How Technology Helps Small Business Owners Maximize Time and Resources
The pandemic outbreak has struck many businesses and enterprises very badly forcing them to think of innovative ways to remodel their business operations keeping in mind strict health and safety measures. Especially small businesses have been deeply affected financially with decreasing manpower and resources. So they need to take long-term measures to overcome these issues sustainably.
Small businesses normally employ small teams to run the business where every individual member needs to perform multiple roles. Especially with the pandemic, the dependency on the even smaller team to meet increasing customer demands has become a trend. With workload skyrocketing, many people are leaving jobs and completely closing down small businesses.
How do we overcome this untidy situation? Digitizing your business and using digital tools can help you solve a lot of issues. Digital tools can replace traditional employees working at the desk and help solo business owners like a stylist to handle the job alone. Technology can replace a large team enabling business owners to concentrate more on clients.
Digital Marketing Made Easy
When business owners concentrate more on delivering quality services to clients, they do not have time to come up with effective and persuasive marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns are very important to attract customers.
The owners can make use of email and text marketing platforms to automate recurring campaigns which will continuously engage leads and loyal customers. Some digital tools offer campaign templates where the owner needs to fill in contact details, business branding material, and other information by reducing the effort of making a campaign from scratch even further.
You can also use the lockdown time where your businesses are closed to develop a website for your business, start social media pages, etc. The website needs to be user-friendly, mobile responsive and optimized for search engines. As well as a good website, channels such as social media marketing, Email marketing, and pay-per-click advertising can be extremely effective. Digital technologies can accelerate business growth because they allow companies to reach a wider audience and build lasting relationships with customers to promote brand loyalty.
An online business opportunity reduces human interactions, takes your business to a worldwide audience, and even increases profits.
The key to the best digital marketing strategy includes aims, tactics, and performance measures. Many digitally active companies necessarily do not have a defined strategy. Such issues can result in wasting and losing resources and opportunities
You can take a sanitation course to gain a certificate to ensure your future customers that you are well trained in health and safety measures. You can assure them, your business is safe for them. the idea here is to show them that you care about them and increase customer trust in your brand. Publishing the certificate on your digital platforms offers an opportunity to prove that you are putting customer health and safety first and increase customer loyalty plus trust. This encourages them to visit you for any services in the future.
Accounting Made Affordably
Small businesses may not have in-house employees to manage their finances. So mostly the owners handle the accounts by themselves. hand crunching numbers can be time-consuming, full of errors and you may be losing time to interact with valuable customers. Especially during the pandemic, every customer is like a treasure for you. You can’t lose them due to your lack of time to give amazing customer service.
To balance this situation, you can make use of accounting software that can help small businesses with accounts, keep track of profits and losses and even show them an analytical report on the business performance in real-time. A simple click on the dashboard can offer a detailed view of the product inventory, sales, etc, and export information directly to their accounts without the need to file receipts.
Scheduling Made Simple and Strategic
Small businesses like saloons have to schedule appointments for their customers. When a lockdown happens, they are forced to miss out on the appointments. Chances are they would love to revisit when the time is right. Now, if you have a handwritten calendar of appointments, you have to rewrite the schedules manually which is a hectic job. Keeping an online appointment book helps you escape the tedious task of manual rescheduling. You just need to click away from the rescheduled date rather than losing details written down in paper stacks. Keep the appointments clean and organized.
For small business owners, time is money. They can use online appointment books to maximize their daily routine. They can adjust slots to keep a day full of appointments and find time to keep the saloon clean and tidy.
Utilizing mobile technologies
Mobile technologies help small business owners in a multitude of ways. The flexible working hours and advancements in mobile technology have contributed to the increasing number of people working outside of the traditional office environment.
You can promote a happy team by investing in mobile technologies as the team members enjoy enhanced work/life balance. This can be beneficial for both the company and the team as happier employees better productivity and reduced cost due to staff retention. It is a win-win situation. Mobile technologies allow employees to work remotely from any part of the world and stay safe & healthy. You have a significant boost in productivity and efficiency with having a fully functional office on the go.
Simply put, more work gets done as the time spends on the commute is cancelled and can be delivered to answer the customer requirements, do more effective marketing campaigns and business tactics.
Mobilizing the workforce via technology can also help a business to make those all-important savings that are necessary to maximize profits and encourage growth. You can also reduce office maintenance cost which comes at an expensive budget for all companies as employees are working from home. Safe more on products and talents rather than utilities.
To utilize mobile technology for optimal results, businesses should not only invest in mobile devices but also consider cloud solutions that allow users to access the same applications and services from multiple devices and locations. These will also enable effective collaboration, so employees can work well as a team even when they’re not in the same physical space.
So, despite the size and type of businesses, it is mandatory to change their business model and enhance the operations using the technology as per the need of the hour. Come ping us for services!