How will you incorporate technology into your business model to enable you to achieve your goals and grow as a company?
Business growth is a critical objective for most organizations. At a time when many businesses are facing never-before-seen obstacles, growing your customer base and staying ahead of the competition can mean the difference between survival and failure in any industry.
How, exactly, can you stimulate growth in a challenging time and difficult environment? And how can you manage this growth when it occurs? There are many elements to creating a strong and remarkable business, of course. Software can play a key role. Here are some of the most important tools you need to make your business a successful venture.
Sales and Marketing
Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS is a central repository for storing, creating, and posting content, from landing pages to blog posts, forums, and your entire website infrastructure. Not only will you be able to use it to manage your content, but you can also get insights and analytics to help you improve your marketing .
Some companies build their own CMS, while others choose existing platforms like WordPress. If you select an existing one, you usually also have the option to purchase plugins and add-ons to further enhance your content and user experience.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Your CRM is another central tool for your company's sales and marketing efforts. This works as a platform to store contacts, including existing customers or customers and leads. Using this software, you can store information about your customers, such as contact information and other details about their needs and interests. You can even automate messages and resolve queries directly from the CRM.
Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM examples, although as with a CMS, you can have your own CRM customized to your preferences and the details you need.
Email marketing platform
Email marketing is perhaps the main way to communicate news, discounts and other information to current and potential customers. It is an important effort for the growth of your business because it allows you to spread the word.
There are many platforms available to manage and deploy your email campaigns, such as MailChimp and Constant Contact. These tools will also help you improve your messaging by offering reports, trending information, analytics, and more. You can also perform A/B testing to improve your communications strategy, identifying, for example, which types of subject lines perform best with your audience.
Internal communication
Messages
It is always important for growing companies to maintain frequent contact with their colleagues and teams. Now that the vast majority of teams are working remotely – depending, of course, on the nature of the business and industry – organizations are turning to or relying more heavily on digital methods of contact.
Slack is one of the most popular messaging platforms for communicating with colleagues. Joining different channels allows you to send your message to multiple people at once, and you can even follow channels outside your organization to connect with others with similar interests or areas of expertise.
Video conference
When the pandemic hit, Zoom became a staple in our lives. But it's not the only video conferencing platform available. WebEx is an alternative, offering many of the same features as Zoom. Meanwhile, for international calls, Skype tends to be the preferred platform for most companies.
Finance
Bookkeeping and Accounting Software
Larger companies may have accountants on staff, but as a growing company, you can cut expenses and streamline the bookkeeping process – a critical part of your organization – by using software that will do much of the legwork for you. From generating invoices to helping with your taxes, these platforms make the money process much easier.
There are many accounting and bookkeeping software options that will help you manage your business, such as QuickBooks and FreshBooks, both of which have packages aimed at small businesses.
Payment Processing Tool
Square, Shopify, and Stripe are just a few of the point-of-sale (POS) payment processing tools to help you complete and manage sales. This software allows for secure and fast transactions from virtually any location, whether in a store, at a conference or just online. As sales are more convenient and efficient, you will be able to increase the volume and rate of your transactions.
Project management
Whether or not you have a designated project manager, project management tools are vital to your business's organization and workflow. How else can you keep track of your projects and assigned tasks and responsibilities?
Different types of project management platforms have different features. Trello, for example, is a kanban board, where you can see the entire layout and image of your projects, including the task owner, due date, and so on. You can also assign responsibilities to people and color-code different types of tasks and projects.
Customer service chatbot
Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), chat bots are revolutionizing customer service. You've probably interacted with them at one time or another, like when trying to track down a lost Amazon package. These platforms are intended to handle customer queries, leaving time for human customer service representatives to deal with more complex issues that cannot be resolved quickly.
Chatbots can also be embedded on social media platforms like Facebook so that the visitor can ask questions and get more information about the organization in real time.
If your goal is business growth – as is the case for many companies, small and large – you don't need to do it alone. There are countless tools and software to help you achieve your goals, from CRMs to chatbots. How will you incorporate them into your business model to enable you to achieve your goals and grow as a company?
