Everyone has a powerful yet often overlooked digital tool, smartphones, credited for the rapid digitalization across the world. With its ever-expanding range of features and capabilities, the smartphone will eventually replace the need for a laptop or computer. With recent events, online transactions and activity have significantly increased.
However, many retail/F&B businesses are slow on the uptake of digitalization. Often, business owners take a “wait and see” approach when digital tools are made available to them, and losing out on potential revenue their competitors are making. Another key factor for the slow digitalization of small businesses would be the misconception that digitalization requires huge investments on hardware like immobile servers and IT infrastructure, which is not true. Here are some ways to digitalize your retail/F&B business without heavy hardware and infrastructure investment.
Reach out to your customers digitally
A big part of running an F&B or retail business is about customer acquisition. Traditional methods such as print advertising and flyers are certainly an effective outreach channel but come at a high cost. Small businesses may not be able to upkeep such outreach methods consistently enough to reap the benefits.
Digital marketing is a much cheaper and effective outreach method. Effective simply because most consumers are constantly on their smartphones, scrolling through social media or browsing websites of interest.
Therefore digital marketing is a means for you to get your brand and products in front of consumers, where they are spending a bulk of their time. For digital marketing tips, click
here!
Set up your own website
A business website should be one of your priorities if you have not set one up yet. Research from Blue Corona shows that 90% of consumers will check a company’s website before emailing or calling them. While it may seem like an uphill task to set up your own website, many platforms like
duda.co
provide a modern, stylish and customisable template for you to build your website. Spend some time on these website development platforms and choose one which you are most comfortable building your website with.
Your website plays a big role in attracting customers. Design wisely.
Turn to Digital Ordering
With the recent occurrence of the pandemic, most consumers are turning to order food and products online. This consumer trend will be here to stay. Hence, it is important to meet your customers where they are buying.
Digital ordering solutions like
iMakan, will help F&B businesses go online, tapping into a lucrative online market.
Meanwhile, retail business owners can use tools like
Shopify
to build their own e-commerce sites to let consumers buy from you online.
Manage your business from anywhere
You may always have to be at a hundred places at once. However, this can be a source of concern for small business owners. A great solution for this is to get a POS solution, like
MEGAPOS, with cloud-based backend, allowing you to see insights and manage your business at your fingertips from anywhere.
Lumpsum or subscription payment
Gone are the days of pouring a huge amount of cash to invest in IT Infrastructure and hardware for digitalization. Cloud-based solutions these days usually allow subscription-based payments, making it easier for you to kick off your digital journey.
To conclude, we are all going digital some way or another in our lives. Therefore, business owners like you, have to evolve to keep up with the times.
To find out more about
iMakan digital ordering solution, contact us at (+65) 6271 5788 for more information, or leave us your contact details below and we will be in touch with you.