Millions upon millions of businesses flood today’s marketplace. That’s true even today when companies are shutting down left and right due to government restrictions.
With competition for less consumer spending being fierce, businesses that can afford to do so are investing in their organizations to help them get ahead during these hard times. Many of those investments are aimed at improving technology.
Business technology has the power to make companies more efficient and customers happier. By doing that, organizations are able to grab more market share and bolster their positioning for years to come.
Should you find yourself willing to put money into new tech within your company, consider shaping your spending per the suggestions we share below.
- Invest in Automation
Automation is the process by which companies outsource repetitive tasks to machines. By adopting automation, several businesses are able to reduce their payroll since less help will be required in the way of temps, administrative assistants, and the like.
There are several automation purveyors on the market that your business can team up with to get started optimizing workflows. For example, Zapier is a great, free automation tool that can give you a taste of what robot-help might look like in your company.
- Start Hosting Your Email
Sure, it’s easy to message all of your clients from your Gmail address. But is doing so really a good look for your company? In our opinion, the answer to that question is no.
If you have a website you have access to hosted email. Those hosted addresses will sport your company’s name (myname@mycomapny).
Hosted email can be forwarded to applications like Outlook for easy access and management.
- Take Security Seriously
Making technological investments in your company’s data security might not seem like a rewarding move. Believe us when we say though that one ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment.
Millions of dollars are lost by companies during the average data breach. Many of those breaches happen because organizations are not encrypting data or are working with poor third-party service providers.
Throw some money at auditing your providers and ensuring things like your website are protecting data in a way that’s in line with the best digital practices. From there, we recommend working with a managed IT service provider to perform regular checks on your security on at least an annual basis.
- Migrate to SaaS Applications
If your organization is still doing everything in Excel, that has to stop. The same is true if the software you rely on is tethered to individual computers.
Today’s most successful businesses are migrating their tasks to the cloud. In doing so, they’re able to work from anywhere in the world and have automatic backups of their data safely kept on offsite servers.
Whatever it is that you do on your local machine, chances are there is a cloud application out there that does it better and will offer you a stunning deal to work with them.
- Get Video Savvy
Including upgraded marketing in your business technology plan is another great way to invest in your organization. Looking at the various facets of marketing that may be worth putting money into, our team is hard-pressed to find a better solution than video.
Video is perhaps the most liked communication medium on the internet. Millions of hours of it are watched daily and every second, countless new hours of content get uploaded to sites like YouTube.
By having a comprehensive video strategy, your company can engage more people online, many of who may be younger and could have a long relationship with your business.
- Make Sure Your Website Shows Your Best You
You can have the best internal technology the world has to offer in your business and still fail if your website looks like it was built in the ’90s. That’s why much of your business technology spending should be funneled into the modernization of your website.
How to best modernize your website will depend on what your company does. For example, if you’re a service provider, can people book your services through your website?
If they can’t, you need to fix that.
Talk with your team and have them explore your site for improvement suggestions as if they were consumers. They’ll likely find a handful of places where you can tighten things up.
- Optimize Collaboration
Team members’ ability to seamlessly work with one another has a huge impact on corporate success. How are you enabling joint creativity?
If you don’t have a concise answer to that question, investments are in order.
Fortunately, investing in collaboration is as easy as adopting often free programs like Slack, Microsoft Teams, GSuite, etc. Anyone of those applications and countless others will help your team stay in touch no matter where in the world they’re working from.
The Right Business Technology Will Enable Your Long-Term Success
Companies invest in business technology because they understand the power it has to enable success. Cashing in on that benefit is especially important in today’s ailing economy.
We hope that the technology suggestions we’ve given you have gotten the wheels turning in your head. As you think of which investments to make, remember, the advice we’ve given you is by no means comprehensive!
There is a virtually unlimited amount of potential technology investments that you and your IT contact could explore. If you need help discovering those additional solutions, feel free to check out more related content on our blog.
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