Moving your local business to the next level: offering digitised solutions

Building a business that focuses on catering to the local community is a great way to create firm foundations for your future entrepreneurial endeavours.

However, it can also be an innately challenging process which is fraught with attempts to keep pace with larger competitors.

Embracing digitised solutions is an effective option for any up and coming organisation, so here are some services to consider implementing if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Take things up a notch with digital menus

It is not just the major chain eateries that can afford to implement digital menus in place of traditional chalkboards, as the technology facilitating the digital display of food and drink items has become both more flexible and more affordable in recent years.

For example, with a digital beer menu you could not only showcase the latest brews that are available in your cafe, bar, restaurant or tap room, but also ensure that the information is updated in real-time.

This means that as new beers come on and existing options run out, you can reflect this with a digital menu on the fly, rather than the outdated information leaving customers confused.

Digital menus are just as effective whether you want to show your daily specials in a diner, or even advertise future events at which unique menu items may be available.

Connect with customers through digital marketing

New and existing customers can be courted in a whole variety of ways, and while local businesses may feel that old school advertising options are still optimal when it comes to reaching geographically specific audiences, this is no longer the case.

Digital marketing strategies can help you to connect with the people you serve far more quickly, affordably and precisely than a print ad or a poster.

From running email campaigns to alert people to deals, offers and promotions you are running, to embracing social media to share updates with followers far and wide, there are lots of potentially impactful options for harnessing digital marketing solutions.

Of course it is worth pointing out that not every service will be suitable for every local business, and so it pays to test out different types of digital marketing in order to determine whether each is appropriate.

You can then use your findings to assess how much of your budget should be allocated to a given solution to deliver a justifiable return.

Future-proof your company by selling online

It is an unavoidable truth that almost no business can afford to exist solely in the bricks and mortar realm these days, and it is even more imperative in the current climate not only to have a website for your organisation, but also to make this a fully fledged ecommerce solution.

This will not only help you to meet the expectations of digitally savvy shoppers who might not otherwise think to visit your real world stores, but also to account for any unexpected disruption which could make visiting your outlets an impossibility.

While you can start an e-commerce site from scratch, or use a platform like Shopify to form the foundation of your transactional web presence, you can also look to marketplace services like Amazon and eBay to act as the conduit between your business and customers locally as well as nationally.

As ecommerce is still set to grow over the coming years, the longer you delay adoption, the more damage it will do to your business.

Keep employees content with digital documentation and communication

Most businesses not only need to think about how well they cater to the needs of their current employees, but also about how they will make adjustments to appeal to a new generation of workers.

Digital solutions of all kinds can help a lot in this context, whether you choose to offer paperless pay stubs that are issued online, or you deploy modern communication tools to allow colleagues to keep in touch with one another with ease.

Once again it will be best to weigh up your options and test out strategies before going ahead with them permanently, and luckily with most solutions either being entirely free or offering introductory trials at no cost, this does not have to be an expensive endeavour.

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