Today’s market is fast paced and ever changing. If you’re not able to anticipate and make changes quickly enough, your business is likely to fail. Agility in a business is imperative in order to survive the modern market. However, few are able to achieve it.
What is an agile business?
An agile business is one that is able to anticipate shifts in the market even before they occur. However, knowing that a shift is going to occur isn’t enough. You need to be able to make the right operational changes and make them quickly enough to create opportunities and deliver better value to your customers.
In order for a company to be able to keep track of the market and quickly make changes, communication and data sharing throughout the enterprise is required. This often involves the application of enterprise-wide system integration. Technology therefore plays a major role in the building of an agile company.
Myriad tools are available in today’s market. Although they are all beneficial, not all are essential for creating an agile business. The following are some of the top tools you should consider.
The Automated Business
- Marketing and sales solutions
If you want to make a dent in today’s consumer market, you have to take your business online. A recent study by United Parcel Service Inc. showed that consumers are increasing their purchases online. Shoppers surveyed in the study admitted to making 51 percent of their purchases online in 2015. This was an increase from 2014’s figure of 47 percent.
The growth of eCommerce is accelerating rapidly. It therefore makes sense to shift your store online. Shopify is a great tool to help you get your online store up and running in a matter of days.
This all-in-one solution allows you to create an online store on a hosted platform. It is an enterprise ecommerce platform that can be customized to meet the needs of individual store owners. Because it is a hosted solution, you don’t have to worry about issues such as compliance to PCI standards, security or keeping servers up. You can focus on running your business and refer to their support team for any technical issues.
- Tools for social media
You can’t sell anything if consumers don’t know about your products or services. Social media is becoming one of the most powerful ways to reach customers. A Dimensional Research survey showed that 90 percent of consumers admitted to making a purchasing decision based on social media reviews.
Creating and updating social media accounts on different platforms is therefore a great way to engage with your customers. However, keeping up with accounts on different platforms can be challenging.
Sprout Social is a solution that allows you to connect and communicate with your customers on different social media platforms easily. The tool integrates with various platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn to allow you to manage your accounts from a single platform.
- Tools for automated blogging
Providing your audience with valuable information is vital if you want to keep them engaged and coming back for more. You need to ensure that you can provide information that is interesting and consistently fresh.
Percolate is a great tool to automate your blogging. This tool sources and curates content. It also schedules content for your blog. You even get data insights suggesting what type of content would be most successful with your target audience. The tool also integrates with various platforms including WordPress, Facebook, Tumbler and Twitter.
The market is flooded with tools that can make your business more agile, but vetting each based on your business’ particular needs and requirements is the only way you can truly shed organizational pounds and keep innovation churning.
