As the movers and shakers of your industry, you need to stay on top of your game, and that means keeping with the times. When I say keep with the times, I’m talking about bringing the wonderful world of technology to the forefront of your business. Though the learning curve may be steep for some, the flow of technology in the workplace can help you smooth out the bumps in your processes. Harnessing the power of today’s modern technology will help you rethink the way you do business, and help you dominate the online arena as well.
We are going to explore a few ways that modern technology can help you create, manage, track and analyze your business from the inside out. These modern business amenities will boost any business’ reach, especially if you are coming from a point where the process was initially a pen and paper deal. Technology makes your business better, smoother, and simply more capable. Let’s take a look.
5 Ways Technology Helps Your Business Grow
Finding the right technology can be hard. There are so many different programs flooding the market with endless capabilities that it’s often hard to choose the perfect tech. So to help you narrow it down, we are going to take a look at a variety of tech options for your business. Sometimes they’re free, and other times they are not, but you can rest assured that the tech we suggest is tried, trusted, and totally worth it.
Start or Expand Your Marketing With Content Creation Tools
There are tons of amazing tools that will help you expand your marketing efforts, but in this section, we are going to look at the best tools from a creative standpoint. In other words, some graphic content creators!
Let’s start with the industry standard, Adobe. Adobe is your swiss army knife when it comes to creating graphic content, video content, pamphlets, websites, logos, etc, etc. You catch my drift. It’s the best of the best and the full Creative Cloud from Adobe is the gateway to endless possibilities. You can unlock the full Creative Cloud, or choose from various other packages. They tend to range from about $30 for one application to about $70 for the full suite. You can check out their pricing here.
For those of us who aren’t quite into the idea of in-depth learning of programs as complex as Photoshop, Bell Solutions LLC would like to introduce an alternative called Canva. Canva can help anyone turn into a Picasso with is the amazingly simple interface. This program can do just about anything you want graphic wise, including uploading images and logos, even with a free account. Create PDFs, Resumes, Social Media Images, Web Page Content, YouTube Thumbnails, and so much more. Most of these are pre-built items inside of Canva that are free for you to customize, and you can download your masterpieces in so many different and versatile formats, including .png.
Things get even better when you snag a pro account. For just $13 a month, you get access to downloading with transparent backgrounds, tons of free stock images, and so much more. Seriously, go nuts.
Integration
Wouldn’t it be great if your applications could all work together? Well, many of them can through integrations. Think of integrations as your ability to link applications and make them respond to each other.
To further explain, let’s start with a low hanging fruit, a contact form on your website. When you set up a contact form for your website, you have to set up an email address that receives the inquiry from the submitted form. The email that it’s tied to is integrated into that contact form.
See what we’re getting at?
There are so many different ways to use integrations too, like a reCAPTCHA. You know, the, “I’m not a robot button.” This is actually done with a special key called an API key from your Google account. This is integrating your email to your website.
If you want to get really tricky with what you can do with integrations, take a look at Zapier. This easy to use tool helps you set up triggers and reactions.
For example, if you get a new subscriber through your MailChimp, you can set up a trigger that will put that new contact’s information onto a Google Sheet for you. It can be a bit tricky to set up, but once you have it set how you like it, you will never want to go back.
Customer Relationships
Creating a relationship with your customer is key to having a successful marketing and sales team. You can do this in so many ways, and most of them have the potential to be great.
Personally, we like QuickBooks. It’s small learning curve, and monetary tracking potential, it’s an invaluable tool for any small business.
If you want to take your customer relationship management to the next level, you could try setting up your QuickBooks inside of a CRM like HubSpot’s free CRM, or SharpSpring for the serious users. Both of these CRMs can integrate with a wide variety of tools like MailChimp, Google, and so much more.
A full CRM will help you keep track your interactions with contacts, and show you a new way of looking at your business.
Analytical Review
No matter what you are doing, you should be keeping track of your progress. Track anything and everything you can, it’s amazing what a little bit of data will tell you, and the major or minor tweaks it can help you make can really boost your potential online.
If you are posting on FaceBook, make sure you are tracking your insights. This amazing tool is given to you on your business FaceBook page, so take note. It will show you what people have looked at, clicked, liked, followed, visited, and more. They give you the tools to see what is working for your business on FaceBook right before your eyes.
You should try to keep solid track of your email success too. If you aren’t, you want to. The easiest way to get into it is with MailChimp. This tool is free to use up to 2000 contacts, and prices are reasonable if you are hitting the contact price breaking points. MailChimp gives you breakdowns and information into the interest of your customers, so you can narrow your scope for every step of your campaign. Don’t just blindly email people, contact them with purpose.
Continuous Self-Audits
Ok, this is the last major point I want to stress about implementing technology, you have to audit it. Nothing is going to be perfect, but you should do what you can to strive for perfection. That means constantly stopping to take a look at your business from an objective point of view. Keep track of oddities in your new system setups and note them, so your team can eliminate the hiccups in the systems and procedures.
Gather all of your data from every platform you can keep track of, and sit down with the data. Many stories of success and not so much success will unfold before your very eyes
The more you audit, and the more you are honest with those audits, the more you will get out of your technology. It is possible to get your business running in a fluid motion with modern day technology if you are willing to invest the time to learn the systems.
Conclusion
This crazy world has developed some amazing tools that can help any business save time through organization and integration. Finding the ones that work with your business might take some time to find, but these are amazing places to start. There is a certain piece of comfort you get when you set yourself up for successful processes. It takes half the web battle off the table.
Looking for help with finding the right systems for your business?
We would be happy to help point you in the right direction so you can organize your contacts and financial numbers.
Let us know how Bell Solutions LLC can help your business get organized fast!