The age of small family-owned mom-and-pop shops is at its end. With every other American shopping online, small and medium-sized businesses can no longer afford to leave digitization on the back burner. Paul Belogour expects most businesses without an online presence to disappear within the next decade. However, taking your business online does not have to be a risky and scary endeavor. Instead, think of it as a way to beat rival companies, find new clients, and ensure business security for years to come.
Let’s take a closer look at how a timely IT intervention can help your business.
Bring Your Products to the Customers
The Internet and Amazon changed the way we shop, and an increasing number of customers prefer to take their business online rather than wasting time and money on going to the mall. Moreover, desktops and laptops are no longer the preferred devices for online shopping. The number of mobile sales increases year to year, and while voice commerce is still slow-going, the adoption of smart assistants is likely to spur the voice shopping market.
The numbers don’t lie, and if you want to keep your business afloat, you need to follow your customers. Better yet, you need to stay one step ahead of them and the competition, if you plan on increasing the sales numbers and expand your offers. To identify the most lucrative approach to business digitization, consider these questions:
- Who brings you the majority of your profits?
- How do your customers like to shop?
- What do your competitors offer to their buyers that you don’t?
Don’t limit your market analysis to the questions Paul Belogour suggests. The better you understand your clients’ needs and your rivals’ strategy, the more effective your digitization efforts will be.
Make Your Business Run Like Clockwork
Transforming the customer-facing side of your business might be the first thing you think about when considering an IT intervention. However, it’s not just website design and marketing that need an overhaul to keep the company on par with the competition. Inefficient internal processes can drain your budget and ruin the profits you would otherwise get.
According to Paul Belogour, there are several foolproof approaches to business process digitization that are sure to improve the overall health of your company:
- Adopt a ready-made or custom-build CRM (customer relationship management) system. It is an invaluable tool that will let you analyze your sales, weed out the customers that drain resources, and tailor your marketing efforts to ensure you enjoy the increased return on investment (ROI).
- Shift from local to cloud systems and data storage. Hardware maintenance and utility bills might seem manageable, but cloud solutions are usually even more affordable. Moreover, they come with multiple benefits, providing seamless synchronization and access from anywhere in the world, whether you are in the United States, China, or the UAE.
- Invest in integration and synchronization solutions. The more IT products your company adopts, the less efficient business processes become unless you pay attention to integration options. Incompatible software products make your employees perform unnecessary tasks that steal from their work time and cause unnecessary delays. If your current software does not have integration options, consider a shift to other solutions, and remember to account for integration before adopting new IT products.
Choose Your Own IT Adoption Pace
Whether you decide to overhaul customer-facing or internal processes, adopting new technologies might be intimidating. To mitigate the risks and ensure your efforts are fruitful, you need a reliable IT partner to help you tackle changes one step at a time.
As Paul Belogour likes to say, “There are always at least two solutions to any problem.” Your business digitization first steps might take any form, including:
- Adding an online store to your offline business.
- Developing a mobile app to promote and sell your products or services.
- Creating a merchant account with Amazon and other marketplaces.
- Building an online presence and connecting to your customers via social media platforms.
- Digitizing your sales records and adopting a CRM system for targeted marketing campaigns.
- Hiring an outsourcing IT team to overhaul your digital infrastructure.
Whichever option you choose to be your first step to full business digitization, you need professional software engineers on your side to ensure smooth development, launch, and implementation. Boston Unisoft Technologies is one reliable option dozens of companies trust to take care of their IT needs, and we can help your business too.
Get in touch with Boston Unisoft Technologies when you are ready to digitize your business and get ahead of the competition!
