3 Ways Technology Can Help Your Business Blast Past Revenue Goals In 2017

Integrate your business solutions, invest in business plan and forecasting software, and socialize your relationships.

It’s that time of year again — the time when we all feel a rush of self-empowerment to better ourselves. The rarely used running shoes are dusted off; the candy bars are tossed in the trash; and the new subscription to Muscle and Fitness is on the coffee table ready to be perused. It’s a new year, and we all have lofty goals. Unfortunately, only about nine percent of the goals are met and kept.

As a business owner, you may have company goals to improve quality, increase productivity, or be more attentive to your customer’s needs. Whatever your goal may be, nearly any objective a business owner works toward is rooted in the same desire: to be more profitable.

Luckily, there are technologies out there that can help you meet your business goals in the new year. Below are three ways to utilize technology to achieve and exceed the projected revenue of your business in the coming months.

Integrate your business solutions

One of the most difficult aspects of owning a business is time management. Knowing how to efficiently utilize your time between all of your responsibilities is one of the keys to success. This can become troublesome, however, if you are wearing many hats in the business and aren’t savvy in all the facets that make it run smoothly.

You can significantly cut down on the time wasted performing remedial tasks by investing in technology integration. There are technology solutions out there that help your business become more streamlined, allowing you to spend less time on the nitty-gritty work and focus on the elements of your business that actually make you money.

One example is Quickbooks Apps. Quickbooks is one of the most widely used accounting tools used by small businesses, and now they have made it even easier to keep track of your finances with the addition of the Apps extension. Apps allows you to integrate other popular payment and merchant services like PayPal and Shopify directly into Quickbooks, vastly reducing the time you have to spend on boring clerical work. There are hundreds of other applications available through Quickbooks Apps that will help you streamline your business finances with ease.

Invest in business plan and forecasting software

All business owners collect financial data about their business, but some don’t know how to interpret this information to make it most useful. This is normally where a CFO would come in handy, but these highly paid positions are often out of reach for a small business in its first years.

One solution is to invest in business plan and financial forecasting software. Startegy, for example, is a business intelligence consulting firm that has developed an easy-to-use tool for the small business owner to accurately track finances. It’s all too easy to overestimate revenue and underestimate costs, but Startegy allows you to track these parameters with little effort and also use them to forecast future expenditures.

Perhaps you have a great idea that you want to share with the world, but you don’t have the knowledge about the financial side of owning a business. Financial forecasting software solutions are a unique offering that do all the dirty financial work for you. And who knows — maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about the numbers along the way.

Socialize your relationships

It’s not enough to brand your business through word-of-mouth campaigns and physical advertisements. Today, your audience is on some form of social media right now. (Users in the US check their social media a staggering 17 times per day!)

Social media engagement has changed the face of brand recognition for businesses. Customers look to social media for information about their favorite companies and, more importantly, they look to these companies to provide actionable knowledge and engaging content on social media. It’s not enough to simply make a Facebook page and walk away.

This is the idea behind M3Jr Growth Strategies, a social media training agency that looks to educate social media users about the importance of social selling and the crucial role it plays in brand recognition. By becoming a source of valuable content on social media, you gain trust and ultimately gain more brand recognition.

Social media management platforms are also helpful. SaaS platforms like EClincher aggregate social media pages and allow you to have all your social media metrics in one place. These platforms give you the ability to also schedule content to post at predetermined times — yet again one less thing you have to worry about as an already overwhelmed business owner.

80 percent of businesses fail within the first 18 months. You can drastically decrease your chance of becoming a casualty of capitalism simply by integrating your business solutions, investing in some kind of forecasting software, and going social. This advice will not only help you survive, but greatly increase your chances of hitting those goals in 2017.