What tools do you use for your business on a daily basis? The record books? The phone? A smart phone? Microsoft Excel? The cash register?
What about the internet? It’s long past the year 2000 now and you really should be using the internet to further your business goals. Successful businesses succeed on the back of the tools that the internet can offer, but before we have a look at the tools, let’s talk about success.
Cashflow, profits and size are one of the main ways we can judge success in commercial terms, but your store likely won’t be beating Google anytime soon, so it’s just too unfair to compare you both. What you can do is start using the same tools and arm yourself like the best start-ups to ensure an even playing field.
The first tool that you must use is data. The internet has the answer to ‘who is visiting my website?’ and it’s called Google Analytics. Google Analytics can offer you a humongous array of demographical information to help you identify your target market. There are many other services that can assist you with this and you should certainly look into that offer as finding your target demographics via data is the key to internet success.
Leading off of data is lead generation. Your business needs to generate leads and you aren’t going to cold call anyone, so how do you do it? The answer is your website. Make up an offer that your target can’t refuse and offer it in exchange for contact details and information. This ensures that you can personally contact people interested in your products and business without cold calling or harassing your customers. You can also use blogs to personify your company and offer insights. This can help drive traffic, increasing the amount of data and visitors passing through your site. These blogs can help generate leads via a call to action that can capture information and data.
There are also web apps like WePay and Paypal that can help you collect cash from your customers. The internet has it all!
So, the workplace. We’ve focused on your customers enough now; it’s time to see what the internet can do for you and your employees.
Communication and collaboration is key for the modern workplace and business and thankfully, the internet offers the tools to do both. Google Drive is an amazing way to store files and work online. You and your employees can collaborate on documents from anywhere in the world and these documents, as well as uploaded files, are kept backed up to remote servers. In terms of communication, you can use tools like Slack to keep in touch and correspond with your employees and create a mobile workplace.
The internet has a lot to offer to your customers and your workplace, it’s best to take advantages of the many tools on offer before you get left behind by the competition. There’s no time like the present, so make the internet bow to your business today!