A new year is about to begin and small businesses need to starting prepping to start strong. To drive revenue and growth, they need to establish concrete but realistic goals and empower their team to achieve them. Today, technology is a key empowering tool. For instance, video conferencing systems, apps, and other new tools have made meetings easier to conduct, as well as more open and engaging. Not to be left behind, transcriptionists now use various advanced tools and techniques to improve the speed and quality of meeting transcription and other business transcription services.
Businesses can improve their productivity and reach by harnessing the latest innovations. Let’s take a look at the tech trends that will impact small businesses in 2020.
- Automation of more office tasks, including email: Entrepreneurs will increasingly make use of time-saving tools to achieve more with fewer resources. Small businesses are leveraging AI to automate several tasks and services such as email marketing, data entry, accounting, and customer service. Automation of email marketing, for instance, promotes personalization. By implementing personalized email campaigns that suit customers’ interests, businesses can build a base of loyal customers. According to Conversant Media, 66% of marketers are working toward securing internal resources to implement personalized marketing programs.
- Telecommuting: This is another trend small businesses cannot ignore in 2020. Video conferencing and apps allow workers to stay connected to the office even if they are thousands of miles away. With a proper strategy in place, teleworking can improve productivity, save time and costs on travel, and boost a company’s employee retention efforts. It can cut operational costs by cutting infrastructural expenses. According to www.business2community.com, small businesses will increasingly experiment with telecommuting in 2020, at least for part of the week.
- Omnichannel marketing: Businesses cannot overlook technology to implement omnichannel marketing in 2020. Omnichannel marketing involves providing customers with a consistent experience across different touchpoints. Why is this necessary? The reason is that consumers commonly hop across multiple channels while shopping. This includes multiple online (website, app, social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp) and offline (retail store, events, call-center) channels. Omnichannel marketing refers to the concept of providing a seamless customer experience across all these different touchpoints. Omnichannel marketing is expected to rule the roost in 2020. Emarsys reports that companies with well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies in place will achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average, compared to organizations without omnichannel programs in place.
- Social media management tools: More and more businesses are expected to leverage social media technology to market their services in 2020 (business2community.com). Leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram continually introduce technological improvements to enhance marketing return on investment for their customers. Hootsuite, Planable.io, Social Pilot, and SEMrush are popular social media management tools that allow businesses plan, schedule and publish social media content at the right time alongside other traditional marketing efforts. With social media technology, businesses can target niche audiences with customized messages.
- Mobile experience: Small businesses will find it hard to survive if they do not adapt to mobile and offer a seamless mobile experience to consumers as well as employees. Responsive web design is necessary to make web pages display quickly and correctly on mobile devices. Small to mid-size businesses also need to utilize Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that make pages load under 0.5 seconds. Mobile technology has also become critical to boost employee engagement. With millennials representing 50% of the workforce and projected to represent 75% of the workforce by 2025, mobile-first communication is paramount to keep them connected, engaged and focused. Many businesses are using communication apps to enhance employee communication and minimize misunderstandings.
- Video marketing: Video will continue to be a top marketing tool in 2020. Along with Facebook, many other social media platforms are reporting high user engagement with video, according to a Social Media Today article:
- Tweets with video see 10x more engagement than those without
- LinkedIn users are 20 times more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post
- Pinterest users are 2.6 times more likely to make a purchase after viewing brand video content on the platform
- On Instagram, video creates more engagement than any other content type
The key to success with video marketing is to implement it correctly.
The use of cutting-edge technology, increasing investment in research and education, and favorable government policies will also drive the demand for business transcription services, according to Persistence Market Research. With the high volume of video and audio content that businesses generate from meetings, conferences, presentations, seminars and others events, digital transcription can be expected to see rapid growth in 2020. Business transcription companies will also need to stay ahead of the curve to provide accurate and timely documentation solutions.
