How do you use technology in the day to day operation of your small business? Sure, it’s more than likely that you use a mobile phone and computer, but are you really harnessing the power that technology has to offer which can help your business reach its full potential? In this article, I will outline 10 ways that you can use technology to enhance your business, increasing efficiency and productivity.
1.Sell Online
Do you own a retail store? If yes, why not consider expanding your customer base by selling products on the internet, a process that can be carried out through the use of an ecommerce website or a large online marketplace, like eBay or Amazon. Do you run your own restaurant? If yes, then you can use one of those online services that allow your customers to place orders online.
2.Use Twitter
Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past decade, you probably already know about twitter and how it can be used as a promotional tool for your products and services. But one thing you may not know is that you can use it to target specific types of customers in order to grow your business.
3.Use Instagram Trends
Instagram may have changed its overall design over the years, but its actual feature set has remained the same. By keeping up with Instagram trends, it’s possible for you to use it to impact positively on your business. I recommend you carry out additional research on how people are using Instagram to generate revenue.
4.Improve Customer Service
Offering a detailed FAQ—either on your site or through voicemail—can dramatically cut down on customer effort and waiting time. On this same website you could also include directions and/or a map to your business premise. Additional information such as opening times, info on returns and shipping, menu specials and items and other important stuff can also be included.
5.Understand Your Customers
Do you have a website? Hopefully you do, if so then why not make an account with Google Analytics. Through this monitoring and analysis tool, it’s possible for you to keep track of your website visits, including the websites that they are arriving at your website from, the location of your visitors and how long they are spending on your website and the pages that they visit most often.
6.Use Facebook Video
Social media video content can be used to great effect for engaging with your potential customers. Through the use of Facebook, it’s possible for you to create your own feature videos which you can use to engage your customers, increasing productivity, profits etc.
7.Use Video Protection
Video production need not be restricted to Facebook and other social media platforms. Consider creating video on your website (if you own one), or for your retail store, as video can also be used in store.
8.Engage Customers with Email
Data reveals that nearly 50% of email subscribers complete at least one transaction each year thanks to promotional messages. Once your customers make that decision to opt-in to your mailing list, you can start to send them emails, on a monthly or weekly basis. In these emails you can create awareness to specific products, special offers and sales.
Success in email marketing is all about frequency and following up. There are many email marketing services that you should consider contacting and setting up an account with, as this is one of the more effective ways of reaching out to your customer base.
9.Use the Cloud
There are many popular cloud storage services, like Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Drop box, that you can use to store all your most sensitive documents online. When you utilise these services, you’re able to keep your data secure while being able to access it anywhere you have an internet connection.
On these clouds you can create different folders, which you can use to organise team members or projects, collaborate with your partners, contractors or employees, and share documents and pictures which would surpass standard email attachment size limits.
10.Use Google Analytics
Having already touched briefly on the benefits of using this tool, I’d also like to add that Google Analytics has many other features which you can use to keep visitors more engaged on your website and win over their loyalty, so consider creating an account with them, as a matter of urgency.
–AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website where he writes extensively technology tools and other computer related issues and topics.
