of Your Team
Remote Working Solutions
We are seeing (more and more every day) a major shift towards remote working powered by technology because of this global pandemic, and the odds are pretty good that things aren’t going to go back to the “old way of doing business” even when we find a solution to the novel coronavirus.
Remote working isn’t going to disappear but instead is only going to become more normalized than ever before (and potentially the standard we use in years to come), helping to facilitate better workspaces, eliminate commutes, and generally help people live where they want while working where they want in ways never before possible.
Digital Meeting Tools
Another huge benefit technology has brought to the world to sort of round this list out is the almost complete elimination of “in person meetings”.
There isn’t a person on the planet that likes to sit through meeting after meeting where very little fields like it ever gets done. Digital meetings, the other hand, by their very nature are much more goal oriented, more process focused, and almost always take up a lot less time than traditional meetings ever could.
Combine that with the fact that they can be recorded for review later on to help those that might not have been able to attend still get the same universal message is a game changing benefit you just don’t get with traditional meetings.
At the end of the day, technology will always continue to change the way that we do business.
The fact that we are living smack dab in the early stages of a major technological revolution is something really spectacular, as we are seeing new and emergent technologies change our world – and the world of business – for the better right before our very eyes.