The 5 small business digital trends that cannot be ignored in 2019

The digital transformation wave is gripping all industrial sectors as we speak. But is it really only meant for the big names in the market? Can financial muscle determine the progress a business can make in the digital space? The answer is simply NO! The best thing about the new age digital paradigm is that it opens up possibilities in digital innovation for industries of any size be it small, medium or large enterprises. A lot of thought has come up from revolutionary leaders in the market that focus on empowering small businesses to achieve high levels of success in their business operations. These thoughts have now transformed into the most happening trends in the small business sector and key players are constantly looking at ways to realize value by following and implementing these trends.

Now comes the crucial question. How can small businesses gain knowledge about the right or in fact the best digital trends that suit their operational model? Well, we have it covered in this blog. It’s barely past the first quarter of 2019, and if you are a small business entrepreneur, then we have compiled a list of the top 5 digital trends that your small business needs to onboard in 2019, to achieve success and remain competitive in the highly crowded market.

Let’s begin the exploration:

1. Subscribe to intelligence

Yes, we are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) here but in a more suitable way for small businesses. Today, nearly all top AI-powered technology services are available on a subscription basis for businesses of all sizes to pick and choose based on their needs and preferences. The same AI technology that powers tech giants like Google and Facebook could be used to boost autonomous offerings in your small business as well. This is a big boost for your business sales prospects as well. Studies have shown that the presence of an AI element can boost sales of companies as< 49%< of consumers will be confident in spending money more frequently in business with AI enablement.

All departments of a small business from customer service to human resources, operations and logistics can embrace the power of AI and ML to enable sustainable growth. When insights about customers are made available through tools, small businesses can use them to make business decisions faster and with more accuracy. On the operations side, AI can help small companies hire smarter with faster candidate resume profiling for relevant skill matching through machine learning. The possibilities when AI is enabled are many for small businesses.

1. Personalized marketing

Gone are the days, when fancy advertising and celebrity endorsements formed the crux of marketing for businesses. Today, a small business can creatively outperform a larger brand in the same industry for marketing excellence. By marketing, we do not simply imply great visual representations and ads, but how technology can be a crucial component in bolstering marketing efforts for small businesses. With marketing automation, it has been proven that there is a 12.2 % reduction in marketing overhead and this will positively impact lead generation as well.

In fact, four out of five users of marketing automation witnessed an overwhelmingly positive increase in leads generated. In addition to the numbers, the quality of leads that are generated through targeted and highly personalized marketing tools available today, are significantly higher as well. By diving deep into insights derived from AI enabled marketing tools, small businesses can create high impact campaigns that have more chances of conversion. As for target user segmentation, today’s marketing automation tools help to identify leads that have higher chances of conversion based on past preferences and behavior. It also saves time and money of marketers who would have otherwise spend hours or even days to send thousands of emails to folks who have very minimal chances of doing business with the organization.

Related Reading: Simple Ways to Create a Small Business Website in 2019

1. Workforce Management

A small business often has restrictions on the physical work infrastructure they can offer for employees. But today, the lack of dedicated physical office space is never a constraint on measuring the success of your business. Thanks to advancements in digital tools, it is possible to have a workforce managing your business operations from literally anywhere in the world. You only need to provide a working space for employees that must absolutely be located in an office environment to run your office. Others can simply connect to your business remotely and there are tons of collaborative and management tools available to ensure that a remote workforce operates as efficiently as an in-house team.

Additionally, if your business requires executives to be deployed at filed locations or at customer premises to carry out tasks, then there are tools that assist them to deliver more valuable services. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2020,75% of field service organizations with more than 50 users will utilize the capabilities of a mobile app to deliver customer delight. Thus, managing a workforce becomes quite seamless with a host of digital tools available for small businesses to help them empower their workforce to work better and more productively.

1. Digital Payments

You may argue that almost all businesses small or large offer convenient payment modes for customers, it is a known fact that this convenience is limited to cash or card in most cases. The customer of today, however, expects more than just a card swiping option to pay for his or her purchases. This is where small businesses need to invest in building or incorporating world-class payment infrastructure to help serve customer needs better. This includes digital wallets, NFC enabled smart payments on smartphones and wearable devices and much more.

While the physical infrastructure and complexity for such smart payment solutions are less, there is a considerably high level of technical prowess involved in facilitating the solution seamlessly. Sensitive financial data of customers has to be managed securely as any event of a breach will likely result in lawsuits and tarnished reputation which may be difficult to recover. Moreover, this sensitive financial data may at times be shared with your businesses vendors as well for settlement of invoices, etc. More the number of stakeholders, greater is the security assurance needed for the digital payment infrastructure. This trend will be crucial when a small business starts to grow global ambitions as today’s technology allows you to scale rapidly with virtual platforms like e-commerce sites and partners.

Related Reading: INFINCE – A One Stop Technology Solution for Small Business

1. Data Privacy

We already covered a portion of this in the payment trends section but considering the rapid scale in which consumer data is generated and consumed by businesses, data privacy is a trend and force to reckon with. Today, every single piece of information be it past interactions of a customer with your business or their preferences in investing or their personal and social media interests are all acquired and analyzed for arriving at business decisions. While this is a good thing for business, several users have repeatedly voiced their concerns on the growing trend of sensitive customer data becoming exposed to fraudulent and inappropriate proceedings. Increasing compliance requirements like GDPR and other international privacy laws will impact the way in which small businesses operate using consumer data.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that the digital systems and business processes that handle sensitive customer information have strict guidelines for privacy preservation as fines for any mishaps could literally throw your business out of operations. Data privacy policies and tools needed to safeguard customer data are an important asset for all businesses irrespective of their business domain and geography.

If you are a small business owner, then the 5 trends that we covered in this blog are of prime importance. They can very well define the future of how your business will perform in a highly competitive market. With the vast array of digital tools available to support various facets of your business, it is quite natural to get confused about where to start investing and exploring. This is where INFINCE comes to the rescue. With cloud-based integrated solutions, INFINCE can bring together the robustness of suite solution for enhanced productivity and efficiency.

INFINCE – Build Your Team & Collaborate

District Hall, 75 Northern Ave., Boston, 6pm April, 2019:

On 4th April 2019, INFINCE is sponsoring a free workshop targeting the tech needs of small industries. The workshop to be held in the District Hall of Boston aims at preparing small business owners to beat market challenges with available technology options.

In today’s world where market competition is intense and customers expect a faster response, businesses are striving to enhance their efficiencies by turning into “internet companies”. However, numerous factors like limited budget and lack of tech awareness restrain a majority of the new and growing business owners from transforming digitally.

Considering these hurdles, INFINCE has pulled together this workshop to help growing businesses make better technology decisions for rapid industrial growth. The workshop will present ways to organize a firm’s IT options in the most cost-effective and streamlined manner.

“In today’s world innovation is no longer an option but a necessity. The workshop aims at leaving attendees well informed on choosing the right digital options to solve their prevailing business situations and prepare their whole organization for a remarkable future”, says Stephen Cummings, Senior Vice President, Fingent.

Focusing on better preparing small enterprises to accommodate growing technology changes, this workshop will walk small business owners through the many do’s and don’ts of digital transformation. The workshop will be a technology guide for those small businesses who are taking their first step towards a technology future to battle immense market competition. After the workshop, those interested will be able to have a hands-on introduction to INFINCE, a new platform designed expressly to provide small business owners control over their digital capabilities now and in the future.

For free registration sign up at: https://www.infince.com/workshop  

About INFINCE

INFINCE is cloud technology optimized for small businesses and a platform to run IT without any hassles. Stephen highlighted some of the key traits of INFINCE that makes it different from other cloud platforms. Quick deployment is one such, where a company can set up and run INFINCE within minutes. INFINCE is also economical as it integrates optimal cloud configurations that cut down cost without sacrificing on performance.

Leading BRB Reviews Firm Confers Rising Star and Great User Experience Award to INFINCE

The leading B2B ratings and reviews platform CompareCamp has recognized INFINCE for its reliable cloud model by conferring the Rising Star of 2018 and Great User Experience Award.

The expert review team at CompareCamp came to the conclusion after a close evaluation of INFINCE’s capabilities in serving both small and large scale businesses with cutting-edge cloud IT solutions. Together, the review team undertook a detailed analysis of INFINCE, particularly in its ability to deliver. According to CompareCamp, INFINCE’s “top functionality centers on IT essentials which include secure cloud hosting, run-your-business software, and concierge IT services.” This indeed confirms the usability and versatility of our infinite cloud solution for small and medium businesses alike.

CompareCamp gave an overall 83 points for all the capabilities offered by INFINCE combined. In their product quality score, the review team gave the highest rating of 8.4 for the array of features embedded in INFINCE. They highlighted key features that differentiate our platform from the rest, which includes optimized information management, total administrative control, enhanced team collaboration and availability of plug and play business applications. From utility apps to file sharing, management and communications capabilities, INFINCE encompasses everything that a modern business must have at their disposal to maximize productivity and thrive competitively.

For ease of use, INFINCE managed to obtain an 8.2 score with its perfectly streamlined and centralized dashboards that enable effortless navigation and usage. The Great User Experience Award is conferred to INFINCE by considering its simplified cloud administration and management model. CompareCamp also lauded the inclusion of complete support for deploying and managing cloud services in INFINCE with minimal costs.

We conceived INFINCE with the aim of equipping small and medium business with state of the art cloud technology. It relies on a flexible cloud infrastructure with complete support for open source, SaaS and custom applications that encompass the IT requirements of most businesses. Besides, CompareCamp especially noted the excellent support offered by INFINCE as reflected in its 8.3 score for customer support.

Having a dedicated cloud solution with proper customer support ensures that your business is served with the right IT needs at all times. Moreover, it comes handy when you need additional compute resources or applications to accommodate the growth of your business.

INFINCE corresponds to an economical cloud solution that uplifts your business by offering affordable software options running under its secure cloud environment. It drastically cuts your IT spendings significantly through its optimally configured cloud and open source licensing.

Besides, the pre-configured setup gives you the right amount of computing resources needed to run your business smoothly. With it comes a horde of essential computing resources that will ratchet up your business productivity, all the while giving you the advantage of a true cloud service that you can access anywhere at any time.

Any business not having a website in today’s digital age not just run the risk of losing potential customers on a large scale, but also attracts serious questions on its standing as a credible firm. With business websites now simple and cheap to set up, businesses no longer have any excuse for not having a website in any case.

The Domain Name

The first step in building a website is choosing an available web address and registering the domain name. The popular names in website domain registration are GoDaddy and BigRock, among others. There are several others providers as well, and competition among the different players means very low rates on offer for the customer.

It is a good practice to register not just the .com extension for the website name, but also all the other popular extensions, such as .net, .info and any country-specific extensions such as .co.uk, .co.in and more. Consumers overwhelmingly use .com when entering a web address, but competitors taking control of other extensions for the same domain name may create serious issues for the business down the lane.

Having secured the domain name, there are many options for small businesses to set up the website.

The Conventional Hosting Route

The conventional method of subscribing of setting up a website is taking up hosting space and deploying a web admin to monitor the website on a 24×7 basis. The popular names in the hosting space are Hostgator, Amazon AWS, and others. Here again, competition means high-quality services for very low rates.

If in-house talent to design the website is not available, freelance websites such as UpWork offer businesses access to highly creative and talented designers and content writers, to design the web page. The rates are around $10 – $20 per hour.

Ready-Made Templates

Rather than painstakingly “reinvent the wheel”, businesses could access ready-made templates and website builders available in the net. The two popular options today are Wix and Weebly.

Wix offers a very large collection of ready to build templates, with an intuitive DIY builder thrown in. The easy to use interface makes it a perfect choice for non-technical users, who can set up a fairly good website on the fly. The platform offers a good app market as well.

Weebly offers ready-made templates and simple tools to create highly advanced web pages without writing a single line of code. The intuitive drag and drop elements make website creation and editing especially easy. Weebly’s responsive themes facilitate generating mobile-optimized websites on-the-fly.

While Wix and Weebly are perfect for generic websites or for selling a limited number of products, businesses that need to set up a proper e-commerce suite may consider Volusion e-commerce suite, which helps users create and manage an online store, sell products, and market your business.

Some of the alternatives to Wix and Weebly include Squarespace, Duda, Sitey, Webs, and Jimdo, among others.

Almost all the providers, including Wix and Weebly, offer free plans, allowing small business owners to start a small business website without spending a penny. However paid subscriptions get better features such as website stats, video, and audio support, removal of Wix branding, and other handy functionality. Paid plans start at $15 per month.

WordPress Website

Small to medium businesses who are somewhat tech-savvy but cannot afford to invest too much expertise into their website would do well to consider a WordPress website. The advantage of a WordPress website is access to unlimited features and functionality.

Creating a WordPress website is a 3-step process

• Sign-up for hosting
• Choosing any suitable WordPress theme. There are thousands of ready-made responsive themes on offer.
• Customize the theme to design the site.

WordPress is an intermediate website builder, and users may set up a WordPress website without any programming knowledge. However, WordPress has a traditional edit menu, and as such, users may require familiarity with backend menu. The process is fairly easy though, and it is possible to create a fairly decent website in under an hour.

While it is technically possible to set up a WordPress website for free, businesses short of in-house expertise would find it more convenient to subscribe to easy packages, which start from just $2.95 per month.

Two popular e-commerce solutions using the WordPress platform are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Creating an e-commerce website using Shopify is as easy as signing up, uploading the product details, and start selling. The hundreds of themes and extensions on offer facilitate easy customization.  However, Shopify doesn’t offer access to the direct code, limiting the ability to customize beyond a point.

WooCommerce is another advanced WordPress plugin, which also allows converting a regular WordPress website into a full-fledged e-commerce store. The significant advantage of WooCommerce is full access to the source code, throwing open the scope for unbridled customization.

Several providers such as Bluehost offers affordable all-in-one package, which may include the domain name registration, a business email account, and the WordPress website.

Regardless of the route chosen, never underestimate the importance of clean design, powerful content, and SEO best practices. A user decides whether to stay or leave a website in less than 3 seconds. As such it is imperative to make a good first impression. Clear navigation, action buttons, an overall minimalistic design, and constant monitoring to ensure speedy downloads all go in the way to making the website a powerful catalyst for the success of your business.  

The World Wide Web offers unbound potential. However, harnessing the potential requires offering stable and reliable solutions in what is essentially an extremely fluid and unstable environment. Web admins commonly encounter several issues which cause websites to go down or users to have a poor experience.

Here are the key web hosting challenges, and effective solutions to overcome such challenges.

1. Slow Website Loading and Navigation Speed:

Enterprises pay a very heavy price for slow loading websites.

Users rarely return to a website which takes a long time to load and/or which has slow internal navigation. Three out of every four web users do not return to websites which take more than four seconds to load. To compound matters, poor page load affects Google rankings negatively, leading to a downward spiral.

The best hosting providers adopt several strategies to preempt the slow loading of websites:

• Locating redundant servers across the world. The physical location of the data center hosting the website influences the page load time in a significant way. The nearer the data center hosting the server from the user’s location, the faster the load time of the website.
• Making use of quality hardware and infrastructure, to reduce network latency to the extent possible. Network latency is the time taken for a packet of data to reach one point, from another point.
• Offering Content Delivery Network (CDN), which makes available cached versions of the static portions of the website at optimized speeds, to several locations

2. The Challenge of Maintaining Uptime:

Web hosting thrives in a highly unstable ecosystem. Servers going down and various other issues are facts of life. However, downtime is fatal in the web hosting industry, and can even mean the death knell of the client’s business.

Web hosting companies need to ensure a minimum of 99.9% uptime rate, which is the industry standard.  Anything more than about 10 minutes of downtime a week is fatal. The main reasons for unplanned, emergency downtime are hardware or software failure, security breaches, and administrator errors. Planned downtime, for inevitable maintenance, is best performed at night or off-peak hours when the website visitor count is usually at its lowest.

Web hosting providers strive to maintain high uptime and overcome the challenge of downtime by:

• Deploying stable software, and updating it regularly, to prevent software failure
• Deploying high quality and proven hardware components
• Undertaking periodic software and hardware audit to pre-empt obsolescence.
• Offering online support on a 24×7 basis to clients, to resolve client queries and issues promptly.
• Offering FAQ’s, user forums and other forums to share knowledge, for speedy resolution of issues, and even preempt issues through timely client action.
• Ensuring sound network security
• Ensuring adequate protection from hazards such as floods and fire at the physical data center location

3. Challenges of Providing Scalability

Today’s e-commerce companies and website owners expect highly scalable resources. However, hosting providers are often hard pressed to provide it.

Many web hosting companies suffer from dated infrastructure, such as old server hardware, outdated software, a narrow broadband connection, and inadequately skilled support staff. Such restraint imposed a resource crunch, which impedes scalability.

Even when there is nothing wrong with the software or hardware, the limited resources being deployed, or the architecture of the data center may create bottlenecks. Emerging technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data offers unbound possibilities, but also makes huge demands on resources.

Inability to scale up resources when required may lead to websites bouncing due to some unknown restrictions, inability to log on to the mailbox or send email attachments, and limits being imposed without any option to mitigate it. For clients, this translates to missed opportunities and poor end-customer experience.

Successful web hosting providers:

• Overhaul their legacy infrastructure from time-to-time to ensure they are equipped to meet the demands made by emerging technologies.
• Identify the gap between requirements and infrastructure capabilities, and work towards filling the gap by provisioning the required hardware and software.
• Upgrade staff skills through training and other interventions, to ensure they are competent to do the needful when required.

4. Security Challenges

Web hosting companies are always under the Damocles sword of security. Cyber breaches are the order of the day. Breaches are costly in terms of loss of sensitive data, crippling regulatory fines, loss of trust and reputation, and more.

A common pitfall from web hosting providers is failing to restrict URL access. Without such restrictions, unauthorized users may view pages they should not have access to. With such access enabled, attackers may easily forge URLs to access hidden pages.

Many web hosting providers offer shared hosting as a low-cost solution for clients. However, sharing an IP address among clients means linking separate domains using a single server. When a client is blacklisted as a spammer, it leads to a situation where all other clients sharing the same IP is also blacklisted.

Web hosting companies may overcome the pressing security challenges by:

• Deploying the latest and state-of-the-art security infrastructure, including firewalls, networking monitoring systems, and more
• Implementing Secure File Transfer Protocol (STFP) to plug loopholes
• Blocking all file types not served by the application.
• Create an access control matrix which stops unauthorized users viewing content.
• Implementing strict access control mechanisms at the data center to prevent rogue insiders and unauthorized attackers from taking physical control over critical web assets.

Data Centers utilize several physical and digital resources to manage the daily operations. Highly successful providers are always on their toes, to ensure the deployed resources work as expected. They also strive to ensure proper management of day to day operations, undertake prompt and periodical updates, and attend to maintenance issues promptly. Last but not least, they never underestimate the value of a skilled team with experience and expertise.