There’s never been a better time to digitise your small business. The past few years have highlighted the importance of organisational agility and digitisation greatly strengthens this, allowing for rapid innovation and adaptation to market shifts. Furthermore, a Microsoft study of 23 Singaporean companies found that small and medium businesses (SMEs) stand to increase their revenue by 26% and decrease costs by 22% by implementing digital initiatives. Read on to discover more about how digitalisation can boost your bottom line and help your small business to grow.
1. Increasing Efficiency
Systemisation is an important profit-driver in business. Going digital can greatly increase the efficiency of your operations by creating streamlined systems to manage your workflow, facilitate seamless collaboration and ensure that clear lines of communication are in place. Best of all, cloud services are cost-effective because they do not require you to set up an in-house IT structure or regularly fork out for maintenance. Furthermore, you can often easily scale these services up or down as the needs of your business evolve.
2. More Effective Marketing
Switching to digital marketing methods can save significant money for your business, whilst increasing customer engagement. Content marketing, for example, makes use of online platforms such as blogs, social media and YouTube to attract new prospects to your business and position you as an authority within your chosen niche. This is a very affordable style of marketing that can deliver far better results than traditional forms of advertising.
Furthermore, digitising your marketing gives you access to actionable data that you can use to fine-tune your approach. For example, your website data will tell you how visitors find your site and the pages that gain the most traction. Your social media statistics give you an insight into your audience demographic and the type of content that resonates best with them. This allows you to create marketing that better appeals to your audience and continually increase engagement in a cost-effective way.
3. Improve Employee Experience
Happy employees and successful businesses go hand-in-hand; a study by Gallup found that engaged and motivated teams achieved 22% higher profitability, 37% less absenteeism and a 10% better customer rating.
Digitising your small business can empower your employees. Services such as smart notifications, communication tools and streamlined systems make their lives significantly easier, allowing them to focus on what really matters. Furthermore, digital systems support continuity which saves significant time and frustration.
Digitising your business also permits a more flexible style of working. According to a survey by CoSo Cloud, 77% of employees believe that they are more productive when working remotely, whilst research by Amerisleep found that 80% of telecommuters experience less work-related stress. Finally, OwlLabs discovered that US-based companies that allow remote working have a 25% lower turnover rate than their less flexible counterparts. There’s no doubt about it – allowing remote working at least some of the time is a surefire way to keep your employees engaged.
4. New and Improved Products and Services
Digitising your small business could help you diversify your income by creating new streams of revenue. Creating digital products, for example, could provide a source of passive income. You might want to consider selling:
- eBooks
- Templates
- Courses
- Software
Alternatively, you can also use digitisation to improve your current offerings, for example by providing continuous customer support via your website, creating a how-to video library for your customers to access or adding an e-commerce function to your website.
Summary
Digitising your small business comes with an array of lucrative benefits that can boost your bottom line and accelerate the growth of your company. Not only will this process improve employee experience and enable you to better connect with your customers, it will also greatly enhance your organisational agility and efficiency, all of which leads to more profits and a healthier business.
