Small businesses are often under pressure to deliver results on a daily basis, which can leave little time for making maximum use of the digital tools at their disposal. These 11 digital tools or small details within them can help with productivity, or add a lot to your business profile and results, and won’t eat into your working day.
Start With a Website
Start with the obvious. No one will find you if your company doesn’t have a website. Even a simple one that lists your products, services, prices, and area of operations is enough to get most companies started. With that done, you can build up an online profile with social media, blog posts, and a store to get your business going.
Show Your Business Organization Tree
New hires and customers need to know the right person to talk to. A simple org chart explains where people are in the business and what they are responsible for. It can be used internally to drive queries in the right direction so that everyone knows where the business is growing or needs more support. For customers, vendors and prospects, it identifies the right people to talk to, reducing the number of pointless messages or wasted calls.
A Strong Business Email Signature
Easy to forget, among the pressures of day-to-day operations, but ensure your business email signature has a list of contacts, websites, and social media profiles. Ensure that it shows the best way to contact you, or who to talk to, and highlight other ways that prospects can find out about your business.
Plenty of businesses and workers leave their email signature blank, or just put down a website address, expecting people to do the hunting for other contact details. While email is still the king of communication, be smart about that signature and make it friendly, engaging and don’t forget to update it with your latest productions, business information, or articles to make it a thing of value.
Creating an aesthetic signature and regularly updating it can seem like a time-consuming task, but it is actually pretty easy these days. As you can use an email signature generator to create one in a few minutes and update it in seconds whenever you want to. You should be able to add your website, email address, and links to all your social media profiles.
Leverage PDF Guides
Most businesses have plenty of documentation they can share with clients or customers, turning them into PDFs and putting them online creates a useful resource. Putting your advice, guides, case studies or other documentation is one way to highlight your business knowledge and value.
Many firms put these documents behind a digital gate, but until you have a deeper knowledge base, making it easily accessible is more likely to attract customers and interest from evangelists who will help spread the word about your business.
Make Use of Graphics and Video
As well as PDF guides, firms can make use of video and imagery. Lots of companies shoot content on worksites when talking about their products, showing how to resolve issues, and so on.
These can be turned into tutorial videos, image-based guides, and other content to post on social media sites like YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram to demonstrate the value that the business provides and create a wider number of destinations for clients to visit.
Work Smarter With Cash Flow Monitoring
Lots of small companies still keep their cash handling recorded on a spreadsheet. Let modern apps take some of the stress of cash flow, using it to highlight outgoings, predict income, and the other tricks that modern cloud services provide. They can even help with tax returns, invoices, receipts, and other areas of the financial side of the business, helping the company keep a better eye on its finances as it grows and a wider set of workers bring in revenue and the cost-base broadens.
Use Process/Project Monitoring to Stay on Track
Every business has numerous tasks or projects on the go, and many are managed on an ad hoc or word-of-mouth basis. To improve project understanding and productivity, digitizing that process is a key step to making these tasks work more efficiently.
There are endless project management tools like Basecamp and Trello for general tasks, while specific markets like construction or manufacturing all have their own tools to help monitor tasks, workers, hours, and raw material for consumable use. Tracking these makes a business more responsive and even for small projects prevents things from running late or suffering from other problems.
You might want to accompany this with an employee training center where employees can find tutorials and courses to learn how to use the software. This will save you time as you won’t need to coach employees one on one every single time.
Tools to Market Your Business
Marketing is key to helping your business grow and there are many tools to help with email, social media, and broader marketing campaigns. Doing everything manually means you are likely to miss out on data and analytics.
Marketing automation also helps you promote the company even when you aren’t in the office. All of these tools are available as cloud services to keep costs down and help you identify and communicate with likely customers or prospects.
Ways to Motivate Your Team
With everyone focused on their roles and tasks, managers and people can easily miss the opportunity for a little digital downtime and social bonding, even remotely. Having things like contributions to Spotify playlists, playing games like Wordle at the same time are easy and simple ways to bond.
The term gamification is often used among larger businesses, where game-like features can be added to sales, training, and other tools to help improve learning or drive productivity. It can also help make the boring tasks in a business more fun, and as part of any effort to improve how the business operates, it has to be a good thing.
Keep Documentation in One Place
Business knowledge is key to supporting growth and training up new hires. Keeping all that information in a single resource is a great way to make it easier to solve problems, help people learn across projects, or for customer support.
Using a wiki or creating an intranet of all that information, saving documents, email chains, and other conversations is a useful way to store knowledge and save people solving the same problems over and over.
A Place to Store Trends and Marketing Insights
As a company grows, people will want to know how it is doing, and how they can make it better. While managers might want to keep their dashboards close to their chests, having internal access to growth trends or how marketing efforts are key to driving worker ambition.
Using a “parish notices” or another memo as part of a regular update, or showing the basics in a PowerPoint can help make people more interested in what is going on and how they can contribute.
Take the time as your business grows to ensure that some or all of these aspects become a part of day-to-day operations, helping to save time and increase engagement.
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