Major Benefits of Digital Transformation for Your Small Business

Digital transformation is an opportunity for businesses to leverage technology to deliver a cutting-edge user experience. Learn how digital transformation can benefit your small business, writes Shane Barker, Digital Strategist, Shane Barker Consulting

For decades, businesses have been aided by technologies that helped them deliver better, faster, and cheaper products and services. Numerous technological advancements have played crucial roles in transforming businesses over time.

Today, businesses are being facilitated by a new force – digital transformation.

Digital transformation refers to the integration of digital technology into all areas of businesses to change the way they operate and deliver value to customersOpens a new window . It includes adopting a cultural change, experimenting with new technologies, embracing failures, and inventing new digital solutions.

New digital-driven products and services are impacting every industry. This includes industries varying from entertainment (Netflix and Spotify) to transportation (Uber).

Also Read: No Company Is Too Big to Embrace Agile — Just Ask Microsoft

Let’s take a look at how digital transformation can help you grow your business.

Why Does Digital Transformation Matter?

According to IDG’s 2018 Digital Business researchOpens a new window , 89% of businesses have integrated or have plans to adopt a digital-first strategy.

Digital transformation can help you reshape your business to create value, gain a competitive advantage, meet your customers’ expectations, and drive more revenue.

You can use digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to improve the efficiency of your business processes and enhance customer experience.

Also Read: 5 Tips for Selecting the Marketing Tech Stack your Business Needs

Image source: ZIGURAT

Advantages of Digital Transformation

When leveraged the right way, digital transformation can help you increase profitability, improve customer satisfactionOpens a new window , and streamline business processes.

With digital transformation, you can:

Make Informed Decisions Using Data-Driven Insights

In this digital world, where businesses are thriving to be competitive, big data is a blessing. Data insights are the key drivers of growth and success.

There are many analytics tools that allow businesses to track and analyze the performance of their websites, marketing campaigns, and content in real-time. These insights can help small businesses make informed decisions based on what works well and what doesn’t.

Data can help you understand what your customers want so that you can follow a customer-centric approach. Getting access to real-time analytics data can help you wisely use your marketing budgetOpens a new window as well.

And how can you get access to this data?

Through digital transformation.

McCormick & Company is an American food company that manufactures spices and seasonal mixes. Inspired to distribute spices based on users’ taste, they launched FlavorPrint, an online flavor recommendation tool that allows users to recognize their taste.

This tool asks users to take quizzes, collects data, and delivers personalized custom recipes based on their tastes. The idea took off and is known as “Next Netflix for Food” today.

Image source: Consumer Value Creation

You can develop digital tools with the help of machine learning and AI to collect user data and deliver user-focused, customized products and services.

Operate Everything Digitally

Long gone are the days when employees used to visit an office with a pile of files in hand. Xerox machines and cheques are no more preferable. Paperwork has also been reduced to a great extent.

If you are still using the same old traditional practices instead of leveraging the benefits of the modern ones, it’s time to change that.

Many small businesses are already going digital to reduce the wastage of paper. It can also help you save time and money and improve efficiency.

There are a lot of tools that can help you automate various tasks and processes.

This includes employee management tools that enable you to track their attendance, work hours, and the number of days off they take. Such tools can help you simplify the process of calculating salaries and bonuses.

Similarly, there are spend management systems such as PurchaseControl that can help you streamline your procure-to-pay process. They can enable you to easily manage and understand your business spending and figure out ways to cut costs.

Efficient spend management can be a great advantage for the growth of your small business.

Digital transformation is all about digitizing everything from analytics to people management and process automation to transaction automation.

Image source: YASH Technologies

How can you adopt digital technologies?

You should go through all of your business processes one by one and think about how you can automate them. You may come across a number of tools that can simplify tasks and significantly reduce your turnaround time.

Once you have a list of tools and tactics that can help you automate various business processes, it’s time to prioritize the list. Then, you can digitize and automate themOpens a new window one by one.

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Prevent Errors and Increase Accuracy

Automating tedious tasks such as data collection can help reduce human error.

You can use project management and task management tools to assign and manage tasks and deadlines. This can help you ensure that you don’t miss any important tasks. You can also check on who is responsible for each task.

Digitalization can help your organization eliminate errors at every stage. This can help you boost overall accuracy and reduce rework.

Check out the chart below which explains how you can reduce human errors with digital transformation.

Image source: LinkedIn

More accuracy means no more guesswork, reduced wastage, and less human errors. All of this can help you with cost cutting.

Also Read: 7 Essential Tips for Successful Digital Transformation

Future Opportunities for Small Businesses

Thanks to digital transformationOpens a new window , there are immense expansion opportunities for small businesses. You can adopt digital technologies, tools, and strategies to accelerate the growth of your business.

Using big data and analytics can help you make more informed decisions for your business. You can think of new ideas and strategies to improve the journey of your customers at each step.

How has digital transformation helped your business? Please let us know in the comments below.