Digitizing the B2B Industry: Getting Ahead of Digital Transformation Trends
Adapting to new trends often comes in waves. We’d prefer if we could pace ourselves and anticipate new technology, but it’s never that simple in a digital landscape.
As technology improves, companies must adapt. Adapting to new technology can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational and administrative costs. Moreover, the mere appearance of adoption can make the difference in clients perceiving you as a reputable thought leader or an obsolete brand past its prime.
Your intention, of course, is to keep your brand relative and alive. That is why prepping your company’s culture, assets, and methodology to abide by digital trends is paramount.
Optimization Through Digitization
The time of pen and paper is a bygone era. As more companies move their documentation management to online cloud storage platforms, it opens the door to time, space, and improved organization.
Consequently, it allows progressive brands to accomplish more with their time than brands that haven’t adjusted their document management. Not only this, but file sharing is becoming more expected by consumers as opposed to traditional means of communication like snail mail.
Digitizing company documents can also improve the quality of life for most HR workers as it can reduce the footprint of files they need to keep track of physically.
But it’s not only for convenience. If data is being shared via e-mail, it faces the possibility of malicious online threats. That’s why data encryption and security measures are in place to protect sensitive documentation belonging to companies.
Although transforming all physical documents to a digital format may be an involved and large task at first, the benefits of time savings and organization can vastly outweigh the initial time investment. However, it needs to be done in a way that can be repeatable on a daily basis. The new system of conducting work processes digitally needs to be scalable. Physical methods should be put away. Digital forms, communication, and organization should take their place.
It can often feel daunting to convert thousands of documents into digital formats. That’s why many brands hire consultants to aid them in arranging their systems in a way that can be easily categorized, implemented, and repeated.
Entering the Metaverse
The metaverse, one of the most recent and ongoing technological trends, is going to change all aspects of life, including average business daily life. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it is a virtual rendering and representation of the world we live in. You can imagine it like a video game at first, trying to imitate real life by making it appear as real as possible.
The metaverse does this, but the intent is that it will have practical application. For example, where today, to buy groceries, one must get up, go outside, drive to the store, walk around the store, purchase the merchandise, and return home.
These digital realities will strive to allow you to enter a virtual rendering of the same grocery store and simulate walking around and purchasing groceries. The difference is that you won’t have to leave your home. Your groceries will simply be dropped off via a drone, and that’s that.
We already see a glimpse of this in actuality through the popular app, Instacart, which enables distant customers to shop for groceries from their mobile phones.
The ability to access virtually and experience tangible things from a distance could imply major benefits for a lot of different applications.
It could allow clientele to browse inventory and specifications of a product that’s located on the other side of the world. It could allow physically disabled individuals the ability to shop on their own. The benefits are worth considering.
And that is what your brand must consider. What does its place in the metaverse look like? There’s certainly a host of ways that businesses can leverage the metaverse to their advantage, including the sale of NFTs to behave almost like a ticketing system to obtain real-life tangible items. Some other examples might include exhibiting product demonstrations for industrial machining companies or product testing a new design before its put on the market.
If you start now, your brand could be among the first early adopters of the metaverse when it eventually takes off and becomes one of the main alternatives to physical experience.
Be wary. The internet didn’t take off right away. And there will be plenty of naysayers that try to diminish the validity of the metaverse, but your company should be prepared to adapt if it becomes the next big thing.
Maintain Awareness of What’s Next
If there’s anything you take away from this, it should be to stay vigilant and aware of what’s creeping up on the horizon.
The metaverse might get big for a decade and then fizzle out. It might be replaced by another thing shortly after. The important thing to do is to remain conscientious of what’s coming and make decisions on whether or not and how you will adapt to meet the new evolution of technology.
Advancement is exponentially increasing, which means we have smaller and smaller windows of time to settle in the previous development before we have to move on to the next one. Don’t let anything slip by!
*This article is written by Ainsley Lawrence. View more of Ainsley’s articles here.
