Businesses, as well as the rest of the world, are in an era of rapid technological transformation. Simultaneously, customers are getting enhanced experiences, high-quality products and services. This digital revolution is an excellent opportunity for business to leverage for growth. These are some of the considerations your business could use to progress.
Marketing
Businesses are no longer relying on traditional methods of marketing. Digital marketing has proven effective, as well as affordable. Also, digital marketing has several approaches that could all be utilized to benefit your business. Social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, and ad campaigns are some of the options at your disposal. Your business can use all of them because they are cost-effective and able to run marketing programs simultaneously.
Customer Relationship
Customers are the cornerstone of any successful business. Therefore, creating a system to manage customer relationship is critical. Today, there are programs and software that keeps track of customers, sales and other related information. Dedicating personnel to manage these programs is advisable. They will ensure that it is effectively keeping up with customer needs and anticipations.
Project Management
Running a project without a management plan is likely to go wrong. That is why utilizing project management software is a brilliant idea. These programs assist in planning the project according to its scope. They will help you to create milestones and track every step as you observe the time frame. In case of unforeseen eventualities, project management software plays an essential role in managing crisis.
Human Resources
Businesses can never be functional without employees. Minding your workforce welfare is critical to the success of your business. Manage your employees’ progress by using human resource information systems. They are excellent in keeping personnel records, performance appraisal and identifying employee needs.
Evaluate your business needs and maximize technology to grow your business. Contact us to learn more.
Does thinking about new tech for your small business cause you to stress out? Investing in tech can be a source of great anxiety for many business owners, and often that anxiety comes from concerns over the costs of upgrading small business tech. While cost should certainly be a factor, most businesses need some type of tech to thrive and even survive. So, how can you determine if you’re getting an ROI on business technology? Well, you can get started by answering these key small business tech questions.
How Will You Pay for Business Tech Upgrades?
Acquiring the best new tech for your small business usually requires finding the right funding option. For many business owners, that means looking outward for financial options to help pay for tech updates, especially if major upgrades will provide a major ROI. One way to fund small business updates is to apply for a small business loan.
Lending choices for small businesses include SBA loans, short-term loans, business lines of credit, and equipment financing, among others. You can use online guides to make getting started easier if you think one of these lending options may be right for your tech updates. You can also consider using a small business credit card to fund new tech and benefit from card perks and rewards.
Will Your Tech Updates Provide a Return on Investment?
Before you consider funding sources, figure out which tech changes will actually help you increase your profits and productivity enough to make the investment worthwhile. For example, some tech can generate additional profits, with low setup costs. A dropshipping business is one such update, which allows you to offer popular online products, such as clothing and electronics, to customers without having to house additional inventory.
You can also look for tech that won’t cost anything to update, like these software tools, to increase ROI for your small business updates. Free small business tech can resolve issues with various processes and elements within your company, but know that these tools typically come with limitations. You may be better off using the funding tips above to pay for tech upgrades for your small business.
How Can New Tech Make You, and Your Staff, More Productive?
Productivity can help the profitability of your small business. In fact, business experts agree that small businesses need to boost productivity and profits in order to maintain their role in the economy and maintain hopes for long-term success. So, you should come up with your own practices and tools that can boost each one, which can include tech updates.
Evaluating your productivity needs can help, but there are also productivity apps and tools that can make increasing efficiency easy, and make increasing business success effortless. You can use the ever-reliable QuickBooks to simplify accounting processes or a tool like Wunderlist to make task management less time-consuming for your small business team. These tools can solve a variety of productivity challenges for businesses and help those companies grow their overall success.
Will New Tech Help Keep Your Small Business Protected and Secured?
Keeping your small business safe means guarding against online threats. Cyberthreats for small businesses can come in many forms, but each can result in devastating losses that can eventually result in affected businesses closing their doors, according to recent stats. Which is why small business owners need to invest in cybersecurity tools that will defend their companies against potentially devastating attacks from cybercriminals and also provide peace of mind when it comes to securing private data. Because these attacks can still happen, businesses should also put time and effort into developing a data breach response plan that can minimize damage and also keep breach management within current federal regulations to avoid catastrophic legal issues that could cause those businesses to fold.
New tech doesn’t have to be unattainable for your small business. You just need to use the right questions, like the ones above, to develop the right plan for integrating tech updates into your business. Because not only can tech increase your profits and boost your productivity, but the right technology can help your small business survive and thrive for many years to come.
Modern-day businesses have never seen a more streamlined, convenient, and affordable means to collaborate with teams, employees, managers, or business partners — thanks to technology.
These days, almost every industry you can think of utilizes technology in every facet of the business. From brainstorming, production, to product distribution, the dependence on this Omni-system is at an all-time high. It’s safe to say, without it, a business is truncated from a sturdy structure that hinders growth and revenue. If you’re not optimizing technology in your business, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to propel your business into the limelight. Here are the seven powerful uses of technology in business today that entrepreneurs should watch out for.
1. Boosts Marketing
Although the conventional forms of marketing like outdoor advertising still work nowadays, digital marketing is way ahead of the marketing ballgame. Businesses can now leverage different digital marketing strategies depending on their budget and audience. Regardless of the industry, here are the most common types of online marketing tactics gaining popularity in the market today:
Social media marketing
Content marketing
Influencer marketing
Email marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Affiliate marketing
2. ERP Integration
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is now a must-have in small- and large-scale businesses today. ERP is a software that streamlines all operations within an organization. Here are some uses of ERP in organizations:
Purchasing
Inventory management
Manufacturing
Sales and marketing
Financial management
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Human resource management (HRM)
Business intelligence
Compliance monitoring
Project management
IT optimization
E-commerce platforms
3. Cloud-Based Services
Cloud computing is the most adapted form of IT collaboration, automation, and computing without the need for hardware installations. That means, businesses can take advantage of applications or software that can store, monitor, and modify data over remote servers. Cloud-based service providers are clamoring for client attention, namely Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and more.
4. Mobile Assimilation
More and more companies have associated their products and services with mobile applications. For instance, home and office security providers have connected their entire systems into mobile apps so customers can access surveillance clips anywhere. Mobile phones may be small, but they’re compelling gadgets that can protect a whole office!
5. Easier Transactions
Financial technology companies, also known as ‘fintech,’ are on the rise. Fintech is paving the way for better, quicker, and easier transaction methods in terms of finances. Consumers can now pay through mobile apps, get a loan online, and apply for insurance from a website. This establishes confidence and reliability between companies and their customers.
6. Robust Security
Nothing is more valuable than customer information. After all, this goes beyond to-and-fro negotiations – trust is an essential factor in safekeeping business partnerships. If you break that trust, you’ll lose regular customers, and word of mouth is going to spread like wildfire. With an upswing in the number of hackers, security companies are making their systems more robust than ever. Firewalls, SSL certificates, WEP, WPA, and all encryption tools are at every business’ disposal.
7. Affordable Outsourcing Solutions
About 40 percent of freelancers will dominate the US workforce by 2020. This is a huge deal for businesses. While this eliminates the additional upkeep of brick-and-mortar offices, server installations, and hardware maintenance, this also gives organizations a more extensive recruitment process that can search for the crème de la crème in the industry worldwide. Companies are no longer limited to in-house employees that cost more. They can hire remote employees and collaborate with them like they’re in the same physical office.
Final Thoughts
The powerful uses of technology are what we need in this digital era. It puts the whole business force in common ground, a level playing field where both neophytes and veteran entrepreneurs can go neck and neck with each other.
Author Bio:
Kerry Brooks is an ardent blogger and frequent traveler who writes about home improvement, travel and the latest trends on emerging technologies. She is currently working with EyeSpySupply, which offers a wide range of surveillance equipment, including wireless spy camera, nanny cams, GPS trackers, and voice activated audio recorders and more.
If you’re ever bored on a Friday night, go back and read dated doomsday articles. Whether these articles are related the tempest in a teapot that was Y2K or the fear that e-books will wreck the publishing industry, after a while, you’ll notice that no matter the tech being discussed, many of the arguments start to sound alike.
From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label (Slate).
While it’s not clear that emerging technologies will wreck society, it is clear that they will definitely impact life–particularly at work and in the home.
Work
Clearly, the introduction of computers and automated phone systems had a huge impact on the workforce. Since their introduction, further technological developments have produced exponential change.
For example, it’s just a matter of time before self-driving cars are delivering pizzas, and augmented reality projection technology such as Lightform are applied industry-wide, from enhancing live entertainment to helping interior designers pitch ideas to clients.
Home
With services like Amazon Prime Air stepping up the online marketplace by using drones to deliver packages, and smart fridges helping out in the kitchen by letting you check its contents while you’re at the store and then pulling up recipes for you once you’re done shopping, it’s clear that changes at home will keep pace with those in the workforce.
While the pace of the changes may seem dizzying, the changes themselves are exciting. With everything moving so quickly, sometimes it’s hard to feel that you’re keeping current. Fortunately, you have us.
We Can Help
Here at 4 Corner IT, we’re proud to be South Florida’s best provider of managed tech services. We have what you need to reach the next level. By availing yourself of our expertise, you can focus on what you do best and let us take care of the tech.
To hear more about this or discuss our services, please feel free to contact us. We look forward to serving you.
Viruses and malware can be detrimental to your business’s critical systems, which makes it important that you do everything in your power to protect your business from these digital threats. Here are a few of the steps every business owner should take in order to protect the digital security of their business.
Invest in Quality Antivirus Software
While this may seem obvious, it is important that you take some time to research the best internet security program for your business. Work with a reputable antivirus software company to create a software package that will meet the needs of your business. You will want to ensure that the program you choose protects against other digital security threats such as malware in addition to virus protection.
Stay on Top of Updates
Aside from having a good antivirus program, one of the best things you can do to ensure your company’s digital security is to stay on top of updates to your operating system as well as all of your other software and programs. The fact is everyone has been in the position where they ignored the update reminders they receive, however, keeping on top of these updates is imperative as hackers often use vulnerabilities in outdated programs to infiltrate networks. Keeping on top of upgrades is then one of your best defenses against viruses.
Consider an IT Service
One of the best ways to ensure the digital security of your company is to partner with an IT service. IT professionals will have the experience necessary to protect your company against digital threats and they will be able to help you maintain and protect all of your business’s vital systems.
Contact us to learn more about what you can do to protect your business against viruses and other digital threats.
