Businesses today are faced with the era of digital disruption. The advancement in innovative technology is constantly pushing the frontiers. To succeed in this ever changing environment, businesses have no choice but to respond proactively in defining how they operate in order to survive.
As much as this creates challenges for businesses, it also presents unending opportunities for those who are willing to think ahead and make the necessary adjustments in response to change.
To successfully navigate these challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities they present, firstly, businesses need to continually discover new ways of meeting organizational goals and objectives; secondly, learn the process of effective strategy planning; and gain valuable knowledge and skills on tools and applications that will play an important role in helping them implement a new or improve an existing strategy.
Let’s get into these three briefly.
Discovering Problems and Opportunities
For any business that seeks to grow in today’s environment, it is vital to keep exploring new ways of doing things. You cannot afford to become comfortable. This means a deliberate effort to continually discover weaknesses in current systems and find ways to make them better.
To do this effectively, businesses need to have access to information systems with analytical capabilities that allow them to gain insight into their current activities, so they can act in a practical manner.
In the case of online marketing, I use the scenario of traffic to your online business. How do you know that all the time and effort you put into your content is getting the desired results i.e. engagement/leads? The answer is in the data. A careful analysis of the data made available in your information system will help you discover strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Learning New Strategies
Discovering the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in your online business will lead you into learning about what needs to be done strategically. You may have discovered that most of the traffic to your good looking website in the past month was from mobile users, however, website displays poorly on these devices.
This should spark off a learning process on the strategy to develop in order to avert the situation of losing your audience and sales as a result.
A number of questions can be raised here:
- Should you develop a mobile app for your business to cater for mobile (smartphones/tablets) users only?
- Should you develop a responsive website to cater for both desktop and mobile (smartphones/tablets) users?
- What is the cost implication of developing a mobile app as against developing a responsive website?
- What type of content and how much of it should be made available to users if you decide to develop a mobile app?
Carefully assessing the above questions will help you learn more about the most effective strategy to use in improving user experience.
Gaining Expert Knowledge
It is only natural that after discovering and learning in detail about your strategic options, you will gain significant knowledge into what it will take (time, money, skill and applications) to achieve set goals and objectives.
