How Digital Tools Saved Small Businesses in Utah
I will forever have a grudging fondness for my small business owners and CEOs who unequivocally refuse to use a digital tool where a manual one suffices. As an example, I give to you the master architect who would write proposals in cursive, on notebook paper for me to transcribe. While potential time-wastes can be frustrating, I also appreciate that a business owner’s casual disregard for that which they cannot see or touch helps them create the tangible services and products I love to sell.
During the period of social distancing following COVID-19, a lot of them got to reap the benefits of those digital tools they had previously scorned. And others felt the burn of not adopting those tools earlier.
Digital tools are a blessing and a curse. Each can potentially save time, but also threatens to become collapse in on itself and become a black hole. We all know the pain of realizing you’ve spent twenty minutes tinkering with the settings and are no closer to any practical advantage. But the fact remains: digital tools can save time. A letter to the Salt Lake Tribune observed this recently while reviewing a study from the Connected Commerce Council.
That study found that smaller businesses suffered more during the pandemic than larger ones and that using digital tools was very strongly correlated with increased resiliency. This trend carried through in Utah:
They also discovered that 76% of Utah small businesses increased their use of digital tools during the pandemic and those businesses that used more digital tools earlier did even better.
Even crazier was the fact that businesses with older employees were more likely to struggle with adopting digital tools! This is a good reminder that while its fun to start a business with people demographically like us, incorporating people with different perspectives and skills hugely increases our ability to be flexible, foresee problems, and manage solutions!
So if the benefits are obvious, why don’t small businesses adopt more digital tools? This is what the study said:
While digital tools can help with all of these objectives, SMB leaders also have numerous concerns about them: they are unsure of return on investment (31%); worried about the cost (30%); concerned that digital tools won’t help their business (25%); think they lack skills and knowledge (23%); and concerned about protecting employee/customer data privacy (22%).
These are all concerns that a qualified marketing consultant can alleviate. Just like my clients know their industry, I know mine. I can tell them quickly (and if I don’t know off the top of my head, I can research quickly) whether a tool is worthwhile for their business strategy. The earlier I’m familiar with their business pillars and messaging frameworks, the faster I can do these analyses. I’ve written proposals analyzing cost-benefit for equipment investment. I’ve explained the differences between purchasing web hosting services and a URL. These are the kinds of conversations that make for good business! At its core, a business is often characterized by the ability of the product or skill-owner to communicate effectively with the salesperson. Think of yourself as a knight and your marketing consultant like a herald. This is an ancient relationship archetype. You do the thing and I tell people why they should pay you for it!
Let’s review some of the digital tools that small businesses can employ to great effect with the help of a good marketing consultant.
Project Management Softwares- For a nominal fee every month, there are excellent services out there to help manage small business teams. If your business has more than three or four people, this is usually a worthwhile investment. At the simplest end of the spectrum is something like Slack. Even a work-specific messaging app with some file storage integration can be miles ahead of trying to manage projects in a mostly linear format like email. Trello is inexpensive and especially nice if you love project hierarchy like me. Asana and Basecamp are both excellent. Being able to manage projects with documents, deadlines, and personnel assignments really helps keep a team on the same page.
Google My Business- Unless your ideal customer persona is an Ask Jeeves or Bing kind of person, you do not have an excuse for not having an updated Google My Business. These were essential during the pandemic. With every business shifting hours and deciding whether to stay open, be available for delivery, drop-off or what have you on a changing basis, GMB was the most common way customers used to access the small businesses they patroned.
Basic SEO & Indexing- Using the right terms and phrases in your existing web presence is so important to a developing business. “Search Engine Optimization” is a super fancy-sounding term that means “how Google decides if you’re important.” For example, every time a person looks for “fresh dog food pet stores SLC,” Google has to look at thousands of websites that sell fresh dog food calling themselves pet stores claiming to be located in Salt Lake City, and come up with a list for that person. What you write about and how you talk about your business on specific places on the web, will knock you up or down that list. There are a variety of ways to improve one’s “rank” on the web. Larger companies with more specialized products/services can implement a blog or a social media strategy. Smaller businesses may need a website or Google My Business that clearly defines their value and position in the market. This is all a fancy ways of saying that there are easy ways to tell Google what you sell and who your customers are, based on the words we use and where we use them.
Industry-specific directories and blogs- One of the things I do when I show up at a job in a new industry is open an incognito browser and start Googling my dumbest questions about the industry. (The incognito browser is so I don’t have to be ashamed of my internet search history.) I want to see what blogs are out there, who our competition is, what strategies are being employed by our colleagues, and what others are saying to our customers. Seeing what comes up in these preparatory searches literally allows me to map out the digital landscape surrounding my client. Now if only I had any geographical reasoning skills.
Social media & video platforms- I’m not trying to make you the next Instagram influencer, I swear. But the fact is that video is a POWERFUL tool in communicating the story of a business, service, or product. If you do something highly technical, that makes for content that can educate your customers about the value your product brings to the market. If you do something highly tactile or visually pleasing, we can leverage that to get your customers’ attention. And if your business has neither of those things, we especially need to put a human face to it! That personal connection reminds customers what they’re paying for and why its worthwhile. Humans want to buy things from other humans. Video is essential. I’m grateful all the time that I was able to work so much with video in high school. Technical education programs work! My skills are basic for the video industry, but can have seismic advantages for my clients and their customers.
Customer Insight Tools- So many business owners have access to these tools already and don’t even know it! There’s nothing quite like getting to show a CEO the gender, age, and location breakdowns of their social or website audience. These analytics are essential in helping us to understand how to market your business. When we know who your customer is, we can ask better questions about the best ways to talk to them, what they need to know, and how to sell your business to them.
Google Alerts- ESSENTIAL! What if you could get an email, the moment your business was mentioned on the web? You can! It is stupidly simple to set up. And I would love to show you. This is a perfect example of a digital tool, introduced at the correct time that can be hugely advantageous!
Look how a still from this video immediately conveys the value of the product it features.
There’s a super reasonable reason that most business owners don’t see the value in researching these tools for themselves: it will take them time to understand all the factors that go into picking the correct one for their purposes. That’s where I come in. Years of experience with both B2B and B2C clients at various sizes gives me an instinct at the word go for which tools will be most useful and the fastest to implement. When the time comes to teach owners and employees how to use these tools, I go straight back to my grad student days teaching college freshmen. Even the most stubborn and old school employees will adopt digital tools if you lead with the value. That’s the heart of sales: tell people a story about how their lives will be better after their purchase. I do it for customers and I do it with business owners.
That master architect who used actual paper and pencil worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. And the look on his face when I showed him how to Reverse Image Search a building was priceless. There were practical business applications to him understanding the benefits of that digital tool, even if I was the one pushing the buttons. It’s more than a matter of teaching an old dog new tricks, it’s a matter of leveraging the value everyone brings to the team.