Going Digital: 4 Doable Steps for Businesses

Gone are the days when going digital is just a nicety or an add-on for your businesses. With the pandemic going on, it has significantly affected everyone, including our lives and businesses.

As of January 2021, there are 4 billion active internet users worldwide. People go online to stay connected during the pandemic. With the lockdown restrictions enforced around the globe, the majority of businesses were faced with the urgency to put more online efforts as well.

As businesses acknowledge the urgent need for digital transformation, the majority of them do not know where to start. In a survey conducted by Jabil, 90% percent of companies of all sizes in the world are faced with almost the same hurdles to digital transformation. These drawbacks include:

• The lack of expertise to spearhead digital approaches or plans
• Come up with an overall, company-wide digital strategy
• Employees or the organization push back against change, especially with the process involved in digital transformation
• Limited budget to build a digital transformation strategy

Why You Should Go Digital Now

While the above data show that we all face the same challenges, this shouldn’t hold you back to be receptive to change. As a business owner, these drawbacks must enable you to come up with doable steps or actions for your organization.

As mentioned, people are now online to look for information, stay in touch, and for amusement or enjoyment.

Apparently, the e-commerce industry had significant growth in 2020. Both the apparel retail and grocery retail industry were able to grow their digital migration by 40% and 100%.

Some industries that have adapted to digital transformation prior to the pandemic are reaping the rewards of increased customer revenue and market share.

Forbes has come up with a list of industries that thrived during the pandemic, including cleaning services, grocery stores, delivery services, fitness equipment companies, tutoring services, and many others.

Companies that are active on their social media showed improved customer engagement as well. These companies focused on “people-brand connections.”

But how do these businesses thrive in their customer engagement? They understood the value of real-time customer service, well-thought-out, and relevant actionable online content, and the seamless omnichannel customer experience.

Other businesses that use the right digital tools to accommodate their employees to work from home improved their employee morale. In addition, businesses with platform-based business models have cut down their office-based costs as well.

Our SEO Hacker agency is one of the few tech companies that have adapted to the digital transformation well. For 11 years, we have equipped ourselves for what’s to come.

All the challenges our SEO agency faced have helped us become more resilient over time. From the way we do business with our clients to Google’s innumerable algorithm updates, the emergence of more digital marketing forms, and the use of team collaboration tools with our ever-reliant team, we will continue to thrive as time progresses.

What Steps You Can Take for Going Digital

Change does not happen without resistance and inconvenience. When you come up with new ideas and present them to your team, either you won’t get any response from them OR nobody will dare act on them.

And this behavior is common among many employees. The fear of the unknown is real to most of us. Yet, this shouldn’t discourage you to keep up with digital migration. Here, we came up with 4 actionable steps you can take to go digital with less resistance:

Set a company-wide digital transformation strategy goal

Be consistent and transparent with your team. Explain to them that going digital is vital to the growth of your business. Begin with a clear vision of why you need to digitally transform, a set of goals you need to reach, and involve your whole team with their specific roles and purposes.

Your journey to going digital shouldn’t end with one team or department alone. If you want your business to be resilient over unprecedented situations, your team needs to work toward a common goal. In other words, your common goal should be to meet the needs of your clients or customers.

Find a talent with technology expertise to help you with your digital journey

Most businesses aren’t tech-savvy. The process of digital transformation poses many technical challenges. That’s why you need the right people on board.

Hire talented individuals with relevant experience, and train your team to become digitally literate. Our SEO agency has built an internal onboarding system that will indoctrinate our new hires and provide them with all the information they need for their work.

Stay ahead of the game by helping your team build the skills they need to thrive and to be tech-savvy. Most of the time our different teams work together to get to our client’s goal. More often than not, when our different teams collaborate, we get exponential results.

Find free online tools and platforms that can provide convenience and options to customers

As more people shop and look for information online via their smartphones, your business must be adaptable to where your customers spend their time in.

Spend time doing your homework by looking for free online tools and platforms that can make your and your team’s work easier. Fortunately, there are tons of technologies out there that don’t require codes for use and are beginner-friendly.

Our SEO Hacker team uses different tools to meet our and our partners’ goals. We also make use of FREE tools for our digital marketing that is user-friendly as well.

Set a realistic budget for your digital transformation journey

There is no one size fits all budget when it comes to digital migration because businesses have different sizes, too. If you limit your business’ digitalization because of your budget, you are also limiting your business’ growth.

As you go along your digital transformation journey, financial constraints are unavoidable. However, do not let these budgetary constraints put your company at risk. Use your existing budget as your benchmark to see how short or how much time you need for your business to be fully digitized.

Key takeaway

As business owners, it’s a challenge to leave our comfort zones and adapt to changes. This is true especially if we are used to the business model and strategies that we’re accustomed to and have provided us with promising results.

However, we need to keep in mind that our businesses exist and thrive not because of our product, but because of our customers. We can’t expect our customers’ behavior to remain unchanged. A crisis can only speed up the pace of people’s behavioral changes which entails their consumption patterns too. A crisis where people are required to stay at home for a while calls for businesses to go digital.