No matter what industry you are in, technology is revolutionizing the way businesses conduct their daily activities.
We have outlined 5 ways technology can improve your business.
Increase productivity
The use of technology in your business can speed up processes and, therefore, improve productivity.
Whether you want to analyze how your staff is spending their time or introduce systems to ensure efficiency, various technologies can offer solutions.
Task management tools, such as Trello or Taskque can help you stay on top of your daily tasks and duties.
Also, with the use of automation tools, you can centrally control certain aspects of your business. For example, you can replace your traditional paper posters with digital signage, which can be controlled centrally. Therefore, your staff do not have to spend time changing posters but can concentrate on increasing productivity in other areas of the business.
Improve Communication
We know how difficult it can be to keep staff members engaged in meetings. However, the use of interactive touchscreens in the boardroom can make meetings much more than just showing statistics on a board. Enabling staff to stand up and contribute to the meeting content on the board, through interesting software and apps, can greatly increase the chance of staff retaining the information from the meeting.
Also, the use of digital screens in offices can be used to display sales figures and targets, event information or urgent safety announcements. You could even incentivize sales staff with ‘flash targets’ that can be displayed on the screens in the office for a short amount of time. For example, you could offer sales staff a voucher if they get so many sales within the time limit. This can help boost your sales.
These tools for communication can help to improve teamwork across the entire business.
Improve Flexibility
The ability to change and update marketing material at the click of a button is very helpful in your business.
For example, if you owned a chain of cafés all serving the same menu at various locations and you had a breakfast and lunch menu, you could control the digital menu boards to display the correct menus on a schedule. So, your screens could be programmed to turn on at 7am when the cafes opened and then to change from the breakfast to lunch menu automatically at 11:30am. This could be different for each site, but all controlled from one central point. You could also display specials for each location and turn this off when they run out to avoid disappointment for the customer. This automation has numerous benefits for your business and customers. It will give you the control and consistency needed for your brand, enable you to target different audiences at different sites to gain more sales and, also improve the customer journey by avoiding disappointment.
Enhance your Marketing
You market your business through different channels to improve brand awareness, build relationships and boost sales. Both digital and traditional marketing methods work together to achieve these goals.
In a fast-changing business world, customers and audiences now expect more from technology to improve the customer experience, whether it’s faster ordering on payment kiosks or augmented reality tech to help choose a sofa.
It now takes between 5 and 7 touchpoints before your customer will buy from you and technology is a very powerful tool when it comes to influencing the customer. It has been shown that digital signage adds an upswing in overall sales volume by 31.8%.
The adoption of technology can improve the customer journey, increase brand awareness and it can be used to increase sales via targeted marketing. If you want to get more customers into your store, high brightness digital displays can show offers or events to increase footfall. If you want to increase sales at the point-of-sale, 60% of buying decisions are made at this point so you could use targeted adverts on payment kiosks. If you need to increase brand awareness, roadside LED panels might be a good option in a high-traffic area. There is a technological solution to suit every need.
Increase Profitability
A great way to grow your business is by increasing your profitability. To do this, you could cut your overheads using technology.
Whether it’s using a piece of software to give you control or improve communication or hardware to decrease waste in your business, technology can provide the perfect solution.
For example, if you owned an advertising company, you could install a large LED screen instead of a billboard. This would mean that you would cut down the costs of replacing the posters every so many week. You could also use the technology to gain more revenue by building more partnerships for the same amount of space. You could have one billboard-sized screen but could change the adverts every 3 minutes. This means, for the same space, you could have multiple customers paying to display their adverts with minimal costs to your business.
Most technologies could be used in this same way, reducing waste of materials and time and making the most out of the space you have.
In conclusion, technology is such a powerful tool to help your business in so many ways. Whether you need to increase brand awareness or improve the customer journey whilst keeping costs down, there is a perfect solution for any problem.