How Your Small Business Can Stay Current With Today’s Technological Landscape
In the digital age of lightning-fast media, viral videos, and increasing demands for unique content, companies everywhere are working to keep up with technological shifts that are constantly changing and improving the way that businesses interact with their customers.
With startup culture forging ahead, fresh solutions to a number of our technology-based workflows are becoming more prevalent, but as with any road to innovation, new solutions breed entirely new sets of problems.
So how does one keep up with the growing pace at which the world of business and tech moves?
It’s a vast arena, so for those new to the game, how do you familiarize yourself to which areas you ought to draw your initial focuses to?
There’s more than one way tackle this, but here’s where to start…
Organize Your Resources
Right off the bat, one of the first things you can do start following relevant industry news, such as what’s found here at Stigan Media, and elsewhere on the web, including reputable places like Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land.
The old-fashioned way to doing things was to bookmark your favorite blogs and websites into your local browser’s bookmark folder, but these days, cloud-based solutions are what reigns supreme. Aggregator services like Feedly are at the forefront, which allows you to create user profiles to produce your own personal news feed that pulls in stories from all the websites you decide to feed into it.
Another similar service like Flipboard does a similar thing, but takes things a step further by extracting data from the stories relevant to you and your peers on social media networks. It uses smart algorithms to display and suggest relevant news articles that fit your tastes and presents them in a beautiful visual interface, truly making it your own, personally curated magazine of sorts.
There are plenty of other services and methods available out there, making it abundantly clear that discovering websites and the unique sources to keep us informed have never been made more readily available than today.
Be an Advocate for Embracing Change
Sometimes the hardest part about change is less about the actual change itself, but on adapting those around you to it.
A good way for employers to get their teams on board with technological shifts and changes are to empower them by allowing valid input on the decision making process. There’s always the trouble of alienating those set in their ways, but empathy can play a crucial role here by addressing the current roadblocks of current practices and procedures, and surveying a fair and honest consensus of potential workarounds from each of your team members.
What this does is it instills a culture of community and collaborative problem solving. It reinforces the feeling of positive change and carves a nice path to the acceptance of innovative thinking and ideas.
Afterall, when we motivate those who embrace technology, it gives a self-awareness to spread the knowledge and naturally teach those around them.
Being an empowering leader who embraces such will undoubtedly serve to influence a trickle-down effect. Lead by example and be willing to accept fresh ideas and input yourself.
New technology is more than just a tangible object. It is a mindset.
Start Getting Familiar with THESE Game Changing Factors
Alright, so you know where to find information and how to get your team on-board, but what sectors can we look at, specifically, to get our businesses on the ball right now?
The tech industry has changed the way we do business, but none with a significant impact as with mobile and apps. Compared to desktop computing, smartphones are become more of a place for not just communication, but for customer purchasing with over 50% of all online retail purchases in the US stemming from mobile users.
And working in tandem with the growth of mobile usage comes the relevancy of cloud-based computing, a way of centralizing user data and profiles to an online location for ease of use across multiple platforms. Clouds have soared in popularity, due to their ability to enable both professional and everyday users to access all sorts of data such as applications, documents, and files on-the-go.
How this helps a business is by allowing for simple scaling, self-servicing, and dynamic application deployment for those looking to offload things like bandwidth and storage capacity to third-party servers. Convenience is the key here!
Which leads us to the art of remarketing, which can be done via your Search Engine Marketing Campaign. Thanks to online data like Google Adwords and Analytics, we, as a business, are able to track the people that visit our sites and use our apps. What the remarketing solution provides is the ability reconnect with these individuals by allowing your ads and relevant content to appear to them while they surf the web elsewhere.
What this does is it creates unique profiles on current and future customers that allow you to tailor your marketing strategies in much more meaningful ways. Technology is helping us to connect better and this is certain one of the ways in doing it.
And as with all current technology, there is indeed some elbow grease involved in keeping up with evolution, but when you move away from the mindset of it being an arduous task and instead use it to fuel your ambition to achieve more, it’s an exciting world to be a part of! Contact our digital marketing agency if you need more information about it!
Stigan Media is an award-winning web design & marketing agency specializing in WordPress, WebFlow, and Shopify. Our team focuses on SEO, PPC and conversion optimization strategies to help your company grow.