Software and apps have completely transformed the way businesses work, in almost every way imaginable. The truth is in 2020, if your business is not using software to improve the way it operates, you’re living in the past. Fortently, the vast majority of businesses have long adopted software and are using it to get ahead. However if you’re one of those businesses yet to take the plunge, here are 3 ways to get started.
1. Automate your marketing
Ok, so that headline is a little ‘clickbaity’, you can’t actually automate all of your marketing, neither would you want to. But you can use marketing automation to do an awful lot more with marketing, with much of the manual work being automated.
Take email marketing for example. There are a wide range of email marketing software options to choose from – see some of the best rated here – but whichever one you choose, you can use to do a lot of the leg work for your outbound email marketing campaigns. This includes setting up automation processes to capture email addresses, sort them into customer groups, and place them into targeted marketing campaigns – all with automation. Once they drive a response or enquiry, they’ll be placed into a customer marketing category, and the process continues.
2. Find industry specific software
These days you’ll be fairly hard pressed to find a business industry which doesn’t have several software options dedicated to it, even those more focused areas. Take field service management software for example, which is software dedicated to businesses with engineers who work in the field.
The software allows these engineers to be connected to business systems via their phones or laptops, and have full access to things like job management schedules, customer information, stock levels and quoting, invoicing and reporting functions.
Such software completely changes how these businesses can work and offers significantly improved efficiency, both for the business and the engineers in the field.
3. If budgets are small, make the most of free software
For many small businesses, purchasing high end software suites is a pipe dream, as they simply do not have the money to do so, or perhaps weary of the investment. Fortunately in today’s world, there are a huge range of free software options available designed to help businesses grow and become more productive and efficient.
Need an office suite for your business? You can purchase Microsoft Office like many businesses used to, or you can simply use Google Docs, which is completely free and offers pretty much the same service – some would even argue a better product.
If you need a specific piece of software, many will offer a limited version for free to allow your business to trial some of it’s more basic or less premium functions before committing to a larger investment. This option is a good one if you want to test the impact of a particular piece of software on your business, and is a good way of getting business buy in for a purchase later down the line.
