The Cloud
The infamous phrase, “the cloud’. We have all seen the rooms where the network servers are housed. It definitely takes a master to understand and navigate that room. But, what happens if you don’t have the space? Investing in cloud storage will help with limited office space and keeping a smaller IT team on board when resources are slim.
Some best companies that offer great storage whatsapp number data options with security are: Dropbox Business, Google Drive for Work, OneDrive by Microsoft, and Amazon.
All offer economical plans starting around $5.00 per month.
Business Operations
How can technology help alleviate the burden of accounting, payroll, general communication between staff, and handle special projects? The above tools are great choices for storage of important present and historical documents of the business, but investing in tools to help manage the process and present demands will help you and your team function day to day.
Google Drive is great for working on documents simultaneously with others with a record of changes with Google Sheets and Docs. Dropbox Business helps safely send documents that may have sensitive information.
Project management systems can help streamline the process of each department and assign responsibilities, which is important in every aspect of your business. Some options are: Basecamp, Asana, Wrike, and Teamwork. Pricing will range from business needs, system features and uses. These are all cloud based systems that work with just an assigned login and internet connection.
Instant messaging in this time of constant, quick communication is a needed item for every business, especially for those that are now in a remote setting. Slack, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Basecamp 3 (within the project management tool itself) are great options to keep in contact with your staff.
Bitrix24 is a tool that offers many day to day functions within one place such as, instant messaging, collaboration, project management, scheduling, document safety, staffing, and more. The beauty of this omni-channel system is that it also offers a full CRM platform with marketing capabilities and option for an online-store with customer support features. Their solutions team can create custom packages based upon your company, industry, and needs. Pricing is by features and online gigabyte storage.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation utilizes software that will alleviate manual implementation of marketing activity, such as: email deployment, social media postings, lead nurturing, and digital ads. Not only can these tactics be scheduled to preferred dates and times, but marketing automation comes with automating specific messages that are triggered after certain consumer activity – such as; thank you, birthday, anniversary, and suggested products in during online shopping trips.
Automation will not take away jobs – it will empower and allow jobs to become more efficient on your marketing team and within your company. Automation allows your team to free up their time from monotonous tasks and focus on how to drive business and sales for your company.
Software and platforms available for marketing automation can differ by the type of automation your company is looking for and the size of your company – all which provide a depth of analytics to help advance the automation practices.
Technology Advice helps break down what tools may fit the size of your company.
Artificial Intelligence Hosts
Artificial intelligence (AI) can give a business a competitive edge by improving the entire customer journey and data analysis as it frees up your company’s employees for more complex strategic work, similar to automation.
An example of a great enhancement for a company is the Chatbot. There is a connotation that a chatbot is a very negative and a tactic businesses should turn away from – fast. However, since their inception, the capabilities and sophistication of chatbots has grown immensely as artificial intelligence has developed. Chatbots for a small business can actually help qualify and nurture leads based upon the interaction and need to speak to the chatbot in the first place. It can become a great tactic for a constant stream of sales.
A hurdle that many small businesses will come across with implementing different AI tactics is the company’s technological infrastructure, which can be costly burden with the additional cost of staff to implement and maintain the equipment and software. Small businesses may be able to benefit from outside companies that offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that enable companies to use AI in simpler ways.
Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft all offer products that include AI capabilities that are hosted by that specific company and used by your company as needed.
