Any business expert will tell you that you need to digitize it to have a successful business today. Business digitalization is the active use of digital technologies to improve their business model and expand their sphere of influence.
In 2022, spending on digital transformation (DX) will reach 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars. By 2025, global digital transformation spending is forecast to reach 2.8 trillion U.S. dollars, says Statista.
This article will help you understand why digitalization is vital to your business and its impact on your growth.
What is digitalization?
Digitization is taking digital technology and reshaping business models. It helps you find new opportunities to generate income and create value for your business.
Business digitalization leads many companies to success. It helps automate marketing activities and process company orders.
The digitalization of a business helps to improve the efficiency of its operations by making automation possible reducing human error and operational costs by reducing the need for human resources.
Cloud computing has become a unique element of digitalization.
They have helped many companies gain a competitive edge over their competitors.
Impact of digitalization on customer experience
When a business accepts new rules of the game and adds digitalization, it most of all begins to influence its customers. Most often – for the better.
The upward trend in online shopping and e-commerce has continued for many years.
Having fully embraced digital technology, customers are now using the web and mobile apps to find any information they need at any time.
Forbes notes that people’s business expectations have changed since the Covid-19 outbreak. Trust is a huge factor for people when buying a new brand or becoming loyalists. A critical customer service strategy, personalization goes a long way in building trust. Some of the most trusted brands use personalization, social media, and data-driven strategy to gain consumer trust.
The importance of business digitalization
Digitalization brings its changes. Digitalization of a business helps improve the efficiency of its processes, consistency, and quality. In the process of digitalization of your business, the following occurs:
- integration of regular records into files
- improvement of information exchange
- the best customer service
- reduction of operating costs
- reduction of human errors
- getting analytics and actual user data
- constant business growth
- competitive advantage among similar businesses
- secure data storage, etc.
Digital marketing has become a lifesaver for all types of businesses.
With the adoption of digital technology, workflows are more streamlined, and human errors are reduced. All operations are more efficient with these streamlined workflows that reduce operating costs.
Huge companies such as Microsoft and Amazon offer highly secure cloud services that allow you to manage digital assets non-stop.
Tools like Google Analytics have become the core of fundamental data analysis. Such analysis would not have been available without digitalization.
The emergence of new communication channels
The introduction of digital technologies increases the company’s digital presence and contributes to creating new communication channels.
Email, mobile apps, and social media are powerful new communication channels. Using the power of digital communication channels, you even have a chance to implement an omnichannel strategy!
And this already helps to grow your income and build loyal relationships with customers.
At the same time, it is not the number of such channels that is important, but their quality. As a business owner, you need to develop clear strategies for working with these channels to communicate and increase your customers’ loyalty. Such channels will bring more profit in the end. Thus, communication channels with customers are opportunities and high responsibility.
Also Read – 13 Ways Businesses Can Save Money On Office Equipment
Digitalization versus digital transformation
There is still some confusion in these concepts when a business begins to think about its path in the modern world. While digitalization is often used as a general term for digital transformation, the two terms are very different.
Digital transformation means more effective use of digital technology and cultural change. It’s more about people than digital technology. It requires fundamental changes in the organization supported by management.
At the same time, special attention is paid to empowering employees with digital technologies to change the corporate culture.
Examples of successful digitalization
Today, digital success stories are easy to learn. Many large companies and businesses have already profited from the use of digitalization. Some hire business analysis services for this.
And make up a strategy for their promotion. Here are some examples of how businesses from different industries benefit from digitalization.
Banks and digitalization
Banks were among the first to realize the benefits of digitalization. Your bank’s application has probably been installed on your phone for a long time, with which you perform your financial transactions.
Online banking has become the most prominent example of digitalization. You no longer have to leave your home and stand in an endless line to deposit money into your savings account. Or pay by credit card.
Digitalization in advertising
Currently, Facebook Ads and Google Ads are some of the most used ad platforms. Just remember what the ad looked like before these two ad platforms existed.
Today it is possible to create marketing research thanks to digital technologies and use Facebook Ads and Google Ads to target specific audiences, which was impossible in the golden age of TV advertising.
What to do today?
To keep up with the times, you should start digitalizing your business. However, this does not mean that you need to implement all available digital technologies. It is enough to use only those that will maximize the efficiency of your business.
After the successful implementation of digital technologies, the digital transformation should be seen as the next logical step. And if you’re a retailer, digital transformation will enable you to implement successful omnichannel strategies.
Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.
