Every year, business owners are flooded with urgent calls to transform their company with the newest and flashiest tech solutions on the market. Keeping up is hard to do, but we have to accept it’s a part of life. Nonetheless, not all tech upgrades for small businesses are born equal.
Below we’ve picked through the marketing material to choose a few solutions that can provably enhance a small business’s performance.
1. New Call Center Software
Outdated software is frustrating to work with. Your call center customer service team is going to feel a lot happier and perform a lot better if they’re not battling with semi-functional equipment. That means your customers get a better experience when calling, which minimizes the risk of bad reviews. Reviews are your lifeblood as a business.
Upgrading your call center software is good for your customers, your employees, and ultimately your business. Improving staff morale also drives up retention rates, meaning you aren’t wasting resources hiring and training new employees. It’s demonstrably a great investment for small and medium-sized businesses.
2. Remote Working Management Software
Remote working is likely here to stay for many businesses. Upgrading your cloud-based work management software helps keep everyone on the same page. Remote working lives and dies by the quality of communication.
Remote working software can offer benefits like:
- Online checklists that can be accessed and edited by multiple parties
- Schedules that can be updated in live time
- Notification systems to ensure all employees are aware of changes and new priorities
- Private channels for employees to ask questions and raise concerns
- Better video call and screen sharing services
Even if remote working is a small part of your operation, better management software is typically very affordable and can dramatically increase productivity.
3. Improved Analytic Tools
Google Analytics is an excellent and affordable tool for you to track your online performance. However, bespoke analytic services can offer much more detailed and helpful feedback. You’ll often also benefit from a professional doing your analytics work for you – they can retrieve and present the most useful data in a way that helps you define clearer business objectives.
If online retail is a significant part of your business, it’s worth investing in high-quality analytic services.
4. Better Cybersecurity
This isn’t a situational upgrade – every small and medium-sized business needs to regularly assess its cybersecurity performance. Smaller businesses are the main targets of malicious hackers and are typically the most vulnerable because it’s easy to think “who would target us?”
Nobody is invisible online. Hackers don’t expect to pull off billion-dollar heists – the thousands they can extract from you by holding your customers’ sensitive information to ransom is more than worth it and far easier than cracking Goldman Sachs. Hold regular cybersecurity reviews and consult a professional; it’s simply not worth the risk.
5. Choosing Digital Marketing Strategies
Is social media marketing dead? Is email marketing still a thing? Do PPC ads work? The answer: it depends. It depends on who you are, it depends on how you use these tools.
Digital marketing moves extremely quickly. This means that you can waste a lot of money by throwing a bit of everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. Working with a specialist to devise a strategy that suits your brand is much more time and cost-effective than buying some ineffective PPC ads, updating a blog once a month, and getting your niece to act as a social media intern.
Finding Diamonds in the Rough
Don’t let the noise of a thousand marketing solutions overwhelm you. Listen to the voices that make sense and can prove how their ideas will help your business. You know what makes a discerning customer: be that discerning customer and find your diamonds in the rough.