Strategic digital investments for business growth

Elevate business growth with strategic digital investments

Spending money on anything that isn’t absolutely compulsory for your business can feel difficult to justify. Money is tight when you’re a startup, so it’s natural to feel cautious about coughing up cash for something that you’re worried may not be worth it.

But in reality, you’ll need to make investments in your business in order to grow sustainably – fail to do so, and your growth will stagnate. As the saying goes, you only get out what you put in.

One of the best investments you can make is in digital tools. Making the right digital investments can not only aid business growth, but it can help you automate time-consuming tasks, improve workplace efficiency and promote more successful sales. This will all help you cut costs in the long run.

But how do you know which digital investments you should make? In this article, we highlight some of the tools you should consider investing in, from website design to collaboration tools.

Sales tools that can boost profitability

A great sales tool is one that helps manage and streamline your data, leading to more successful sales with less time wasted.

Some sales tools that you should consider investing in include:

• Customer relationship management software: CRM software helps you understand your customers’ behaviours, such as their shopping habits. This means that you can deliver more targeted and personalised campaigns to each customer, resulting in more successful sales. Popular CRM tools include Pipedrive, Salesforce and Hubspot

• Email management: Emails are a powerful sales channel that shouldn’t be under-estimated. This kind of direct line of communication with customers is hard to find elsewhere. However, emails can very quickly get out of hand, so it’s important to keep on top of them. There are countless tools out there that can help you, such as Mailchimp, EmailAnalytics and Campaign Monitor

• Sales productivity tools: These can help you streamline processes and automate administrative tasks that take up a lot of your time. For example, Calendly makes scheduling meetings easily, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you generate and organise sales leads in your network.

Creating the perfect website

Does your website give the right impression of your brand? Having a website that will actually engage your target audience will really help your business stand out against your competitors.

If you’re not sure where to start, do some research on your market and look at what your competitors are doing. This will give you an idea of what you want – or don’t want – your website to look like.

There are plenty of other reasons why you should invest in your website, too. For one, it can make you seem more credible and help build trust with your audience. This will help you secure more sales and increase customer retention, saving you time and money in the long run.

The power of search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making improvements to your website to increase the quality and quantity of traffic, helping your site rank better on search engines such as Google.

The world of SEO can get quite complicated, but there are some really easy steps which can make a massive difference to your search engine ranking. This includes:

• Publishing relevant, helpful content: Google’s helpful content update prioritises ‘people-first content’, rather than content built for search engines. This essentially means that if your content is actually useful, Google will rank it better

• Updating your content regularly: One of the factors in a site’s performance is its relevance, so keeping your content fresh and updated will do wonders for your SEO

• Getting more backlinks: Backlinks are when a website links back to your website. Earning backlinks can take time and is more of a long-term process, but they’re crucial to your performance on search engines.

  Learn more about how backlinks can help your website

If you would like some more advice on how to improve your website and its performance, book a free one-to-one call with one of V-Hub’s advisers.

Making the most out of remote collaboration tools

Remote working has been around for decades but since the pandemic, the number of fully remote teams have skyrocketed.

While it brings countless benefits, from reduced staff turnover to greater flexibility, remote working often makes collaboration more difficult. As you can no longer hold conversations face-to-face or share information in person, employers have had to adapt how they manage their teams.

Utilising remote collaboration tools is a simple way to combat this issue. There are a wide variety of remote tools available, and the right solutions for you will depend on your business.

Some types of tools you should consider as a startup include:

Time management tools

Time tracking is important for many reasons, whether it’s to record time spent on client tasks or just to get an idea of how much time you spend on certain areas of the business.

Getting an idea of how you spend your time can also help you establish smarter business decisions. For instance, if you spend most of your time on administrative tasks, then you know to invest in a solution to help streamline your admin processes.

Not sure which tool to go for? We’ve listed some great options for time tracking tools that could support improved productivity.

Password managers

With the cost of cybercrime expected to skyrocket in upcoming years, keeping your business safe from cyber-attacks is crucial.

Cyber-attacks are unfortunately becoming more and more common, with 39% of UK businesses falling victim in 2022. This means it’s more important than ever to keep your information safe, and one way to do this is using password managers.

Not only do password managers keep your passwords safe, but they’re also a great way to manage and store your passwords, so that staff don’t need to memorise countless login details.

Popular password managers include LastPass, 1Password, NordPass and Bitwarden

File sharing tools

Cloud file sharing means that employees can share documents, photos, videos and other files with their co-workers, and edit them in real-time.

There are countless benefits to using a file sharing tool. For one, files can be accessed anywhere, meaning that if a computer gets damaged, then all is not lost. It also improves accessibility of information, saves space on your computer and of course, aids in colleague collaboration.

For more information on the best file sharing tools, check out our article where we share the five most popular options, including the pros and cons of each.

Project management tools

When running a business, the last thing you want is for things to fall under the radar. Thankfully, project management tools can help colleagues stay on the same page, manage their workload, and easily communicate about work progress.

To find the tool that works best for you, it will most likely be a matter of trying out a variety of options. With so many choices out there, you’re bound to find the perfect tool that suits your business’s needs best.

Some options for project management tools include:

• Monday.com

• Asana

• Trello

• Wrike

• Todoist

Not sure what digital investments to make to help your business grow? We’re here to help – sign up for free one-to-one business support with a V-Hub adviser today to gain expert advice on a range of digital topics.

For more support on other areas of your business, you can also find advice, events, tools and more on the Vodafone V-Hub, designed to help your business thrive in the digital world.