4 Ways How Technology Can Help Your Business

From reaching new customers to improving communication within an enterprise, there is no aspect of a business that can't be improved with technology. This is why globally businesses will spend nearly $3.7 trillion on business IT in 2015.

If you're still on the fence, here are four reasons why you need incorporate technology into your business:

1. Technology Improves Communication

The most immediate impact of technology is felt in the way an organization communicates within itself and with its customers. The simplest example of this is can be seen in the dramatic improvement in efficiency by switching from snail mail to e-mail. The ability to communicate quickly, efficiently, and cheaply fosters improved productivity and helps make a business more competitive.

Hundreds of billions of pounds are lost every year due to improper communication within an organisation. Technology is the antidote to this miscommunication since it enables both one to one, and one to many communication. Using technology, you can communicate with any person directly (for instance, by sending an email or having a Skype call). At the same time, you can also use technology to communicate with a large number of people, by sending an email to all employees in an organization, sending out a tweet, or posting a message on an intra-company chat group or communication platform.

To put it simply: good communication is the foundation of good business, and technology helps businesses communicate faster and cheaper.

2. Technology Helps You Market Your Products Better

Technology helps businesses in two ways: it helps your business find new customers, and it helps new (and existing) customers find your business. Customers are increasingly turning to online sources to discover businesses that can solve their problems. Yelp and Google have almost completely replaced the Yellow Pages for a majority of consumers. Consumers also turn to Google to find answers to their queries, which affords businesses another chance at being discovered.

Technology also helps businesses market their products better. This includes virtually every aspect of the marketing and sales process, from researching the market to testing new products to branding to the actual sale. A simple website can give businesses access to millions of more consumers than they would have with a brick and mortar business. A Google AdWords campaign can bring your business before the billion+ people who visit Google every month. Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, your business can learn exactly what kind of brand messages, colours, and even logos help you sell more. This is to say, technology gives the smallest of businesses the leverage to compete against much bigger competitors.

3. Technology Helps You Make Better Decisions

Decision-making is the biggest component of business. What to sell, who to sell to, and how to sell it - all of these are key decisions every business must make (besides the hundreds of smaller decisions every business must make on a daily basis). Technology can help with this aspect of running a business as well.

Technology enables businesses to make decisions backed by data, not intuition. For example, by testing out five different headlines for a sales page, a business can figure out exactly which headline drives the highest number of sales, instead of resorting to guesses and intuition. Similarly, businesses can dig through search volume data to figure out what customers are actually searching for (and how best to meet that demand). Businesses can derive even more nuanced understanding of itself and its customers by leveraging Big Data.

Whether it is testing out new headlines for a web page or running a deep analysis of a company's competitors, technology can give you the hard data you need to make better business decisions.

4. Technology Makes Your Business More Productive

In an ultra-competitive business environment, every enterprise needs to extract as much value from its resources as possible to survive. By giving you access to powerful productivity tools, technology can help your business not just survive, but thrive in competition.

The productivity gains from technology are usually incremental in nature. If access to computers and office productivity software such as MS Office improved the speed and efficiency with which organizations worked with spreadsheets, presentations and documents, newer technology such as cloud computing, office-wide social networks, collaboration software, etc. are helping businesses get the most out of their employees. Thanks to technology, you can access your work from anywhere, stay in constant communication with co-workers, and deliver results faster than ever before.

The result: a pronounced increase in productivity, which ultimately leads to a positive impact on your business' bottom line. Every business that wants to thrive today must strive to make technology its number one priority. By incorporating technology into your organization, you can improve productivity, market yourself better, and create a more cohesive organization.