Digital Innovation 101: A New-Age Upgrade to Provide Your Business Invaluable Insight
Digital innovation is using technology to enhance your business. This involves everything from automated processes and bookkeeping to streamlined checkouts and personalized customer care – and everything in between. With the right technology, you’ll save time, money, and energy. It’ll be easier to meet goals as well as grow your business. You don’t necessarily need a great deal of expertise or large investments either.
In this mini guide, Tapyness explains digital innovation, including offering several suggestions on making your business better:
Why should you care about digital innovation?
Digital transformation is everywhere. It’s transforming industries and businesses, big and small. You may have heard of the buzzwords – Industrial Revolution 4.0, the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, automation, machine learning, and Big Data. There’s real substance to these technologies. Adopting them is a smart business decision, says Virtru – not only because your competitors are doing it, but also because they help you run your business better, reduce the burden on your employees, and generally be more profitable. Digital transformations won’t happen overnight and there could be misstarts, but the effort is worthwhile.
Ways businesses can innovate digitally
Here are some of the most noteworthy ways for your SMB to innovate digitally:
Smartphone apps
Smartphone apps are an excellent digital upgrade. They’re in keeping with the times and are something all customers expect. In 2017, for instance, 46 percent of millennials made more than five in-app purchases, while 70 percent made more than one. They allow your customers to do business with you conveniently from their smartphones, essentially, without visiting your brick-and-mortar site. Moreover, they make you more accessible, professional, and credible and can be a great marketing avenue.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is using external computing resources via the internet. The benefits of cloud computing are many, such as the ability to access the software remotely, the ability to scale up and down as needed, security, convenience, lack of manual updating, and more. With cloud computing, the infrastructure – like processors, servers, and storage – is hosted by someone else. You essentially rent it instead of buying and maintaining it yourself.
Big Data
Big Data refers to the practice of gathering large volumes of data, E.g., via Tapyness and analyzing it to extract valuable insight. This insight includes relevant trends, customer preferences, and other information that can help business leaders make important decisions. For instance, financial institutions often use Big Data to make sense of market conditions, make pre-trade decisions, measure sentiments, and more.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is spreading the word about your brand through online channels. Reliablesoft offers a list of channels you can use, which includes websites, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, affiliate, mobile, video, and content marketing. You can use marketing software to create, design, and monitor marketing campaigns. Good digital marketing will let you find a steady stream of customers online.
Online time-management tools
Online time-management tools allow you to organize and make the most of your and your employees’ time. There is a great deal of variety in available tools, meaning you are spoiled for choice. For instance, some planners allow you to come up with goals and tasks and then tick them off. There are calendar apps that track meetings and deadlines as well as coordinate with employees. There are priority tools that allow you to sort out your tasks in terms of the highest priority.
Customer experience solutions
The customer is still king. Any solution that allows you to monitor customer experience – their thoughts, preferences, opinions, and criticisms – is worth its weight in gold. You can use the data to identify your shortcomings, improve your products and services, and generally serve the customer the way they want it. Tapyness offers a handy customer experience solution that is a breeze for customers to use. Customers can tap to share their experience, and you get real-time insight and an actionable report soon after.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that technology is not a be-all, end-all solution. It can make some processes better, but it’s not a good idea for you to use it everywhere. Humans often do things better than machines. Before adopting the innovations mentioned above, it’s a good idea to conduct a cost-benefit analysis and choose a solution that makes the most business sense.
Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash