Using Technology to boost your organisation’s Visibility, Sales & Revenue

If you want your organisation to thrive in the current market, you would be surprised to know how much technology impacts the growth, visibility, sales and revenue. So, I am going to explain how well you can use technology to improve on almost all the significant business metrics in your organisation.

While the suggestions I give here applies to almost all industries, feel free to pick and choose what applies for you.

Social Networking

Almost every person in the world is a part of at-least one social networking platform be it Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Wechat, LinkedIn, Instagram. These are best places to reach people and in a way that feels native to the platform and the community. While this would be a well known fact to all of you, you have to understand that there is a tiny line between advertising and spamming and as long as you respect the boundaries, people will respect you.

You can do campaigns, organise community events, do giveaways, share offers/discounts and sometimes even share interesting and useful facts driving engagement from the audience.

You have to understand that no one follows your page/group just to go through your ads, promotional content or to buy your product. The main reason that people follow you is when they feel that you believe in what they believe.

Targeted Forums

There are a lot of forums online, each targeted to various domains of interest, and most often, these are the forums where reviews happen. Some can have employee reviews glassdoor, targeted topics like reddit, questions in forums like quora or even developer questions like in Stack Overflow.

You have to make sure that you are a part of the interaction in some way or the other and also make sure that you create a positive outlook on your organisation even if you may or may not be perfect. People appreciate your attitude towards solving a problem even if you have not solved it yet.

And if they are appreciating you, a simple thanks can mean a lot to them and show to others that you are in gratitude to the trust they have in you.

Analytics

Everything your organisation does generates data and out of data comes actionable insights when analytics is applied on it. You can quickly identify and resolve the common problems in your organisation just using the inference generated out of the analytics you do.

You can identify where you should focus more on, where you can divert resources from, where you were and where you want to be in the future.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning when combined with Analytics help you predict trends across timelines by using the history data. This can be of great help to track and correct the course of your path.

In domains like agriculture, it can even help you predict how the weather will behave and help you decide the cultivation pattern based on the historical patterns.

Blogging

Platforms like Medium, LinkedIn are great places where you can put your content up. You can write about engineering challenges, case studies, or even any article which is related to your domain. So, people following such domains closely become the natural audience to the content generated by your organisation.

For eg. companies like Digital Ocean are well known among the community due to the rich content (articles) they have in addition to the cloud service they provide.

Open Source Platforms

Has your organisation developed something which is not closely associated as an IP or your business domain? Open Source it. Most of the stuff we use daily is a product directly/indirectly of open source software and tools. So, if you give back something to the community, people appreciate it and this creates a sense of trust and respect from the developer community and thereby the business community as well.

Today’s startups are tomorrow’s giants. So, if your project/tool is able to help them out, it will give you back a lot of reputation as time goes by.

Using an open source tool/project yourself? Contribute. Also let them know and get yourself listed on their page/website.

Support via Twitter

This has now become a benchmark demonstrating how open and caring your organisation is, towards your customers. Various organisations like Twilio, Uber, Ola, etc. have their own support channels in such forums and the more you care for your customers/users, the more they will care for you.

Automation

Everything in life is full of patterns, as someone close to me used to say. So, if you are able to identify such patterns, you can automate most of the tasks now with technology. So, saving time and effort directly leads to saving money and hence increased revenue. You can rather use such time in concentrating on other activities which really require attention.

For eg. tools like Jenkins help in Development automation, Zapier/IFTTT for automating event based workflows, Buffer in automating your social media campaigns across platforms and there are more depending on what you want to automate.

Search Engine Optimization

This has been overlooked a lot nowadays. To make your website more visible to the outside world, it needs to be indexed where relevant with a higher rank by the various search providers. People know what they want but most don’t know where to get it. So, having a good SEO for your website can prove to be a lot useful to generate valuable business.

Personalising content

Anyone can do ADS, anyone can promote and send newsletters, but not everyone can give a personal touch. While what you do may matter a lot for you, how relevant it is for the users is what matters ultimately in lead generation. If you have some level of identifiable information or context, you can use that to add a personal touch when sending your communications across.

Various social networking and AD platforms give you such information allowing you to target audiences based on various criteria.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

There are lot of CRM tools out there in the market. While the tools matter to an extent, what matters more is how you use such tools to effectively establish a good level of automation and control. Such tools can help you streamline processes and help you reach out to a lot of people with very less effort.

Such tools also maintain history of previous engagements which can be a lot of help when setting contexts.

Online stores and platforms

The way you distribute software/hardware, tools, and information can also matter to a great extent and platforms and shopping websites like Google Play, ITunes, Amazon, etc. can help you a lot in getting visibility and also help you generate revenue. In addition to that, the rating which people give for your product also directly reflects back in revenue. Hence, you can take advantage of such platforms to a great extent.

There are various other ways you can use technology to impact your business but it all depends on the domain where you operate. Is there something I missed out? Leave it down in the comments below. Subscribe/follow me/my publication for future updates.