3 Trends More Small Businesses Will Explore for 2023

Technology has long been an important part of growing a business. As the calendar turns to 2023, this won’t change. Organizations of all sizes are looking to technology to solve their operational problems and to help them build more productive and efficient processes. In our last blog of 2022, we take a look at three technology trends that any business can look to, to do just that. 

Continued Rise of Software as a Service

For most businesses that have had the choice to add new software to their IT toolset over the past several years, one of the questions that you’ve had to answer is whether or not to utilize hosted software through an outside provider or go ahead and purchase the software and host it on your own centralized servers. These days, nearly every meaningful application your business can use can be purchased through a SaaS platform. This means that while you may lose some control over the management of the application, you typically gain the flexibility to add and remove accounts quickly while having the underlying IT infrastructure that your application runs on be completely managed by the provider. Generally, there is more convenience and scalability, but the service goes to an operational cost as opposed to a one-time expense.

If saving money and gaining scalability aren’t major considerations for your company, consider that by subscribing to SaaS computing to run your business’ IT, you can gain access to more advanced and innovative tools than you can if you host your own IT. This is a jump that many businesses are making. It started with email, but many businesses are moving to cloud-hosted communications and collaboration solutions, while others are getting their entire cache of productivity software delivered through the cloud. 

Building More Personalized Experiences

Today, most people are used to making purchasing decisions online. This is why it is more important to create more immersive customer experiences. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to build personalization. By using strategies and tools that make it much easier to personalize messaging, service delivery, and more, customers will feel more at ease doing further business with your company. 

The best way to do this is to build customer profiles and then segment your leads and your existing customers into groups. There are many ways that a business can segment its leads and its customers. You can do it by geography, demographics, purchasing behavior and interactions, and other metrics including where they are in the sales funnel. The more effective you are at breaking down your customers, the more targeted your correspondence and your message will be. This creates better customer experiences through engagement and leads to better sales and more revenue. 

Improved Transparency

On top of personalizing your approach, building long-term trust is a great way to rapidly grow your business. One way that modern businesses are going about this is by improving their transparency. This is all about building a business that doesn’t mind sharing its process, and even its ups and downs, with its employees and customer base. Some things will always need to be played close to the chest, but it stands to reason that the better a company is at sharing its journey, the more trust everyone will have. 

A couple of things that you see businesses doing today that will continue into 2023 and beyond is re-establishing their company values. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted a lot of things around and a lot of businesses failed or had problems due to the problems surrounding it. Identifying your company’s values and sharing them with anyone that will listen is a great way to establish a company identity. Another thing that businesses can do to improve their transparency is to be direct about what value your product and service bring, and make sure that your staff and your customers understand that is what they get when they purchase your product/service. Companies that make promises they can’t keep won’t do well in the post-COVID economy, so stating your aims and fulfilling your promises is essential in today’s environment

At BNMC, we want 2023 to be your business’ best year yet and we can help you meet your goals and build a better business for your stakeholders, your employees, and your customers. We want to wish you all a happy and safe New Year and look forward to hearing from you. Give us a call at (978) 482-2020 to see how we can help you improve your business.