End of business as we know it

We are going through a great cultural shift. Letters and postcards are replaced by Emails, SMS and phone calls are being replaced by social media and chat applications. Anyone can go live and broadcast video to millions of people just using a smartphone.

It is very important for our businesses to innovate in digital space because technology has the power to disrupt business as we know it. Let us see some examples:

1. E-commerce: Companies like Amazon and Alibaba disrupted retail giants like Walmart and Tesco.
2. Wallet services like PayTM and Oxygen are disrupting banking services. It is a matter of time for the cryptocurrencies to compete with normal money transactions.
3. Training, tutorials and education business is getting disrupted by online classes like Udemy.
4. Travel and hospitality industry is being disrupted by companies like AirBNB, OYO, makemytrip, etc. Taxi Industry with Uber, food industry with Zomato, the list goes on.

So, what can be done?

It is high time that you take care of some basic things on the internet for your business. According to your company and customer size, you should take different approaches to secure your business in a fast-changing economy:

Basic Steps

1. Business Listing: Make sure all details regarding your business (contact number, email, services, website) is updated in Google my business. Also, pinpoint your exact location in Google maps.
2. Company website: Make sure you have a mobile responsive website. It is better to have a content management system.
3. Update your company details in all the free business listing like Yellowpages.
4. Social Media Page: Start a page in all social media platform and update contents regularly.

Advanced Steps

1. SEO: Make sure your website is in the top results for the keywords relevant to your business.
2. E-commerce platform/ Booking Platform: Make applications so that customers can book services or products online.
3. Digital Marketing: Make content and invest in digital marketing efforts.
4. Virtual Assistants & Chatbots: Integrate chatbots in your website so that customers can chat and get what they want.

Highly Advanced Steps

1. Data-Driven Approach: With the help of data analysts find important data relevant to your business. Build applications to get more of this data and build insights on different business verticals.
2. IOT: Invest in the internet of things to collect relevant data for your business. Eg: Amazon – Tide
3. User-Generated Content: Implement strategies for customers to generate content related to your business and use online tools like TINTUP to segregate and make sense of this data.

We at Pentagon, are determined to help businesses in making them ready for digital revolution which is already over the horizon. We build online presence, leveraging merchants to help find customers and vice versa.