The current COVID-19 pandemic has hit the global economies much harder than the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) which led to the Great Recession. Thankfully, digital technologies have evolved immensely since then. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, etc can be incorporated as an integral part of any business. Advanced technologies, technical innovations, and some pathbreaking growth strategies have created avenues for companies to recover from a global crisis faster than ever before. Here are some growth strategies businesses should incorporate:
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one area that companies should consider implementing in their business strategies to save time and money. All mundane tasks in every department can be streamlined with automation, whether it is Finance, IT, Marketing, Sales, General Operations, or HR. The time saved can be channeled into other important areas to achieve bigger goals.
Organic Growth Marketing
Organic marketing is a multi-dimensional approach that goes beyond SEO alone. To create a sustainable business, paid advertising is not enough. You need to find organic ways to increase brand awareness and achieve organic results. If you talk about B2B businesses, Quora has been the most effective lead channel after Google Search leads. So, marketing departments should identify more organic platforms and implement content strategies to gain benefits.
Another example is Product Hunt for SaaS companies. Product Hunt is an efficient platform to incorporate into your customer adoption pattern to help find early adopters who can take products mainstream and influence your target audience in the right way.
Interactive and Personalized Communication
When it comes to the customer, they tend to expect a lot. Luckily, for businesses, giving them what they want is not hard. The future belongs to interactive and personalized customer experiences. One of the most effective ways for companies to enhance customer communication is by integrating Chatbots into their online platforms.
A chatbot can provide great benefits such as:
- 24X7 Customer support
- Multilingual Assistance
- Bypass Human Errors
- Provide Quick Responses
Predictive Modeling
Integrating predictive analytics into business practices can help identify future consumer behavior based on historical data. Predictive modeling is even more beneficial now as the world starts to slowly adapt to a new normal and resume business operations. Predictive modeling is all about creating visualization dashboards that are backed with data and machine learning techniques that will help businesses prepare for different scenarios. This type of modeling can be implemented in different business areas like sales, marketing, supply chain, or HR. For predictive modeling to successfully work, you need to define a clear goal and collect sufficient amount of data for better predictions.
Digital Transformation
Businesses need to identify the best use of emerging technologies to achieve their goals in different business functions. Some of the technologies to consider would be IoT, Blockchain Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Advanced Analytics. Oil and Gas, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain companies should consider using drones to manage mundane tasks. Even refineries are deploying drones for inspection which is, otherwise, a tedious manual task to perform.
The future of businesses is moving towards technology adoption quite fast. Businesses should adopt a growth model to embed these technologies to manage operations and achieve their goals.
So what is a growth model?
A growth plan involves the different components required to scale your product strategy and foresee growth opportunities based on predictions.
What does a growth model look like?
In a growth model, you:
- Choose a business function to optimize
- Create a Hypothesis
- Execute a PoC
- If the PoC works fine, scale the mode
Businesses must consider various tools and technologies available to implement a business model that can efficiently and effectively scale down and save costs during a crisis. This will provide more opportunities for business owners to avoid using the hiring and firing business model.