If there’s one advantage SMEs enjoy over their larger and more rigid counterparts, its their ability to swiftly implement new technologies and strategies that can enhance their business. If you’re a decision maker in an Irish SME, pay attention to these six digital tech trends that could help bring your business to the next level of performance in 2017.
1. Become a Thought Leader
2017 is the year your company needs to have a voice that can be heard. We’re not suggesting that you scream your product offering out the window at passers-by, but it is vital that the relevant stakeholders know your views on how current events affect the industry, as well as your solutions for solving the common problems of your customer base.
By becoming a thought leader, you will stay at the forefront of your customers’ mind throughout the year and not just when you are directly contacting them about new products or services.
Your customers are consuming more media than ever before, in both their work days and in their personal lives — so get out in front of them.
If you don’t have one, consider dedicating time to develop your company blog and looking for opportunities where you can create content or tools that helps your customers solve their problems.
Or, take your knowledge on the road. Identify speaking events that your CEO or CTOs could present at that could generate new business. If the conference circuit doesn’t fit your business, reach out to radio producers and get a member of staff featured as a regular speaker on an industry specific business segment.
As well as your blog, set up a newsroom on your website and have press releases readily available to members of the press. As you grow your reputation, journalists and writers will increasingly come looking to you for your thoughts on the industry news of the day.
2. CRM and Client Retention
One great New Year’s resolution for business is to make 2017 your company’s best year yet for customer retention.
The first step towards achieving this goal is to have visibility on all aspects of your business’s relationship with a client. This includes everything from the frequency of correspondence with the customer, the number of billed hours dedicated to a client’s projects and all invoices.
If you have invested in a CRM product like Salesforce or Oracle Sales Cloud make sure your business is using these to their maximum potential. Bring in a trainer to teach your staff about new developments in the CRM system to enjoy the full benefits. If you feel that there is a niche function that your business requires that your CRM is missing you can work with a CRM developer that can build in some bespoke functionality for your business.
If you are not doing so already, get into the habit of regular reporting. This will keep your client in the loop of all ongoing activities and help you identify areas for improvement in your own performance.
3. Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is not new to anybody, however, the rate of innovation here continues to accelerate. If you’re not investing in this space, the chances are you’re missing an opportunity.
For example, with 67% of Irish adults now owning a Facebook account, 74% of these using it every day and the accuracy of the demographic and custom audience targeting increasing all the time, Facebook is an advertising channel that SMEs may ignore at their peril.
Facebook is making big strides towards becoming a one stop shop for online retailers. With the help of Limerick’s Collison brothers’ payments system, Stripe, Facebook now allows businesses to set up a shop section directly within their Facebook page making sales possible within a couple of clicks. Keep an eye out for this innovation making its way to Ireland in the future.
Meanwhile, Google Shopping finally launched in Ireland earlier this year allowing online retailers of all sizes to get in front of a much larger audience, front and centre in the Google search engine results pages. If you’re an online retailer this Google AdWords innovation is a must.
4. Personalisation
A trend that could be crucial for e-commerce businesses in 2017 is the personalisation of services. An Accenture study, reveals that 56% of consumers are more likely to conduct business with a retailer that recognises them by name. Before you throw your eyes up and claim that this is something you do already, let us first explain that this goes beyond composing a marketing newsletter with the correct first name of the recipient.
One business that is winning when it comes to personalisation is inbound marketing specialists Hubspot. Hubspot will send visitors of their blog marketing newsletters suggesting new articles based on your reading history. They will even go one step further and identify the type of customer you are to them (consumer, business, agency) based on the content you interact with. In other words, the company is using all the data it has available to it to ensure that only relevant content and offers are served to users.
For organisations that don’t have the same vast resources as Hubspot, personalisation of content and other services can still be achieved on a smaller scale.
Look at these variables below:
- Location
- Device
- Search keywords
- Visitor frequency
- Referring URL
- Customer history
- Session behaviour
Does your website take any of these factors into consideration before bringing a user through to your website?
Talk to your developer and discuss the possibility of implementing one or two variables on a trial basis. For example, location and device. Now visitors coming from Australia might see a different home page to those coming from Ireland. The pages can also be optimised to provided different content for Android or IOS users.
Once this is done, you can use Google Analytics to see if the personalisation is leading to an increase in time on page or conversions and optimise accordingly.
5. Consider IoT
In 2017 businesses are operating two years after the events of Back to the Future II and two years before the events of Blade Runner. However, in our present there are still no flying cars or synthetic humans to be seen. One aspect of futurism that did come to fruition is the Internet of Things (IoT).
IoT refers to devices that can be assigned an IP address and connect to the internet and other devices, enabling M2M (Machine to Machine) communication. If 2017 is a year that you have earmarked for an IT overhaul, consider how you can factor an IoT philosophy into the mix.
IoT is all about connectivity, scalability and future proofing. If your business installs a new server in 2017, you want to choose a model that can be expanded or enhanced with ease when it is necessary and that is also compatible with your existing infrastructure.
You also want to choose an operating system and software package that can be adjusted to meet future standards over the next decade.
6. Digital Twins
In 2016, automation dominated the digital tech trend discussion and in 2017 it takes one leap further with Digital Twinning. A digital twin, refers to a digital version of a business’s real world asset that is used for simulations for the purpose of improving the real word asset.
The examples for now are pretty niche, but companies like GE are betting that this is a practice that becomes mainstream in future years.
Sometimes a digital twin is built before the physical counterpart is brought to life, to see if the asset can be made with today’s technology and to see how it would perform if subjected to real world conditions. Imagine a jet engine or a pacemaker being rigorously tested in this way.
One of the most advanced practices of digital twinning sees the real-world model and its digital twin feeding information to each other simultaneously. According to an article in the Economist, GE is currently piloting a “digital wind farm” concept. Once the farm is built, each virtual turbine is fed data from its physical equivalent, and software enables to optimize power production at the plant level by adjusting turbine-specific parameters, such as torque of the generator or speed of the blades.
The practice could have huge benefits for any business that is involved in manufacturing or computer aided design regardless of scale or industry and become a new part of the quality control process.