By Roberto Garvin
How Embracing Digitalization Can Help SMBs To Grow
Research by Tech Pro shows that 70 percent of companies either already have a digital transformation strategy or are working on putting one in place. Digitalization in today’s world is essential for bringing your business to the next level and keeping up with your competitors.
Today, we will be looking at the top seven benefits small businesses can see when they adopt a digital transformation policy.
- Expand Your Reach
Digitalization lets you reach more people, leading to an increase in sales and more profitability. There are 3.5 billion people online, and 2.26 billion people are on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
There are so many opportunities for reaching new people online:
- Blogs
- Social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc
- Video networks such as YouTube and Vimeo
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Paid search engine ads
- Paid website banner ads
- Mobile apps
With traditional, offline marketing efforts, you are missing out on an opportunity to reach all of these people.
- Increase Efficiency
Digitalization allows you to be more efficient in many ways.
For example, you can accept payments quickly and in a more secure manner. You can allow customers to create accounts online and manage their subscriptions or process returns.
Using a CRM, you can manage your customers, respond to support tickets, and much more.
Doing things such as printing out receipts, sending faxes, getting receipts, and sending notes to other team members in the office all take time, but digitalization can fix that.
- Improve Customer Experience
Adopting a digital approach lets you provide a much better customer experience.
As mentioned before, customers can log onto online sites to manage their accounts. You can also create a mobile app where they can send support tickets on the go.
Using a multi-channel customer support system, you can allow customers to find solutions quickly. For example, you can integrate phone support with email, live chat, and social media support.
Using a CRM, you can keep the history of a customer’s purchases and previous support requests to help find solutions to problems they have.
With digitalization, you can allow customers to order products and services online, track their orders and shipments, get self-help by browsing a help directory, find information by reading your website, and much more.
- Better Communication
Digitalization opens up many new communication channels. This goes beyond letting your customers get support through email, social media, live chat, and other digital channels.
With digitalization, you can stream live videos or conduct webinars where you can answer questions and chats in real time from customers. You can send automated text reminders as well.
Digitalization also lets you open up communication between customers. For example, you can create a Facebook group or online forum where users can share problems with each other and get help from other members and from moderators.
You can even create WhatsApp or Telegram groups or channels, which allows everyone to exchange messages and share information much quicker.
- Better Team Management
Digitalization allows you to improve communication not just between customers and yourself, but between team members and yourself.
Adopting a digital strategy lets you use services or platforms that allow you to assign tasks to team members, exchange notes, track their performance, see when tasks have been completed, and so on.
It also allows you to be a better leader – you can communicate with your entire team more efficiently and make sure they are all on the same page as you. You can share projects and keep your team motivated.
- Better Market Research
If you have a digital strategy, you can get feedback from customers more efficiently. Whether it’s through inserting polls into your emails or collecting opinions via text messages, you can learn what is bothering your customers and how you can keep them satisfied.
However, it goes beyond that. If you adopt a digital strategy, you can collect information about your customers, social media followers, and website visitors. For example, you can learn about their demographics, age, location, interests, and much more.
You can figure out which pages people are visiting, which links they are clicking on, how much time they are spending on certain pages, which signup forms work better, and even where they are scrolling to on your website (with the use of heatmaps).
A/B split tests are a great way to test different calls-to-action, landing pages, email subject headers, and much more.
All of this information can be used to improve the customer experience, get better conversion rates, and increase sales.
- Safeguard Your Business
Going digital allows you to store a lot of information and documents in the cloud. Backing up your data is important in case you lose it because of a natural disaster, robbery, or human error.
If you back up your data to a hard drive, you can still end up losing it. However, if you back your data up to the cloud, you will be able to access it from any device and from any location.
That’s another benefit of digitalization – you can have team members work remotely from the cloud, on the go. Even if they are at home or on the train, you can keep getting things done and greatly increase your productivity rates.
Even though everything is being backed up online, you can keep things secure. You can use antivirus and antimalware software on your computer, install firewalls to block hackers, collect secure payments and protect credit card information with encrypted pages, and more.
Finally, going digital lets you release new features and services like Volkswagen did with the release of WeShare.
Wrapping It Up
If you have not yet adopted a digital strategy, now is the time to do so.
According to one research study, 20 percent of in-store purchases are driven by online marketing.
Whether you are selling products online or in store, you can adopt digital marketing tactics, such as blogging and using QR codes, to attract new customers, get more sales, and increase your ROI.
Roberto Garvin –
Roberto Garvin is the co-founder of Mofluid. He is amazed to see how technology continues to evolve. From email to browsers, search engines, mobile, AI and now blockchain, he feels fortunate to witness it all and is really excited to see what’s next.