How to Use Technology to Grow Your Business
By Sydni MillerJuly 08, 2021
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It's today's businesses, technology is everything. It's one of the best resources to operate and grow your business.
In today’s era, technology is everything. Using technology is essential for growing your business, reaching audience targets and having the ability to communicate with your clients and customers. While there are some people who still turn to paper material like catalogs, magazines and newspapers for advice and reports, according to Pew Research Center, eight out of ten Americans (86 percent) get news from digital devices. Read below to find some tips on how to use technology, especially social media, to grow your business.
- Time
Management
One of the many tools
technology brings to the table is better time management. The Internet is now
high speed and available in almost all areas, towns and cities. This allows
employees and business owners to manage their business faster than ever before.
It’s quicker, easier and can allow more time in the day to complete other
duties, as well as multitask.
2.
Social Media
Besides doing other
daily tasks on a digital device, social media is one of the most important
tools for growing an audience and targeting people to buy into your selling as
a business. Popular social media sites are Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,
Snapchat, LinkedIn and TikTok. While you might think these target younger
generations, everyday people are deciding to join social media apps because of
the news they bring and their influence on updating people on endless things.
3.
Social Media Part 2
The best way to grow
your small business on social media is to use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
According to Statistica, roughly 2.85 billion people use Facebook, making it
the most popular social network worldwide. Instagram comes in second with over
one billion users and Twitter is third with 350 million. Facebook and Instagram
reign superior for growing small businesses because they have created their
apps with many fantastic features to see engagements of how many people follow
and like your posts compared to others. It also gives businesses the option to
pay for a better outreach to people who are not yet following you. Twitter is a
great outlet to tweet updates to clients and customers, but it’s not the app
most people go to when they want to see ads for new businesses.
4.
Social Media Part 3
Creating a Facebook and
Instagram business page is important and vital for every small business to
grow. Here are some links below to check out for Facebook and Instagram that
provide in depth knowledge and strategies that will help boost your business
forward.
Facebook: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7761-facebook-business-guide.html
Instagram: https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-instagram-for-business/
These websites will
provide information regarding how to set up a business account, the steps to
take, and how to regularly post advertisements to promote your business for a
bigger audience reach. These apps started out as photo sharing sites for family
and friends, but over the past years they have grown into hubs for business
activity. It is so important to start using these as you can get left behind in
the dust if you don’t capitalize on these opportunities.
5.
Photo Editing
Having beautiful, clear
photos are very important in digital media, so photo editing is one of the most
important and crucial ways to grow your business. Now, when you’re editing a
photo or video, it’s important that you don’t manipulate an image. For example,
if you have a photo of a green field and a blue sky, and you edit that the sky
is pink or the field is a way darker or lighter green then it actually is, that
is photo manipulation. Edit the photo or video that looks fresh, bright, clean,
vibrant and pleasing to the eye. There are many websites and apps that are
based specifically for photo or video editing. This is a must and should be
done on every photo and video a realtor, agent or business publishes. When
photos look dark, blurry and distorted, it steers potential clients away
because the property isn’t great to look at. By editing, you will drive more
traffic to your website, social media pages, catalogs and magazines.
6.
Financial
Everything costs money,
but when using technology to boost your business, it can help manage costs and
also cut down on areas that you don’t need to spend. Here are some useful tools
that can manage your company's financials and can help you spot wasteful spending
and increase your bottom line. Use an online invoicing service to reduce the
costs of collecting payment
from customers. Use online budget tracking to keep on top of—and reduce—your
expenses. File your taxes more efficiently online. Create a new income stream
by selling your products online. Use a comprehensive accounting software to
streamline your business finances. Share digital files with your bookkeeper
or accountant
to improve your ongoing bookkeeping processes. Explore open source
applications to replace some of the more costly "name
brand" alternatives. Sometimes, cost management can get messy, but
technology gives us the opportunity to organize what we do need to spend.
7.
Collaboration
Working from home has
becoming more popular than ever. Technology is what allows us to still be in
contact and communicate to coordinate plans, tasks and assignments. Easy ways
to get in touch are conducting teleconferences,
webinars and or web conferences to team members in different locations. Another
great way to stay in touch is by zoom calls. Zoom gained popularity throughout
2020 and up to the present day because you are able to video chat, chat without
video, share screens, and record calls. This is great to use with agents,
employees, and even clients who want a more personal way to communicate..
8.
Smart Devices
There is various smart
devices on the market made for everyday use. Smartphones, smart TVs, smart
computers, smart watches, smart iPads and many more. Having up-to-date devices
will help in communicating with others easier. For example, if you are out
showing property and your long distance buyer wants the property in real life,
not in photos, they may ask to FaceTime you. If you don’t have a device that
allows that, then your customer might just go to someone else. Having smart
devices also makes it easier to check social media, emails, texts, and calls
without much energy.
9.
Storage
Another way technology
is great? Storage! Files, photos, videos, paperwork, listings, almost
everything in the real estate world requires documents. Technology helps
organize everything in places that are easily accessible. ICloud has become one
of the most, if not the most popular and easy way to store data. When you set
up iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. You can use that storage
space to back up your device and to keep all of your photos, videos, documents,
and text messages securely stored and updated everywhere. You do have to pay
for more storage room, but ultimately you are paying for easy access as well.
Storage in the cloud is a practice that has completely upended the old ways of
storing data. Ten years ago companies who managed large quantities of data had
to FTP large files when they wanted to send them. Likewise, businesses could
not manage data without investing in numerous high capacity storage devices.
For example, cloud storage
makes it possible for users to:
- access
their data from anywhere in the world
- perform
backups automatically
- store
unlimited amounts of data
- collaborate on a single
document in real time
Storing data in the past
could be messy, untimely, and confusing, but now it’s as easy as ever.
10.
Marketing Campaigns
This is the tip on how to grow your business. Marketing campaigns are exactly what they sound like. According to HubSpot, marketing campaigns are defined as organized, strategized efforts to promote a specific company goal, such as raising awareness of a new product or capturing customer feedback. They typically aim to reach consumers in a variety of ways and involve a combination of media, including but not limited to email, print advertising, television or radio advertising, pay-per-click, and social media. This is where you can get creative in how you would like to promote your product or business, the target audience, what media and how long you would like it to last. Digital marketing campaigns have the potential to offer highly specific targeting, immediate results, easy testing environments, and two-way conversations. You have the ability to check them daily to see how your content is doing, and the chance to stop it whenever. More importantly, they tend to offer higher returns on marketing spend than some traditional forms of advertising. These characteristics make digital marketing much more accessible to small businesses than other types of marketing. One of the reasons online marketing appeals to smaller businesses is that unlike print, radio, or TV advertising, you don’t have to wait until the campaign is over to review campaign results. This creates an overall faster way to get results as well as to get in touch with people who are interested in your campaign.
United Country Real Estate is the leading, fully integrated
network of conventional and auction real estate professionals in the nation.
The company has been an innovator in lifestyle and country real estate
marketing since 1925. Throughout our nearly 95 years in business, our business
has had to change with the changing times. In the age of technology, it’s
important to stay up to date and use resources that can efficiently market to
our audiences. Learn more by visiting www.UnitedCountry.com.
Links:
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-technology-in-small-business-2951633