The business world can seem incredibly cutthroat, especially when starting. You’ll need to leverage innovative technologies to keep up with the competition in a fast-paced marketplace. With careful planning, thoughtful execution, the adoption of best practices, and a little luck, you may even get ahead.
As essential as incorporating new tech into your operations is, however, it can get expensive. Most solutions will cost time and money for your team to implement fully. So you want to make sure you’re investing in the most bang-for-the-buck options right off the bat. With this in mind, read about three tech solutions to fuel your small business’s success.
1. Automated Marketing Software
As a small business owner, you’ve already spent considerable time and energy developing a solid product or service. You also know how important marketing is and what a resource drain it can be. Market to the wrong audience, at the wrong time, or on the wrong platform, and your efforts may be wasted. Not to mention, hiring a marketing team can be expensive and time-consuming in its own right.
Rather than fumble through learning another aspect of business, take advantage of automated marketing software. Such platforms streamline numerous essential marketing processes. These tools will help you produce professional email, text, and social media campaigns, providing proven templates so you don’t start from scratch. They can automatically send custom messages and emails and maintain your marketing lists. You’ll also be able to manage your online reputation by monitoring reviews so you can respond to them quickly.
Marketing is a never-ending project, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it consume all your time and energy. No longer is sophisticated automated marketing software just for large corporations. These days, plenty of software-as-a-service tools are designed just for small businesses. Using one of these SaaS solutions, you can easily streamline your marketing efforts and take advantage of new upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
2. Project Management Tools
Marketing only matters if you have a great product or service to back it up. In turn, you can only meet your customers’ needs consistently if you’ve got a robust, transparent workflow. During your startup phase, a couple of spreadsheets may have been all you needed to keep tabs on the work that had to be done. However, as you continue to grow and expand, you require a more scalable and reliable way of tracking your team’s deliverables. Otherwise, you risk delays, miscommunication, and other systemic failure down the line.
Project management tools address this issue by providing highly visual, intuitive, and customizable workflows. They enable your team to represent each project task on a shared timeline, clearly specifying deadlines and task handoffs. This facilitates real-time collaboration so everyone can stay on schedule and adjust that schedule as needed. Your team members will have greater autonomy, enabling them to do what they do best.
One of the greatest benefits of this kind of SaaS software is that it gives insight into your resource allocation. You’ll instantly spot which team members have too many tasks. You can see where individuals are waiting on work products and where deadlines have been missed. With these insights, you can rebalance your team’s workload to both speed project task completion and prevent employee burnout. The result will be happier customers and happier team members.
3. Customer Relationship Management Solutions
When was the last time you forgot an important customer’s name? How soon before it happens again? How soon before a series of simple mistakes turn a customer off so much that they never return? You can put out the best marketing materials for the greatest product or service in the world. But the whole ship can sink if you don’t have the right customer support systems in place.
Forgetting names is just one concern. What about tracking customers’ purchases so you can send them relevant offers? Or offer them discounts for being in your top 1% of shoppers? Ensuring your customers are more than satisfied is essential to succeeding in a highly competitive business environment. But rather than hiring more customer service reps to handle all that data, automate it.
A customer relationship management tool addresses all of the above concerns and more. It will enable you to give your customers the best support possible while slashing your workload. A CRM is a repository of customer-related information, collecting contact details, purchase history, communication preferences, and more. It gives you a unified view of your customers that you can leverage for up- and cross-selling purposes and to personalize each customer’s experience. Using a CRM, you avoid becoming a faceless brand as you continue to scale, improving your bottom line.
Enabling Your Business With Tech
Modern tech solutions can serve your business as incredible launchpads to success. However, you want to ensure you get the most out of your investments. By implementing types on this list, you can compete with the best.
When investing in SaaS solutions, be sure to revisit your research periodically. The tech world moves fast, so staying on top of the latest developments is important. Some new products or features will be nothing more than fads. But now and then, an innovation will completely reshape the business world. By staying on top of tech trends, you may be able to get ahead of the crowd to find lasting success.
