Opportunity and Crisis: How to go digital with your business and succeed

The COVID-19 virus put the entire world in lockdown, the markets are falling like a deck of cards, governments are trying to adapt to an emergency, and everything seems to work by different rules now. Someone might say that this is a dead-end for small and medium businesses, but from our experience, this is the time of opportunity within the crisis. 

What history teaches us about how businesses act in a crisis

Let’s look back to the past two great recessions and who caught the opportunities in recent economic disasters. 

• Companies founded in the middle of the 2008 recession are Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, WhatsApp Inc., Square, Venmo.

• Companies founded around the 2001 recession: GoPro, Five Below, RedBox, Sonos, SpaceX, Wayfair. 

Take this as a wake-up call to scan the business model you are following and how the crisis has changed your customer’s buying habits, and what they expect from your brand. Right now is the time of hitting it big or dying while waiting. In this case, one fact is crystal clear; the solution lies in digitalization and taking your business online as soon as possible. 

So, how can we move a traditional business online? 

You can be in any industry: sports, education, health, retail, entertainment and events, tourism, or crafting & DIY. 
Start by creating a digital solution, which can be a web platform or a mobile application that will spin, adapt, or complete your traditional business. 

Setting up your platform requires resources and a good business understanding. That’s why this scenario is recommended for already well-established businesses that want to create their digital presence, go international, and build a strong online brand for their customers stuck at home. 

Technology-wise, there are several solutions you can choose, but seeing the growth of some of the apps we’ve built in the past, we highly recommend choosing custom web development with Ruby on Rails and Native iOS and Android development. That means the software will be built from scratch, and all the infrastructure of your software will be adapted to your business needs.

Custom development goes hand in hand with custom UI/UX design. It will make your app stand out from the competition and offer your end-users considerable value in terms of: 

• usability — with logical and clear user-flows; 
• utility — the user can easily find what she/he is looking for and effortlessly solves her/his problems;
• attractivity — design has to be nice and serve as a trigger that makes the user come back to use your platform, crucial for user retention and referral.

Some key features to add to your digital product. 

Depending on the nature of your business, you can shift your customers online and provide the same value through digital channels and assets. 

• Build your e-Shop or Marketplace: sell your products or services through a custom e-shop or marketplace for your business. The main reason is that customers will easily find your shop online, and you can list your products and showcase them through images, descriptions, and reviews from previous customers. This will help you improve your sales and gain new revenue streams from going online, gain credibility and authority.
• Virtual showroom with 3D objects — brings the marketing of products to the next level and speeds up the purchasing decision of your customers. 
• Integrated payments — provides all the necessary steps to fulfill the financial transactions starting with the user adding the item in the shopping cart until the payment from his card has arrived in your business account. The integrated payment will improve the buyers’ shopping experience within your app. 
• Powerful inventory management — gives you improved inventory control helping your business with forecasting and projection. 
• Bookkeeping made easy — receipts and bills to upload and send directly from an app and real-time updates so employees across multiple locations can see the same info, reducing communication errors.
• Shipping and tracking — track the fulfillment process with label creation, send custom tracking emails to clients, get order alerts, etc.
• Estimation/pricing tools — a good example would be the user sending a picture of her/his room and measures and adding furniture/objects to it to generate pricing. 
• Blog: content is king, and you know it. Your passion can inspire others, and content creation can be a useful learning resource for your community. A blog will help you increase your visibility in Search Engines, and customers can find you more easily in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, WiKi, or other engines. 
• Live Chat for your customers — be there in real-time when the customer is looking for ways to solve his problem. Provide quick answers and advice. 
• Video embedding for tutorials and how-to videos — can help you engage with your user through video learning resources, product presentations, tutorials that can boost your sales and grow your audience. 

Going digital with your business means optimizing the offline processes, such as accounting, marketing, order processing, payments, shipping, reporting, security, taxes, and inventory accounting. There’s a tech solution for any service or product your business is operating with.

Back-office processes digitalization will reduce your operating costs (e.g., internal management, task tracking, CRMs, most paperwork that can be digitalized through templates ready to fill and send, etc.). 

These are just a few features that can help your business adapt to the digital world. Remember that each business is unique, and an experienced digital agency like Wolfpack Digital can identify the specific features that will help your business thrive through these hard times.

Web and mobile app monetization strategies

Building a mobile app or a web platform requires financial resources, but think of it as an investment in the future of your business, which will be returned through a well-established app monetization strategy. These are just some of the strategies that can be adapted to your industry: 

• In-app purchases;
• Recurring Subscriptions (monthly, annually);
• Freemium model;
• Advertisements;
• Free Trial;
• Affiliate marketing. 

In the digital era, gaining profit from your passion has been made simple through some time-tested app monetization models. Check the 2019 monetization trends that helped businesses keep their revenue in check. 

Yes, I want to build a digital presence for my business, but where do I start?

Find an app development company, sit down together, and let them investigate your case, do research on the current state of your market/industry, identify opportunities and start by building a Minimum Viable Product. 

You might not be familiar with any technical terms. And you don’t need to since we take you from start-to-end and we guide you throughout the entire process until you see your business flourishing and growing online.