Do You Need to Go Digital?
The answer is YES, but the real question is why? There are many reasons to take your business digital. Let's look first at what it means to "Go Digital"?
Going Digital
Digital marketing and SEO and social media marketing are great, but without actually delivering your service or part of your service digitally your limiting yourself to just having a digital pre-amble with potential customers.
You should be thinking about converting what you do to a digital offering, enhancing and extending your business, or changing direction to embrace the technological possibilities available today. You should also be considering how to improve what you deliver to your existing market, and how you can reach potential customers you currently don't consider much, perhaps becuase of their ability to buy from you, your own capacity to deliver, or simple geographical limits.
Replacing your service
One option is to simply take what you do now and convert it into a digital service and sell that.
Perhaps you're a sole consultant, delivering classroom training or specialist advisory sessions face-to-face. If what you deliver is fairly consistent every time, you could achieve a lot with a series of videos and work assignments delivered through an online learning portal.
You'd extend your potential market reach to the whole world, and you've relieved the capacity constraint that's inevitable when there are only seven days in a week and one person delivering the service.
Extending what you do
In some cases, the face-to-face experience is essential to what you deliver. A level of personal interaction is needed.
You can still go digital by preparing your clients in advance with digital material, and by reinforcing what you do afterwards with questionnaires and feedback and valuable supplementary material.
You'll enhance what you do so that you can either put your prices up or you make your service higher value and therefore easier to sell.
And you get create what is effectively marketing material that can be delivered as a kind of teaser to bring people in.
You can even use your new material to create an additional service for people who cannot afford the full experience or maybe cannot get to you in person - a whole new line of business for a group of customers you were never going to sell to anyway.
Going in a new direction
You can take the opportunity to use technology to radically change your business to take advantage of new possibilities that just weren't around when you started out.
You can put your new business in front of any user at any time using a device agnostic strategy. And you can head off the threat of new entrants into your business area by being there first and using all your industry experience to raise that barrier to entry for new companies.
Why bother to go digital?
No matter how much you say to yourself that digital isn't going to impact your industry, you're wrong. Big businesses and household names have fallen into that trap and failed in spectacular fashion.
Take pretty much any industry - Retail, Education, Traditional TV Stations, Communications and even Software. They have all been changed beyond recognition by advances in digitial business, and they are continuing to change.
Don't take my word for it
Forrester, one of the world's leading business analysis firms, predicted in 2018 that by the end of 2020 49% of all business revenues will be influenced by digital. That includes all different types of digital activity, not just straightforward sales.
In a report by Eurostat, it was noted that in 2023, 23% of EU businesses reported that they had conducted e-sales in the previous year. And EU businesses reported that this accounted for 18% of their total turnover. That's right across Europe, in some countries it was as high as 30%.
Another statistic to set you thinking - when companies who thought they were digitally ready were asked what the biggest stopper is, 35% agreed that it was the owner or CEO of the business either being incapable of embracing change or thinking that the digital world didn't apply to them.
And if the words "It ain't broke so why fix it" are passing through your mind, stop thinking like that. There are people all over the world right now dreaming up new business ideas that will simply make what many of us do redundant overnight - and they are not even trying to hurt you, so what are your competitors dreaming up.
What next?
Look out for the follow up article - How To Go Digital for practical advice on moving forward.
In the meantime, if you'd like a free consultation to see what digital possibilities exist in your business or industry, get in touch. What have you got to lose ........................ apart from everything?
