Leveraging Technology for Business Growth

Technological research giant McKinsey Digital. recently made a bold prediction in regards to the state of business technology moving forward. According to their hypothesis, by 2025 the Internet of Things could have a potential total economic impact of as much as $11.1 trillion per year.

Indeed, the pace of technological advancements is breakneck, and only appears to be speeding up. So how can you harness it to your advantage? Here are three ways you can capitalize on business technology trends and watch your company thrive.

3 Ways Business Technology Can Help Your Company Grow

Boost Productivity

One thing true of business technology through the years is that it continues to boost productivity in the workplace. The rise of cloud technology has given way to a new state of “normal” within small and large businesses alike.

Tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Office 365 improve collaboration between teammates by making easily accessible documents that can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Additionally, these tools can also speed up reaction times, help keep maintenance costs down, streamline administrative tasks, provide secure data backups, and a lot more. Ultimately, all this efficiency adds up to save you big on both time and money.

Get to Know Your Audience

Recently, social media juggernaut, Facebook, hit an incredible milestone when it hit 2 billion active users in a single month. While Facebook remains the undisputed ruler in the kingdom of social media, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks also comprise their fair share of users. Within these enormous numbers lies a treasure trove of information about your customers. All that’s left to do is for you to dig in and put it to use.

Through regular engagement in your social media channels, you can gather as much relevant customer data as you can handle. Simple statistics such as preferences, demographics, thoughts on your brand, etc. have proven extremely valuable to businesses. Then, you can use that information to make informed decisions about the future of your business.

With a business technology solution like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite Insights, for instance, you can gather information across all your social networks as the tweets and posts roll in. This allows you to get a pulse on customer reactions and listen in on conversations about your brand. Additionally, you can use social media to recruit new employees and run reports—all in real time.

Finally, when it’s done right, social media engagement not only helps boost awareness of—and loyalty to—your brand, it’s also a way to keep up with the competition, and increase your web traffic, search rankings and conversion rates.

Put Big Data to Work

Big data is already a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s only picking up steam. After all, it’s not hard to imagine the money-making insights a team of intelligent people can generate

One example that has already proved fruitful for many businesses is the ability to specifically target certain demographics with marketing efforts. Through targeting, retargeting, and deep analysis of big data, companies possess more information on their customer base than ever before.

In fact, the company Hubspot expects that by 2021 ecommerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion globally, which is no surprise considering that 49% of people use Google to decide what to purchase and 65% of 25-49 year olds use voice-enabled devices at least once daily. Businesses find this data extremely valuable when making marketing decisions.

If you’re not already onboard the business intelligence train, check out this list of the 10 best tools currently available.

Become a Business Technology Master

Understanding how today’s technology can benefit your business isn’t a luxury, but a necessity for success in the current environment. For more information on how to leverage Leveraging Technology for your benefit, visit KnowledgeCity.