Any business owner knows that to stay ahead of the game, you need to make use of all the tools available to you. For the modern business owner, that means making use of software and other technology that can improve productivity, reduce business running costs and help to maintain staff satisfaction.
Mobile Device Management
Mobile device management offers lots of benefits. If you provide staff with devices to be taken out of the office, like mobile phones, tablets or laptops, it’s also an essential. Mobile device management can be used remotely to keep company owned devices safe and secure.
If you’re worried about devices owned by the company being used for things other than work, you can use the management system to monitor usage, or just to block access to particular apps or websites. You can also use it to automatically push updates to software or security to all devices to ensure that they’re up to date and protected. If a device is lost or stolen, you can use the MDM to wipe or block it remotely, to make sure your company data can’t be accessed.
Social Media Marketing
For any business, social media can play a very important role as part of your marketing mix. This can save some marketing budget, if you’re smart about using the free tools that social media has to offer.
Spend some time doing some research to find which social platforms your customers are most likely to use, whether that’s LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. When you’ve found them, set up profiles there yourself. Keep your branding consistent across all the platforms you decide to use. Use the same username to make it easier to find you, and choose a professional looking profile picture and header image, like a logo.
You can use social media to engage with your customers in a more human way than other marketing methods. Your customer service team can respond to queries and complaints, and engage with customers who leave reviews. Make sure you are posting good quality content on a regular basis, and try to keep the tone of the content in line with the rest of your business. You can share a more relaxed side on social media, but remember you are a business, and your social media reflects you.
Email Campaigns
Make the most of online software that is designed to manage your email marketing. Many of these tools are free to use, and you can input your customer email addresses and divide them into lists by area of interest. You can send hyper-personalised emails to these different lists to make sure you’re hitting the right people.
Regular emails can be sent out to targeted customers to share offers, news or product adverts. Send these mailshots out regularly to keep you in the top of your customers’ inboxes, but not so often as to make them consider your emails annoying. Keep the emails you send relevant and avoid spam.
Remote Working
In many offices now, at large part of their team work remotely at least part of the time. With the right technology, you can make remote work a much more likely possibility for anyone in your company. The added bonus of having staff out of the office is that you can get away with using a smaller office space, or might not need one at all, which will be cheaper to run and will require less spending on office supplies big and small.
Make sure that any devices that you give to staff to use off site are reliable, to ensure they can get online with no technical problems. Stay in touch throughout the day with tools like Slack, WhatsApp or Skype, and keep in contact with your staff all day, whether they are in the office or working from elsewhere. You can even use some of these tools to share screens with your team to allow for remote meetings, so there’s no need to be in the office at all. If you decide to go with Slack, check this list of best slack apps.
Offering the option to work remotely gives your staff a much better work/life balance, which in turn makes them much happier and less stressed. A happier workforce is likely to stay working with you for longer, saving you the cost of recruitment and hiring. It’s great for staff with children too, as they can still produce effective work, while also being able to arrange their work hours around childcare requirements or the school run. Your workforce will thank you for the extra flexibility.