In 2020, every company is a tech company — no business can operate without being somewhat reliant on digital infrastructure. Even with the abundance of tech available, it’s difficult to know which tools will have the greatest impact on your regular operations.
The problems you encounter in the average working day have a twofold impact on your company: not only do they stifle output, they also reduce productivity by requiring the attention of your employees to fix. Adopting the right tech today can save you significant amounts of headache tomorrow.
Before you start looking for new applications, you need to know what problems you’re hoping to fix — here are a few you might not have considered yet:
1. Data Transfer
For the modern business, data is the new currency. Knowing who your customers are and what they want is the key to growth in the long term, so you need tech that can help you acquire and store the data you need.
While there are a number of services available for effective data transfer, ETL — which stands for extract, transfer, and load — remains the gold standard for moving data from one place to another. As effective as it is, ETL is a difficult process to manage without a user-friendly platform to back you up. Thankfully, you have more options than ever to choose from.
2. Site Redirection
As your business goes through seemingly innumerable website updates and redesigns, it can be easy for key pages to get lost in the shuffle. URLs change, brands alter, and mergers happen so being able to easily redirect between old pages and new is an absolute must.
Unlike some of the other options on this list, relatively few options are out there for people looking to enable large-scale URL redirection. Platforms that can do so allow you to keep a great customer experience on your website as you optimize your URL redirection to pages your customers need to be on.
3. Task Automation
Businesspeople of all industries waste hours every single day on menial tasks such as downloading documents and archiving emails. While some of the more hands-on activities may always require a degree of human involvement, many can be done without even lifting a finger.
While there may be specific tools that can help with some of these problems, platforms like Zapier that allow users to build their own applications are the gold standard when it comes to eliminating time wasting tasks. By designing applications that fit your needs on the job, you can be sure that you’re spending as much time as possible doing the work you need to do.
4. Content Scheduling
For most businesses, generating content isn’t the difficult part of the marketing process: your company’s mission should be easy to expand upon, and there is no shortage of writers looking to put it down into words. Getting your content out into the world, however, is another issue entirely.
Content needs to be deployed on time, in the right place, and with the right metadata attached in order to be truly effective for your company. By loading your content onto a platform that does all of that for you, you can focus your efforts on perfecting the content itself — guaranteeing that you’re always putting out the best work possible.
5. Schedule Alignment
It’s an experience every office worker has gone through: when trying to schedule a meeting, you play a seemingly endless game of email ping-pong trying to find a time that works for all involved — surely there’s a better way of doing things?
Most digital calendars have ways of integrating different accounts, you just need to have the right options enabled. With Google Calendar, schedule syncing is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons. If your calendar app prevents you from sharing with your coworkers, it might be time to adopt a new one.
6. Proofreading
While some may think business is all about the facts and figures, choosing the right words can have just as big an impact. Writing clear, concise emails and press releases is a key part of keeping your brand strong and ensuring that your company’s message gets across effectively.
While popular word processors usually have some kind of grammar checking software built in, they rarely are as sophisticated as some of the independent options available. Grammarly, for example, can be easily integrated into most word processors and can help with anything from spelling mistakes to sentence phrasing.
There are almost no problems that tech can’t help with, but you have to know what platforms to use in order for it to work for you. By identifying the issues your business faces, you can know exactly what to look for when purchasing tools that will set you up for success.