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The Data Daily

5 Tech Trends That Will Help Your Small Business Become More Efficient in 2018

5 Tech Trends That Will Help Your Small Business Become More Efficient in 2018

I originally started tracking small business technology trends 5 years ago, in order to prevent my business from falling behind in efficiency and productivity. Once a year I reevaluate what technologies I am paying for and this is one way I have kept my business growing over 30 percent year-to-year for the last five years.

The business world is full of new innovations that constantly require small business owners to learn new rules. As I have worked on growing my own businesses, I allocate a few hours each week in order to read up on what new opportunities are out there for me to expand my business. This may include learning better accounting practices or integrating new forms of small business automation.

The important part of this process is that I am open-minded and never stop trying to learn about new technology. I have been able to average more than three times my returns on investment for technology and these are the tech trends I will be implementing this year.

The Internet has spurred a massive amount of data available for companies to track and analyze. I no longer deal with numbers for my company. All of my data automatically powers my marketing decisions.

My investments in data analysis have included learning about statistics and how to get better data for my industries. These have led to my revenues boosting over 20 times and let me build better sales funnels for each of my products. I am particularly leveraging data analysis for cross-marketing my different audiences and consumer bases.

The consumer is always right. I will follow the consumer through the jungle if that's where they were taking their spending. After starting the foray into consumer applications, I have launched a number of them and all were positive investments. Consumer applications let met better build an audience and tailor my product to the consumer.

This was daunting, but it was crucial for my company to understand how our business world was transitioning towards digital areas. I built out a consumer app for health related needs and was able to gain over 5,000 paid users within the first year. If you dedicate your time to the product design, consumer applications will be instrumental for growth.

Marketing budget allocation can now be automated based on campaign performance. Social media posting and engagement can be automated for efficiency and metrics. Ultimately, these are tasks I set on auto-pilot and optimize for peak performance. This automation has allowed me to cut out 25 hours of work per week from my schedule and increase the average profit per hour of work over 400 percent.

Like I did, you should sit down with an overview of your various business dealings and see what tasks you seem to be doing most frequently that require little brain power. This might include scheduling meetings or finding articles to read on a specific topic. Identify those pain points and do research on what automation technology solutions are best suited for your lifestyle.

This comes as no surprise, but social media truly is one of the most valuable opportunities for any small business owner period. The benefits of building, analyzing, and tracking a network online lets you better build your brand and monetize your audience. Any business who is not yet on all forms of digital media, needs to do so immediately.

I used to use several different automated tools for tracking, responding to, publishing, and managing my brand's social media accounts. I switched over to one main tool, which made sense for us because all the members of my teams are involved in our social media to a certain extent.

Many blockchain technologies are claiming to have exponentially better functionality than their competitors' existing systems. I have personally only found two that meet our current demands better than any other tools we've tried. However, one of the important things to remember is that each blockchain technology also (potentially) has its own cryptocurrency. As you learn about new currencies make sure you research what the specific product value is.

2018 is set to be another major year for technology growth and as a small business owner, you need to be proactive in value creation for your customers. Whether you should expand your personal investment strategies or find news opportunities for adding products, technology can help boost your bottom line. It is often daunting to try and learn about all of the opportunities out there, but setting up a consistent learning cycle will make the task easier moving forward.

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