Small businesses often underestimate the power of technology. They are sometimes afraid of the overhead that comes along using technology like costs, time consumption, downtimes, and even errors. Many business owners come from non-technical backgrounds; hence they like to stay away from technologies.  

A Google report shows that almost 80% of small businesses are not leveraging technology completely. If you are a small business, this might be your sign to take the lead by using some technology.

Technology Trends for Small Businesses

In recent years, small businesses have been flourishing, and they are well-funded. Due to which there’s an increase in demand for technology use in small businesses. In this post, we’ve compiled the best technologies that small businesses are using to ensure that you don’t miss out.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the usage of machines to predict the future and make decisions. Small business owners often lack the industry experience and expertise required to make impactful decisions that help grow the business. Due to this inability, they often end up making wrong and substandard choices that hinder the business’s growth.

Many small businesses use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to understand their market positioning better. They often rely on AI models to churn data for them and create meaningful models out of it for reference. These AI and ML models are then further used to simulate real-world scenarios to predict the impact of decisions before they are made.

Using this technology has enabled small businesses to make better-informed decisions to sustain their businesses in rising cutthroat competition.

Analytics and Reporting

No one likes to keep updating the database all day and still miss out on some information to keep in reports. That’s where analytics and reporting come in. Small businesses are moving more towards automated analytics and reporting technologies that can develop reports on their own and serve key business insights in a digestible manner.

Creating reports manually is a tedious task, and you’ll surely miss out on some crucial metrics. Hence, it is better to rely on software that assists you in creating excellent, insightful reports.

Analytics are crucial to have a close eye on business performance and day-to-day activity. If you master analytics, you can quickly find patterns in your business data and outsmart the competition with that skill.

Automation

Automation is an essential technology that small businesses are starting to embrace. Automation is used majorly to handle and automate operations to decrease time. Many small businesses have automated recurring, tedious tasks using various software and applications. Doing so has helped them to save time and productivity that went down the drain doing those tasks.

Automation is becoming increasingly important because of the shortage in the supply of skilled workers. Due to this shortage, fewer people have the right skills to fit the place; hence, machines are considered the best resort. Automation has helped factories to operate on a large scale with zero dependencies and decreased operational costs.The same rule applies to small businesses online – automation helps manage your finances fast and without extra hustle.

Businesses that adopt automation early in their inception will enjoy increased profits in the coming years, and their processes will be much more streamlined and independent.

Remote Working

Remote working might not be considered technology, but it is a trend you cannot overlook while talking about small businesses. Today, living in the cities has become expensive, and the pollution and pandemic scenarios add to the hardships further. Due to this, more people are preferring working remotely.

Remote working has helped small businesses to decrease their operational expenses and divert those funds to grow business. Remote working has also opened the doors towards the gig community for smaller firms.

Using this opportunity, the company is no longer dependent on full-time employees for everything, and they can work with freelancers to achieve their work objectives. This also provides cost benefits to smaller businesses, and hence many of them are turning towards freelancers, part-time employees, and other sorts of remote workers.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a marketing channel that is essential for small businesses to be in the market. Marketing with conventional forms provides lesser results than social media marketing, and more small companies are adopting it.

Social media marketing allows small business owners to connect with their customers and understand their target audience in a better way. Social media advertising is another trend that is becoming increasingly common among small businesses. Advertising products on social media platforms is easy, and the reach is unimaginable. One well-curated advertisement campaign is enough to grow in the social media community.

Social media marketing cultivates brand image, value proposition, and even better growth opportunities for business. With social media, business owners can be available to their customers round the clock and help them with any problems they face. Moreover, posting regularly on your small business’s social media account helps increase organic reach and amplifies more traffic to the business website, resulting in more clients for the company.

If done correctly, social media marketing can provide small businesses the best return on investments, and they can quickly grow their audience base. Many have understood these benefits, and hence they are including social media marketing in their marketing plans for every year.

Cyber Security

As many small businesses have started adopting remote working and freelancers for their work, the threats for cyber-attacks and data breaches are increasing at an alarming rate. Cyber security is an increasing trend. The demand for safer applications and software is more than ever before.

Small businesses have some unique differentiators that help them sustain their businesses, and if such data is compromised, they might lose business to competitors. Hence, small business owners are becoming increasingly aware of their cybersecurity practices to protect such spirals from happening.

Small business owners are now aware of data security, and they work towards protecting their business data crucially. Moreover, 18% of business owners have reported being under a cyber attack in the last year due to a lack of knowledge and cyber security measures in place.

Business owners are wrapping their heads around cyber security software to ensure that their business stays as it is and does not get affected by any cyber attacks.

HR Technologies

Human resource is an essential department for every business. It is tasked with the responsibility of ensuring an adequate workforce for the proper functioning of the company. Without the HR department in place, many small businesses tend to suffer a lot. Some businesses suffer even though they have an HR department as they lack the right software tools.

HR technologies and tools are being developed at an increasing rate to meet the demand for such software. The pandemic has changed the HR domain completely, and now nothing is possible without high-quality software.

Many small businesses are adopting applicant tracking systems, payroll processing software, and even hiring software to ease down their HR tasks. Business owners have understood that HR software is not just about keeping records of employees, and it is much more beyond that. Hence, they’ve started to invest in such systems heavily.

Apart from these trends, there are many other trends that are shaping up the coming year for small businesses, but these are some of the very best trends that you should be looking at. To keep your business at par with all your competitors, try to follow more and more technology trends from this, as all these will make your work easier and provide you more time to focus on business growth activities.

Author Bio:

Name:  Pooja shah

Bio:  Pooja Shah is a Content Writer at Financesage. It is a blog where I cover financial tips related website which is working towards investors to take better financial decisions and make the best choices while buying financial things and for better financial life.