4 Tech Upgrades Your Small Business Can’t Afford to Skip

As a small business owner, you know the importance of a lean operation. With limited startup capital and thin profit margins, you have to be careful about where you spend your hard-earned money.

However, there’s a difference between being lean and being cheap. If you pinch pennies in the wrong places, it could hold your business back.

Technology is one area where small business owners are hesitant to invest. Not only is the latest tech expensive, but tech that adds efficiency to a business’s back end doesn’t necessarily translate into increased value for the consumer. At least not directly.

If you think tech upgrades won’t pay for themselves, then you’re not looking at the big picture. The right tech optimizes business operations, saving time and increasing your capacity to scale. You might not see results immediately, but in the long-term, that leads to greater market share and higher profits for your small business.

So, which tech is worth investing in for small businesses? If you’re wondering about the best tools to take your business to the next level, consider these four upgrades that will help boost your business’s bottom line.

4 Smart Tech Upgrades for Small Businesses

A Dependable Smartphone

When you’re running your business, it’s essential that you have the right mobile device to handle all your daily tasks.

A reliable smartphone will allow you to send proposals, video chat with clients, respond to emails, and download and run any apps your business needs.

The latest models perform at a high level and have many useful features, such as high-end cameras that are ideal for taking product photos.

If you’re an Apple aficionado, the iPhone 11 Pro has a triple-camera system with an ultra-wide lens, a super-fast chip, and 16 hours of battery life. If you prefer Android phones, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is a powerful device and has a large screen. 

A PHP-Powered Website

A website is more than a landing page for potential clients. It’s a big source of your business’s credibility. If you’re running an outdated website, you could be scaring customers away.

Good design, easy navigation, and mobile-friendliness establish trust in a business’s website, but you can’t achieve a dynamic website with just HTML and CSS.

Today, 80 percent of websites use PHP, including major players like WordPress. As a server-side programming language, PHP is responsible for executing code based on user interaction.

Even though it works behind the scenes, it plays a big role in making websites user-friendly for customers and business owners, who can update their PHP-powered website without hiring a developer. 

PHP’s prevalence means it’s a common skill among web developers. You can find PHP developers and many other types of freelancers by searching job boards, whether you need help with web development, customer service, or sales and marketing.

A Full-Featured POS

Fast and secure payment processing is the most important feature of any point-of-sale system, but if that’s all your POS does, you’re not making the most of your business technology.

The right POS not only rings up orders, but it also tracks inventory across locations, captures customer information, and integrates with your online store so you can process both in-person and online payments using the same system.

These tools make it easy to determine what’s selling, what’s lagging, and which locations are bringing in the most revenue for your business. If you invest in a POS that also integrates with business tools like accounting software, you’ll also significantly reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.

Unbiased Customer Testing

Customer experience drives the success of businesses on every scale. Unfortunately, it’s also difficult to quantify. Customer surveys and interviews are notoriously unreliable. But biosensor tools such as those developed by iMotions. Allow businesses to skip the focus groups and collect unbiased customer data.

Biosensor tools like eye tracking can be used to analyze how customers respond to product advertisements, package design, store layouts, prototype testing, and more. If you’re developing a new product, designing a storefront, or preparing to roll out a large-scale marketing campaign. Use biosensors to test customer response at the highest possible level of accuracy.

Your older tech might get the job done, but is it helping your business grow? If you want a productive and profitable business, you can’t afford to stay in the 20^th century.

By investing in tech upgrades like these, you can optimize how your business operates behind-the-scenes. And deliver greater value to your customers.

Content is written by our editorial partner and published by admin Hermansyah Filani. Feature image by Unsplash