How ‘digital ready’ is your SME business?

It may not be a phrase you’ve heard much up till now, but you will definitely be hearing a lot more about this in coming weeks, months and years..

It’s not an easy question to answer unless you understand what it truly means for an SME business to be ‘digital ready’.

It’s a fact that many SME businesses began as family owned or owner-manager businesses which grew over time by reinvesting profits back into the business and the rest is history.

That’s why many SME’s today still use many of the ‘old school’ systems and processes they used in the early days due to the fact that they have often needed to focus on growing the business and serving their customers instead of transforming their operating model from an old-school model to a new-school model.

Many business owners realise the need to do this but have not been able to allocate the time or resources needed, so this has been put on the back burner.

The problem with this is that as SME business owners and managers we now live in 2 worlds. The physical world and the ever-changing, hyper-competitive digital world. 

Over time, most SME’s have realised the importance of engaging with prospects and customers online in the digital world as nowadays it’s here where most prospects and future customers search for information, advice, products and services to fulfil their specific needs or solve their problems.

The net result is that many SME’s now use SEO, Google Adwords and some digital marketing to help generate leads online but due to their old-school internal processes they have often not been able to maximize the return from their digital marketing investment.

At the same time, they are finding that their cost per acquisition (leads) just gets higher and higher due to competitors bidding a higher pay-per-click and they end up getting ‘less bang for their buck’. They often feel that the only winner is Google.

Some SME’s do things differently. They have taken a different tack and instead of plugging in some ‘new-school’ digital marketing into their ‘old-school’ business/service model and processes they have opted to become ‘digital-ready’ and transform to deliver a superior customer experience to both prospects and customers than their competitors offer.

This involves creating a new-school approach to their business both internally and externally to optimise the experience for prospects and customers and thereby maximize their growth, minimise their costs and maximise the return from their digital marketing investment.

This is what it means to be truly ‘Digital-Ready’ and operate in an optimal state of digital readiness – both internally and externally.

So, you may be asking how can your SME business do this? Well the first place to start is to seek out an Inbound Digital Architect who can work with you to assess your current state of digital readiness and then provide you a roadmap or optimisation plan detailing what you need to do to make your business truly ‘digital-ready’ – both internally and externally. 

It may sound like that’s too hard with all the other stuff you got on your plate but the longer you take to become ‘digital-ready’ the more money you will be spending to generate fewer and fewer leads. It’s as simple as that.

Plus, the first step in the process finding out how ‘digital-ready’ your business is, just got a whole lot easier. INBODA is now offering SME’s a FREE Digital Readiness Assessment. All you need to do is to visit the INBODA and see if you qualify.