Imagup General Magazine 2024
Nowadays, business is about leveraging the power of technology to improve business and operational efficiency. Automation is commonplace; innovation is the anchor of progress. Given the reality that the world is headed toward a more global marketspace, as an organization, you can’t move forward or compete with other companies if you aren’t innovating or integrating technology into your operations.
Businesses have to keep abreast with changes in technology in their respective industries. Every industry has a bottom and top. Technology is a constant feature in the future of business operations. For more details, check Thryv.com to look for the necessary tools for your business.
That being said, here’s a brief outline of the tools you’ll need to excel in 2024.
1. Project Planning Tools
Depending on the size and scale of a project, it usually involves many moving parts. Things can get quite complicated easily the more there are moving parts. In the pursuit of efficiency, you don’t want to waste too much time and money around project planning because time is money. Therefore, businesses need to invest in project planning tools that will help them do proper resource planning, allocation, and monitoring.
Moreover, project planning tools can help you to allocate your budget properly. It’d be ideal if project planning and accounting software are integrated. Project planners will be able to anticipate expenditures and manage them as well. Make your business process more efficient by adopting project planning tools.
2. Task Management Software
If you’re just starting and your business is still small, you’re likely going to be working on most things alone or with very few people. Once you start scaling up and the business starts getting busier, you’ll start hiring more employees and implementing business processes to sustain growth. It’ll be easy for you to manage operations if you’ve task management software.
It’ll be more difficult to keep track of work progression and tasks. Luckily, this is something that can be automated. Some tools can handle this for you so that you’ll be able to assign, track, and monitor tasks seamlessly. You’ll also be able to get feedback on the progress of tasks in real-time
3. Communication Tools
Communication is important. There are various mediums through which people and organizations can interact. Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of innovations around communication have been created to facilitate sharing of information remotely. Nowadays, people don’t need to meet physically to exchange information, ideas, or carry out meetings.
Communication is pretty much virtual nowadays. Therefore, depending on a business’ operation, communication channels need to be built sufficiently and integrated with the whole organization to ensure efficient communication. These models were designed differently from organization to organization, but they’re nonetheless important because of how they can improve workflow efficiency.
4. Accounting Tools
This could arguably be the most important tool from the whole list. After all, business is about generating cash flows. Every business needs to have an accounting system that deals with all finance-related matters such as payroll management, budgeting, sales forecasting, tracking expenditures, calculating and paying taxes, and invoicing customers. You don’t want to be doing such things manually in 2024 since there’s software built for this.
You need to have accounting software in place so that you can make inquiries on the go. You can let the software do all the calculations for you. The likelihood of making errors is greatly reduced when using computers. Only make sure that the accounting system you use is properly integrated.
5. Hiring Software
If you want to recruit people into your business, you need to do background checks to ascertain whether they won’t be a burden to your company in the long run. You want people to fill a certain role and want them to do a certain job. Therefore, there’s usually a job description that they have to fill.
Screening applicants may be a very tedious task if done manually. But it need not be the case because there are tools that have been created to assist and are also user-centric. Using the software is much cheaper compared to using a recruitment firm. This is great news for smaller enterprises.
Running streamlined hiring processes would help you cut costs and make the hiring process more efficient. Moreover, background checks can be automated.
6. Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is a very good way of keeping in touch with customers. Since people complain about receiving spam emails, some customers prefer to receive emails from their favorite brands through newsletters and brochures. Promotions are usually pumped through e-mails and push notifications and they tend to be quite effective. Email marketing can be effective but it depends on the quality of your delivery.
Furthermore, email marketing is good in terms of generating statistics e.g., subscribe or unsubscribe rate, churn rates, and a number of leads. Almost half of the world’s population now has access to the Internet. Therefore, you may want to invest in email marketing to tap into this ever-increasing pool of potential customers.
7. Time Management Tools
Unmet deadlines or late deliveries can cost you money. It might be the case that you can’t be at the office 24/7. In that case, you can use tracking or time management tools to help you track the activity of your employees. You’ll be able to see what time they log in and log out. This information is especially important if you’re the one managing people’s operations.
8. Social Media Management Tools
To leverage the power of social media, it’s best to use social media tools to help you market your business more effectively. The number of social media users keeps on rising by the day. This translates to more and more people whom you can reach through your social media marketing platforms. Having many social media accounts can become overwhelming. Therefore, you may need to invest a lot of hours to keep them running and ensure that there are no breaches.
Interacting with customers can be time-consuming. It may seem like a small task, but it’s not. Social media management tools will help you to aggregate all your accounts. They’ll help you optimize your posts for different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
9. File-Sharing Tools
Every business needs file-sharing applications. For your business to work, you need to ensure that your employees have the resources that they need to do their work. You may not always be available or be present physically, this is where file-sharing tools come into play.
File-sharing tools are also important because they can help you avoid the mistake of losing emails in the cloud. A recipient’s inbox could be too full and an email gets lost in the cloud. Also sometimes, some things are too sensitive to share via emails. These applications get rid of that barrier.
Conclusion
For your business to succeed in 2024, you need to take heed of the above-mentioned points. In addition, you need to make sure that you stay abreast with the trends in your particular industry.
Different industries have different KPIs (key performance indicators) and are evolving at different rates. Likewise, your organization might have different needs compared to the next organization.
