Making your business stand out
10 Innovative Digital Solutions for Your Business
If you’re running a small or midsize business, you might be struggling to grow your company. In order to achieve the growth you want, you may need to look beyond typical expansion strategies and start implementing innovative digital solutions.
Today, even companies with brick-and-mortar locations need to build a strong virtual presence, and looking to cutting-edge forms of business technology could be the key to moving your company forward.
Let's dive into those strategic approaches without any further due. Here are top 10 innovative digital solutions that could benefit your business.
1. Develop Internal Process Guides
Do you spend a lot of time catching employees up to speed on internal company processes?
Maybe this aspect of your onboarding process is inefficient, or you regularly end up reminding long-term employees about certain process steps that they overlook. To remedy this issue, you can create visual process guides for your staff. With an at-a-glance guide to different processes that clearly illustrate each task they need to complete, your employees will be able to stay on track.
Don’t worry - you don’t need any graphic design skills to create visual process guides! You can use a free infographic template to tackle this project.
After picking out a template, you’ll be able to customize it with the text you need, as well as your preferred colors, background images, and any other design elements.
2. Allow Remote Work
You don’t need to mandate that all of your employees come to the office every weekday in order to succeed as a company. Instead, you could allow your employees to work remotely at least a few days per week to test out how well this arrangement goes.
In the future, you could consider enabling your team to go fully remote and hire fully remote employees or contractors from anywhere around the world. This will make it possible to hire top talent living far away - and expanding the size of your potential talent pool can only help your company in the long run!
3. Support Internal Communications
Do your employees communicate entirely by email?
You may want to streamline communications by introducing an internal communications platform. With an internal communications platform, you’ll be able to centralize conversations on one platform.
Your employees will spend less time tracking down conversations with each other, and they can easily get in touch in real-time. This makes operations more efficient and helps move projects along quickly.
Choose a communications platform with a user-friendly interface so that it will be easier to onboard your employees!
4. Cloud Computing
Is your company taking advantage of cloud computing technology? If not, now is the time to introduce it.
By making cloud technology available to your team, you can easily manage information that everyone can access from anywhere - and as long as you install the right cybersecurity protections, there are practically no downsides to storing company documents and data “in the cloud” rather than on hardware.
Cloud computing is key for today’s companies because chances are, your competitors are already utilizing it - in fact, Tech Injury states that 81% of all enterprises either use a multi-cloud strategy or are planning to implement one, and in the future, researchers predict that about 82% of workload will reside on the cloud.
5. Leverage Machine Learning
Perhaps you’re not familiar with the concept of machine learning. Basically, machine learning is one form of artificial intelligence technology.
You can use machine learning to gather customer data, analyze this data, and improve your processes. Machine learning applications can help you collect business insights that can completely transform your business.
Forward-thinking entrepreneurs have already adopted this technology - Oberlo states that approximately 37% of businesses, or just over one in three, are already using artificial intelligence in their strategies.
This form of business technology is only going to become more commonplace.
6. Utilize Data Analysis
In today’s corporate landscape, utilizing data to craft your business strategy is practically essential.
When you launched your small business, you might have spent a lot of time guessing what your customers would want, simply because you didn’t have the tools to measure their behavior.
But now, you can afford to invest in software that will allow you to collect useful data - and you can transform that data into effective strategies.
To begin leveraging your business data into new initiatives, you can start by looking at traffic reports for your company website.
This includes Google Analytical reports and your website’s administrative panel. You can also look into free or low-cost options for customer relationship management software, which will help you track all of your leads in one place.
With data analytics, you won’t be building your business strategy on guesswork anymore - instead, you’ll be able to make moves based on evidence.
7. Conduct Market Research
Are you looking into launching a new product or service soon? Before you put out any new offerings, you need to conduct market research online to ensure that there will be a demand for them!
But if you haven’t carried out in-depth market research before, you might not know exactly what it entails. You can begin by surveying your existing customers to find out if they have any pain points that your current products don’t address.
You can also take things a step further by interviewing loyal customers who represent your target demographic. Go over the data you gather in detail to consider how you could improve your offerings.
8. Get Creative With Marketing
Chances are, you’re already engaging in some standard digital marketing efforts. But if you truly want to break new ground as a company, it’s time to get creative when it comes to digital marketing.
You need to look beyond simply posting on social media or improving your search engine optimization strategy.
But how can you really make your marketing efforts stand out amongst your competitors? If you’re short on creative digital marketing ideas, Hive Digital Strategy recommends personalizing your messaging in customer communications by collecting user data, showing off some behind-the-scenes footage from average days at your company on social media, and appearing at digital conferences and events to build awareness for your brand.
9. Host Brainstorming Sessions
Your employees might be a great untapped source of ideas. Some of your team members might feel comfortable sharing their ideas unsolicited, but others may need a bit of prompting to offer their suggestions.
Hosting a brainstorming session is a great way to give everyone the chance to contribute their ideas!
You may be able to include regular brainstorming sessions in your workdays. But if you manage team members at different offices, or you already have some employees working remotely, you can hold these brainstorming sessions virtually!
How can you make the most of a brainstorming session? First, you’ll want to begin by sharing the specific topic or problem that you want to discuss during the meeting - this will help everyone stay focused on your top priorities. You’ll also want to work out a structured agenda beforehand to help guide discussions. You can block off time for sharing ideas and gaining consensus on the best suggestions.
Before you start your sessions, make sure that you have the digital tools you need to take notes. You might want to use an online “whiteboard” to jot down ideas as the meeting goes on!
Finally, remember to keep your meeting relatively short. Anywhere from a half-hour to one hour is a good timeframe. If you let your meeting run on for too long, your team members might start to get distracted, and the discussion could stagnate.
10. Schedule a Virtual ‘Retreat’
What if you want to go beyond simple brainstorming sessions and bring your entire team closer together with a bigger event?
You might want to host a virtual retreat! A virtual retreat gives your employees the chance to get to know each other, have some fun, and toss around interesting ideas that just might become the basis of new business initiatives.
Facilitating a virtual retreat can be a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. If you think a virtual retreat might be in your company’s future, you can start laying the groundwork now! Plan out a few team-building activities that don’t require in-person interaction, put together fun digital “gift bags” with gift cards to popular retailers, and host an “awards show” with silly superlatives!
Make sure to test out all of your technology in advance so that your retreat goes off without a hitch.
Summary
Totally, growing your business always brings challenges.
But with the innovative digital solutions available to entrepreneurs today, you can find a way to overcome almost any roadblock that you encounter. By leveraging some of these business technology tools and initiatives, you can tap into new markets, boost employee engagement, and reach new frontiers as an entrepreneur!
Author
Eleanor Wyatt
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