Are you aware that 55% of startups have already adopted a digital business strategy? And that in 2019, companies were projected to spend over $2 trillion on digital transformation?
If you don’t already have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one, your startup is going to lag behind.
There are several organizations that deem that more than 50% of their revenue will be generated via digital channels by 2020. And a report from Nintex has it that already 94% of decision-makers are witnessing excellent ROI from their digital transformation projects.
Digital adoption has several benefits. It can make employees more valuable, makes employees creative, increases customer retention, increases ROI, and allows a company to remain competitive, among other benefits.
So what exactly is digital adoption?
Let’s get into it in digital and understand why digital adoption is pivotal to your startup’s success.
Understanding digital adoption
Digital adoption can be understood as your company achieving a state where all of the digital tools and assets that you invest in are leveraged to the optimum.
For instance, if you have opted to use the social media platform Facebook as your marketing channel, you will need a social media tool that can help. But if you use the device only to schedule your updates and not to monitor keywords and find new opportunities or set up automation to save time and so on, you aren’t leveraging the tool to the fullest.
Digital adoption is achieved when you implement a tool and use it to its fullest extent.
Another way to approach digital adoption is via the customer’s point of view. If you are an e-commerce platform, you will want your customers to learn about your products better, what value they offer, how to use them, and so on.
Or, if you have recently developed an app for your store, you will want your customers to know how to use the app’s features and benefit from them.
But all these will happen only when you can get your customers on board via a platform or with the app. This is where digital adoption plays a crucial role.
Why is digital adoption crucial for your startup’s success?
Here are seven good reasons why your startup should go digital:
To let users understand the value of your product or service and increase ROI
Let’s say you have manufactured a high-quality product or have an excellent service to sell. But since you are a startup, people won’t know the value of the product or service you are offering. And unless potential buyers see the value or understand how to use your product or service, it will be a waste of investment and time.
Digital adoption can help you to let users understand the value of your product or service via user onboarding so that you get a return on investment.
If you consider the Airbnb app, it offers users a delightful user onboarding experience. If you aren’t already aware, Airbnb is an online community marketplace. It brings together hosts (people looking to rent their homes) and travellers looking for accommodations.
It implements a benefits-oriented onboarding process. It means it familiarizes the users with how they can benefit from the app. During the onboarding process, they let the users know how the users can integrate the app into their life and get value out of it. This is what the onboarding flow looks like:
In one precise concept, they present the value proposition. Plus, they don’t overstuff information on one screen. After the onboarding process, the users know how to use the app to make their lives easier.
When your startup makes digital adoption, you’re not only investing money in the latest tools, but you’re genuinely leveraging on them and obtaining every possible benefit you can get.
As per Forbes, startups that implement a digital-first strategy see an increase in their revenue generation by 34%. And 56% of CEOs report that digital enhancements have resulted in increased revenue generation.
To leverage employees’ full potential and retain them.
As per stats, 74% of employees felt that they weren’t realizing their full potential at work because their company lacked development opportunities. Besides, it is said that up to two-thirds of employees may quit their jobs in 2020, and 43% of them say it is because of career advancement.
Employees are always looking to learn new skills to advance their careers. And if your startup can’t offer training and career advancement, they may leave your company for a competitor who can.
Digital adoption can help you retain your employees by engaging them. One way to do that is to execute great employee onboarding, wherein you let your employees understand your company values and work culture and train them.
It is said that a great employee onboarding process can increase employee retention by 82%.
There are tools out there that can help you leverage your employees’ full potential and retain them.
Suppose you look at Whatfix, a digital adoption tool, that is used by many companies to offer training. In that case, it makes it easy for users to adopt technology and learn by doing, inside the applications.
Whatfix is designed for user efficiency, enterprise productivity, and business outcomes. Plus, the platform makes your content engaging and valuable by personalizing it for the users, making learning interactive, and helping users learn in real-time by adjusting the content to users’ needs. And of course, the tool can be automated to execute tasks like empty clicks and data entry.
It is also equally important to finding means to engage your employees 85% of employees report that they are disengaged at work.
Implementing the right employee onboarding tool can make a world of difference by keeping them engaged while learning new skills and hence increase productivity.
To better understand your customers.
What sets an excellent business apart from a merely good business? It is their customer-first approach. Putting their customers first is what enabled Apple Company to become the first trillion-dollar business. Their leaders knew the importance of listening to what their consumers need.
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook went on to build effective yet simple interfaces that were both functional and beautiful. As a result, their customers are very loyal to their brand.
Businesses are always on the lookout to offer their customers what they want. And though some people may claim that technology is taking away humanity from the business world, you can’t deny that technology is helping businesses to understand their customers’ motives, wants, and behaviors better than ever before.
When you adopt a digital strategy, you can plunge deeper into your customer profiles to come up with better strategies that boost ROI. Today, big data analytics can help solve significant issues that advertisers were facing and permit them to optimize customer targeting to implement more strategic campaigns.
If you look at Coca-Cola, the giant cold drinks company, they already have some of the most loyal customers. Even then, they have adopted digital tech in their marketing efforts and have immensely befitted from it.
In 2015, Coca Cola created a digital-led loyalty program to increase customer retention even more. They collected and analyzed loads of consumer behavioral data using a rewards system. This enabled the company to build highly targeted content that different audiences can relate to. This program resulted in increased customer retention, loyalty rates, and upsells.
Unless you know who your customers are, what they want, or how to give them the best experience, you will always struggle to seize conversions. But once you understand how to best implement digital tech to better understand your target consumer, you can easily guide your team toward smarter practices and offer customers the kind of experiences they are looking for.
To get fast results
In this day and age, everyone is looking for fast results. By adopting digital tech like AI, automation, etc., your business can improve the current process of working and see better and fast results. Modern tech software can go well beyond supporting social media. From warehouse inventory management to assisting your sales team track the interactions of customers, every business task can be streamlined.
AI has made it much easier to handle business. Now you don’t need manual labor to manage lead generation, sales, query, branding, etc.
And of course, there are chatbots or digital assistants who can converse with users in a standard language, eliminating manual customer support. You can implement chatbots on any device, including messaging apps, websites, or mobile apps.
This advanced technical tool will make the engagement professional, responsive, quick, and more functional. Chatbots can analyze the request of customers, identify the intent, and compose a reply based on it.
Your startup business will be made more accessible, responsive, and interactive to your customers when you use chatbots, not to mention reduced workload.
For instance, tech startups such as Motion AI have designed chatbots to respond to complex workflows.
To increased security
Data breaches happen every day. Instances – where a business’s critical and confidential data gets hacked and falls in the hands of the competitors – are nothing new.
If your startup can implement biometrics, you can lessen the data breaching risk to a vast extent. You can use biometrics for identifications, access control, and so on to protect personal information.
For instance, if you look at the modern devices, Apple or Samsung phones, they have installed biometric authentication technology. As a new startup, it is required to install a secured biometric authentication tech that will eliminate the risk of losing your confidential, essential data.
To widen your business reach.
As a startup, you need to market your business to as many people as possible. But funds will be limited when you are just a startup business. However, you can invest in the affordable latest technology to set up your business online. It will make it easier for you to reach people worldwide.
Online shoppers are increasing daily since everyone prefers ease and comfort. Moreover, online shopping also increases their choices, and they can compare brands. Taking your business online can increase your brand visibility and, ultimately, your sales.
Moreover, the number of smartphone users is skyrocketing, and almost everyone spends their time on social networks these days. To be precise, there are 3.5 billion social media users.
And out of those figures, 54% of them use social media to research products. Advertising through social channels like Facebook and Instagram won’t cost you much, but you can quickly increase brand awareness and make sales. Just ensure to stay updated with all the new techniques of the social channels and leverage on them.
To remain competitive
Business these days is very competitive, so it will benefit you to adopt the digital tech. Doing so will give you a competitive edge. Already, several companies have adopted digital innovations in most sectors.
It is said that companies that have adopted digital tech see their profit grow from 9% to 26% compared to companies that are more traditional in their business approach.
Knowing how to leverage the full potential of the technology you are implementing will help you to ace the race. It will give you the best results in a shorter period of time.
There are several tools that you can use as a weapon against your competitors. For instance, the social media tools out there can help you analyze your competitor’s business and techniques. When you implement it correctly, you can beat your competition.
There are also tools like BuzzSumo that can search the keywords your competitors are using and what type of content is getting the most shares. Knowing all these can help you to implement a better content marketing strategy.
Wrapping-Up
Whether you are a small or big business, it is crucial to get a return on investment on your digital tools and platforms; otherwise, your business will go downhill. And to see ROI, you will have to make the optimal use of the tools that you invest in. It won’t be a wise move to invest a lot of resources in the tools and apps when you can’t take full advantage of them.
Training your employees on how to use the tools would be a great start. The same goes for customers who are using your new app.
Though people are becoming increasingly tech-savvy, not everyone has the same tech skill and knowledge. Great onboarding will go a long way in how loyal customers stay with your brand or how long your new talents work in your company.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
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