How can tech improve the life of Small Businesses ?
By: Elias Arfi
Tags: Small Business, Digital Transformation, Technology, Business Strategy, Business

Relying on tech to enhance a business’s product and sales is not the exclusive privilege of huge corporations.

In fact, I tend to believe that Small & Medium businesses, due to their size and agility, gain faster and more impactful results following the implementation of some new technology and data solutions.

Below you’ll find a few use cases pleading the cause of tech for SMBs. This is in no way a comprehensive list, just a quick conversation starter. Feel free to add any feedback or idea in the responses :).

Use case #1: Social network marketing

Instagram, Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok… all of these websites & apps rely on hyper-targeted advertising to make money, providing access to a pool of potential clients to any kind of business. Even though this business model has a lot of issues (Cambridge Analytica comes to mind), it is very helpful when leveraged in good faith and in compliance with any privacy regulation in place.

So, to get more visibility in these social networks, you can either try your hand at organic marketing (by creating a page on the site and delivering great content) or rely on paid promotion to directly target your potential customers.

As always, the best approach is a mix of both, mixing an impactful social media presence (just look at Wendy's for organic marketing done right) as well as surgical strikes to “hook” your potential leads into getting to know about you.

Quick use-case action plan:

Identify your target persona: what’s the age, habits, likes and dislikes of your typical target customer? What are their values, what are their main issues in regards to the problem you are solving? Define an “editorial line” for your social media communications: what will be the tone, vocabulary, humor, associated to your future posts ? Create the social media page, create posts and gather feedback. Iterate on what works, in order to create a positive loop for your page Once you know what works, you can implement targeted ads that lead either to your social media page, or website, based on the persona you identified in step 1.

Use case #2: Leveraging data analytics

Data and its derivative (Big Data, Data Science) is the buzzword of the past decade. Everybody in the corporate world wanted to pivot to a data-driven activity, leverage data, gather insights, and so on. Even though the implementation of their vision proved to be a tad more complex than using an Excel spreadsheet, these businesses are not wrong in their ambitions.

Analysing the data your activity produces can help in assessing your performance (sales, revenue, the usual), gathering useful insights about your activity (“hey, we sell the most burgers on Wednesdays, pizzas on Fridays”) and identify any “invisible” issue that may not be detectable by reviewing atomic events (“our clients take an average of 40 days to pay us, which kinda ruin our cash flow”)

Putting in place a data collection and analysis process can help you ask yourself better questions, and then provide even better answers to them.

Quick use-case action plan:

Create a list of all the business questions you would like to answer (e.g “what’s my best selling product, by day of the week?”) In front of each item of said list, identify the data that may help you provide an answer. For example, for the previous question, the necessary data would be your product sales and revenue data, for at least a period of one week. Design a way to efficiently and reliably gather the data. Your endgame here is to end up with an Excel or CSV file that can be leveraged with data analysis tools. It really depends on your workflow, but most tools now provide a way to extract data from them. If all else fails, you can construct the data file by hand, but it can be both time-consuming and prone to data input risk. Clean your data. By that, I mean that your data should be as coherent as possible before being analyzed: if a specific data column requires numbers (e.g.: “Number of products sold”), then the data should be a numeric value. Scope out discrepancies regarding the type of data, the value, and any outlier that seems too weird to be true. Now is finally the time to analyze the data. To do so, you can either use a simple software (Excel does the trick for simple analytics), or a more involved one. The restitution of the results can, as well, be done in an Excel chart or using a dedicated data vizualisation tool (such as PowerBI or Tableau) Based on the analysis, gather insights and further questions that you could ask based on the data you have. You can also try and automate the data preparation and cleaning process.

Use case #3: Automation

In the past decades, automation completely changed the way factories operate. Repetitive tasks were all given to machines which were less prone to RSI and the soul-crushing nature of doing the same few movements everyday.

That pivot is slowly creeping on us, for software-related tasks. Automation is the best way to liberate time in our days that could be better spent than on low-value, high repetitions tasks.

The obvious example would be the data collection use case I presented earlier, but automation can also be leveraged in the mass sending of emails for example (marketing), or the preparation of invoices, vouchers and other documents that follow a strict template.

A lot of tools exist for automation, such as AutoUI, Wintask, or even online tools like Zapier or IFTT. In addition, automation can also be achieved using ad hoc programming with Python or VBA. You should try out all these tools in order to identify which one better suits your needs.

Quick use-case action plan:

Identify your low-value, high-repetition tasks: for example, do you spend 4 hours a week creating invoices ? For these tasks, identify how you could automate them. More often than not, it’ll involve a bit of programming or reliance on a third-party tool; Implement the automation process and test it out on a small sample of data; Roll-out the automation process for the tasks you have identified.

Use case #4: Feedback collection

All of these news means of interaction makes it easier than ever to collect feedback from leads and clients, to ensure that our business is heading in the right direction.

Tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms or Microsoft forms can help you create simple surveys and quickly send them to your clients (for example, by sharing the link on your social media pages).

A heavily recommended way of gathering feedback is to calculate your business’s Net Promoter Score, or NPS in short.

To quote Medallia (who provides feedback collection solutions):

The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer’s loyalty to the brand.

A simple “would you recommend our services” question is enough to get an estimate of your NPS.

Quick use-case action plan:

Using a survey tool, create a quick 2-min survey to get feedback from your clients. At the very least, include an NPS question. Share it and study the results.

Use case #5: new business models

The last use case is a broader one, and is more a general recommendation than a concrete process.

Technology brings change. Taxi drivers across the world saw their business change overnight (for better or for worse) when Uber arrived in their city.

Likewise, foodtech startups gave all restaurants the opportunity to deliver food directly to their customer, which lead to the appearance of “cloud kitchen” restaurants with no way to eat in. Only delivery or takeaway is proposed to the clients. Needless to say that these restaurants have way less overhead costs, and can change their menu and brand at an incredible speed.

Always remain on the lookout for ways technological innovation may alter your market. It’s always better to be ahead of the curve and anticipate a tsunami, than to be swallowed by it.