Digital Transformation: An Inevitable Key To Survival And Growth For SMBs

Digital technology has already commenced providing liberal access to any remote person, market insights and other vital data, virtually, using Smartphones. The biggest area where digital revolutions have created bigger impact is constant interactions that happen between consumers and brands. By radically changing the nature of these interactions, the technology has opened doors to greater opportunities for businesses to build a solid value proposition for their partners, associates and customers.

The term “Digital Transformation” has therefore become a popular catchphrase among corporate companies active across many industry verticals. In simple words, Digital Transformation (DT) is the process of implementing solutions that empower businesses enough to successfully adapt to evolving expectations of consumers, including social media engagement, automated marketing, predictive analytics, data collection and processing as well as digitally enhanced service offering.

With unfettered potential to scale, transform and control organizational dynamics, digital transformation is prepared to penetrate the existing SMEs market and be an inevitable key for SMEs to sustain and flourish in the competitive market. We are going to illuminate more on this here.

Educational deficiency: The major block to adaptation

Despite being quite powerful, unfortunately, Digital Transformation is often subject to loud criticism mainly coming from circumspect, still-cynical SMB owners. What drives irrational fear and resistance against adoption of digital transformation (DT) and new technologies is the mythical concept that DT means falling for pitfalls in vain. SMB owners do not seem to behold positively the future impact as proposed by the visionary technology leaders and partners. The lack of knowledge required to establish clarity around the idea of mature level of digital transformation is still missing among SMBs and startup entrepreneurs.

They are not completely aware and confident about how technology can be a real growth booster, driving unprecedented outcome for businesses in various segments such as employee collaboration, project management, process automation, product marketing enhancement, customer engagement and data analysis.

Contrary to this, another reality says almost half of all SMBs are smitten by the idea of digitalization and automation, but they still don’t seem to perfectly grasp what it really means for their small businesses. Either they are not adaptive or not educated enough to implement the solutions correctly.

The DT strategy: Reinventing the established processes

In many ways, digital transformation is quite about businesses finding creative ways to adapt to changing market dynamics and win maximum customer loyalty while driving home the much-needed competitive advantage on digital landscape.

Hence, the ultimate merits harvested from well-implemented digital transformation depend massively on how SMBs leverage the available potential of new technologies to modify or reinvent current processes, business model, organizational practices and customer interactions.

It is with the cohesive efforts of CIOs and CTOs of SMBs that strategic implementation of digital innovations aligns inextricably with business value and helps companies build unbreakable foundation of profitable business model. The journey of digital transformation for small-scale ventures sparks off with a mature strategy that helps them envision realistic challenges and ways to transform or revamp existing processes.

Identifying the aching nerves and finding relevance

Implementation of digital strategy would not be as much of a challenge as identifying the potential gaps, loopholes and urgent threats that the technology is able to resolve. It is therefore mandatory to first assess where the problem exactly lies and what improvements are needed to seal up those open gaps and prevent undesirable loss of customers while also accelerating business pace. Collaborating with competent consultants and partners therefore helps small companies make right decisions about finding the relevant solution that would directly address their aching nerves.

Since first step are always crucial, it is important to avoid making shallow mistakes in the beginning phase of transformation. In order to reserve budget for future business expansion and marketing endeavors, companies can alternatively think of choosing low-expense resources that are affordable and suit the embryonic structure of an SMB.

Precise solutions and investment decisions

Approaching the overwhelming decisions about tech-based solutions and resultant investments is another consideration SMB entrepreneurs need to mull over in the first attempt for digital transformation. Here at this point, your tech partners and consultants who have previous experience of assisting SMB companies should come handy in sharing their expert opinions. Collaborate with them to understand what goes where and whether or not a given recommendation of innovation dovetails with a specific problem point.

If the solution is about transforming the employee engagement for better project management, each team member will respond to the changes the solutions bring about in the process. Getting unanimous inputs from employees on comfort and adjustment will help you finalize the decision and prime them early during the onboarding phase.

The sweeping impacts of digital transformation

The impacts you enjoy in your business as a result of digital transformation echo forth and far into the future prospects. This is because, by replacing repetitive, time-consuming mundane tasks with digitally capable automation and AI-powered algorithm, you plant seeds for synchronizing with future market trends. Here are a few phenomenal outcomes you gain from small business digital transformation:

Paperless eco-friendly operations: Making everything digital means you will eliminate the involvement of paper, which in turn helps you properly manage the documentation, optimize your office storage and contribute to creating eco-friendly environment.

Improved turnaround time: All the process-related and finance documents get digital form and are virtually archived. This translates into enhanced convenience and quick accessibility to process-specific data.

Prompt customer service response: End user data is readily available on every touch point via integrated CRM technology which ensures instant customer query resolution.

Error-free workflow and productivity: As invoices, finance contracts, statements and purchase order documents have digitally automated version, the scope of human error is avoided and staff can free up space to focus on more meaningful, creative tasks.

Better value proposition: digital transformation also affects the quality of work produced and methods of product delivery, which conforms to high-level value proposition.

Consistent performance: Whether it is employees or business departments, digital processes, when gone paperless, visibly improve overall performance and efficiency.

Scalability: Among the bounty of abundant pros afforded by strategic small business digital transformation is the opportunity to scale the integrated digital capabilities as business grows and progresses to incorporate new processes.

Competitive advantage: One of the most crucial victories for SMBs is to gain an edge over competition, which is what digitally intelligent system does. The transformation enables you to survive the changing industry parameters and novel trends breezing in on and off.

Transformation is the key to Survival for SMBs

Apart from growth, the small business also needs to be adaptive to changes to bolster survival equations. To make new processes even more efficient, responsive and inclusive of customer requirements, SMBs must look for making a commitment to digital transformation inspired by new technologies.

As market leaders are already picking up a notch higher than the rest, small business as emerging entrants must break the dawn by aligning innovative software in their existing operational and management processes. By encouraging integrated automation technology, SME owners would be able to address employee needs, which will help them achieve positive impact on their organizational workflow efficiency and sustain intensely burgeoning competition.

Moreover, as refined document management, swift communication and data analytics become the daily aspect of work structure, small businesses are most likely to get enough gusto from their digital strategy to blend with market trends and boost their business performance.

Practising the true nature of digital transformation

Being proactive and consistently sharp about knowing and practising current wave of trends is mantra to small businesses wanting to attain fast glory. Delayed actions may leave you behind on the face of relevant market, making for a grave mistake.

Understand the true nature of digital transformation – which is constant learning and evolving mindset. Transformation on wide scale can’t be feasible in one single attempt especially for SMB companies.

For instance, if your business website is not recognizable enough to appear on top search results of Google or is sketchy and offer only surface-level information, it is plausible that your online presence would be lackluster with no real value. On the other hand, your competitor might have a strong online presence with an envious portfolio and conspicuous visibility on Google page. Their website must be attractive enough to pull more customers than yours.

On a big scale, being a top digital authority across major search platforms and social media is pivotal to ensure your customers have multiple doors open to catch up with you and inquire after your business proposition. These digital touch points include Twitter, Facebook, email, LinkedIn, mobile app, blogs, ads, and a few more.

This is why companies, when just stepping into the big market, must understand how digital transformation exactly works and what innovative practices have potential to improve their annual revenue.

Conclusion

We have reached at the other end of the story where we feel driven to fetch a few extracts:

• The conventional economic status quo of plain supply-and-demand will go defunct in today’s (and future’s) digitally dynamic world.
• Small businesses have to view digital innovations never as an alternative, but as the only resort to adapt to the changing business sphere.
• Digital transformation is not really a first-attempt process, but is instead an ongoing process that involves disruptive innovations, experimental approaches and collective efforts.

Small businesses can start baby steps with many digital tools available for internal collaboration, CRM, project management, marketing automation, and they all seem to positively affect the big factors such as time, economy, organization and efficiency. Hence, if you have a small-scale company and don’t want to be left behind in success game, now is probably the time to embrace smart technologies for future-oriented, business-friendly digital transformation.