An effective IT strategy is no longer just a nice-to-have for your business. It’s crucial to achieve your long-term goals, satisfy customers and spearhead scalable growth. A recent study predicts that IT spending will reach $3.9 trillion in 2024.
As the pandemic continues to drive digital transformation in nearly every industry, optimizing your digital strategy is essential so the competition doesn’t leave you behind. Seize these top opportunities to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging the right business technology.
Workflow Automation
Human workers make human mistakes. Luckily, businesses can reduce the risks of human error and boost efficiency by automating repetitive processes. Workflow automation enhances overall productivity, allowing employees to focus on more critical initiatives or ideation while automated systems handle recurring operations.
Real-Time Data Analysis
Most modern companies constantly collect tons of consumer data, but it’s a wasted effort if you can’t organize and extract actionable insights.
Numerous tech tools are designed to automate this process so you can make more data-driven decisions. For example, brick-and-mortar businesses can use location-analytics technology that compiles demographic and traffic-pattern data to identify ideal future store locations.
Cybersecurity Improvements
According to a 2020 study by Cybersecurity Ventures, the global economy will lose $6 trillion to cyber attacks by the end of 2024. This makes cyber crime one of the biggest threats in business today.
The good news is that managed IT support security has grown in leaps and bounds over recent years, evolving to protect your critical business tools, collaboration apps and client data. These can include firewalls, anti-malware software, reliable VPNs and password managers to enhance security and keep your daily operations moving swiftly and securely.
Cloud Migration
Employees can access those applications anytime, anywhere by migrating mobile, web or desktop-based applications to the cloud. All they need is an internet connection. Migrating to the cloud fosters better collaboration and facilitates access to critical business applications; it allows businesses to easily and quickly scale up or down as their operational or data-storage needs change.
Data Visualization
Data sets can seem like an alien language. Luckily, modern data visualization tools take mountains of raw data and extract patterns with actionable insights. For example, a nationwide retailer might look at a heat map of customers by geometric location and realize they never order enough shirts in a specific market but always have leftover pants. With this knowledge, they can start sending more shirts and fewer pants to that region to increase sales and reduce waste.
Project Management
Project management software tracks the progress of various teams, individuals or projects, giving everyone involved complete visibility into progress. If you have a team working on a quarterly campaign for a top client, you can use a project management tool to see both the big-picture timeline and the individual tasks. This keeps large projects moving forward so you can deliver on deadlines and hold individuals accountable for their tasks.
Collaboration Apps
With most of the workforce working remotely, at least part-time, employees need ways to stay connected with managers, colleagues and clients. Without this, it’s hard for them to stay engaged, motivated and working toward your business goals. Tools help bring all your business communications onto one convenient platform. With certain channels, internal teams can stay organized with central spaces for conversations and file sharing. It allows collaboration with teams at other companies, making it simple to stay in the loop with external partners.
Build Your Digital Presence With Social Media
Digital marketing should be at the forefront of your growth strategy, as it can be one of your most potent growth tactics over the long term, especially now that more people have access to digital content than ever before. As the world becomes increasingly connected to the web and other devices via IoT applications, you have the golden opportunity to capture the attention of a global audience and easily transform your business into a global venture.
Of course, you should utilize all digital marketing methods to ensure growth, but you might want to pay special attention to social media. Social media is on the rise around the world and presents a unique opportunity to build a loyal brand following and create a solid inbound marketing approach that will attract quality leads to your website and inspire conversions, which means that over time you won’t have to pour money into paid ads and will acquire lifelong customers organically.
Optimize Everything For Mobile
Mobile technology is all the rage right now, which should come as no surprise, seeing as how employees and customers use mobile to communicate, surf the web, make purchases, and organize their lives more efficiently. You need to take advantage of the growing mobile trend to optimize all of your processes for the mobile demographic. The possibilities are endless, from mobile recruiting to having a mobile-friendly site, from mobile sales to mobile marketing.
Leverage Big Data Analytics For Success
Lastly, your growth strategy should be backed up by relevant and verifiable data, which means you must utilize big data analytics. With so much information flowing around the web nowadays, you can only hope to do this efficiently by combining big data analytics with artificial intelligence to collect and collate vast amounts of data without wasting time or money. When you have the correct data, you can easily adapt your strategy, tactics, and your entire approach at a moment’s notice.
Implement The Right Business Tech Tools
While there’s an overwhelming number of options when it comes to technology, the key to success is implementing the right business tech tools for your unique needs.
To increase customer retention, look for tools that empower your team to deliver better, faster customer service and higher quality products. While making a massive investment in the latest and greatest customer acquisition software can certainly help your business in other ways, it isn’t going to move the needle regarding retention. This means choosing technology that aligns with your specific vision and goals is crucial.