Businesses and the Internet
What the internet could offer for Philippine businesses today.
The Internet has changed our lives so much that interact and make decisions differently; from dating with tinder to politics with facebook, it’s safe to say that we live in a different world today. It has changed our day to day decisions and our culture by drastically dictating and shifting our collective attention by the minute while launching different products, services, and ideas in large-scales; such scales that it becomes difficult even for our human minds to fathom.
The Philippines is by no means a tech hub yet, but we get to enjoy a lot of the best digital products out there today; being an attractive market, we get to have tech products/services available to us, like Uber(huhu) and Netflix, relatively early. However as a collective, we are still just starting to understand what the internet could offer, especially for businesses. Being a source of distraction and entertainment, most of the time we still treat digital as a nice to have due to a lack of understanding; this leads to building digital products that have no strategic value and focusing on vanity metrics, ultimately wasting resources and making bad investments. The Internet is bringing in a new industrial revolution with its scale and capabilities, it pays to have a good idea of what it could do for your business.
Let’s talk a high-level look at what the internet offers for businesses both new and old.
Reach
It’s actually almost impossible to find someone you know who’s not on or have used the Internet, in fact a quick google search shows that there are 3.5 billion people on the Internet as of June 2018, that’s almost half of the world’s population and they spend a lot of time here. According to a recent report, Philippines ranked #1 on amount of time spent online; this means that most of your customers are on the internet and it’s possible to reach them without having to leave your desk; of course given that you do digital and content marketing well.
Social media, despite its other side effects, has been one of the best things to happen on the Internet; it pooled most internet users into around 6 main websites which means that it’s easier to scope out and reach your potential customers. To our credit, the Philippines has adapted social media really fast and we’re spending an average of 4 hours and 12 minutes each day on it; it’s not hard to run into your customers on facebook or instagram. Most local businesses are aware of that fact and have been doing great strides on social but social media does not solve all your problems, we’ll get into that next time.
Scale
Getting a standard Netflix subscription will cost you around $10 US/month here in the Philippines, almost the same price for a movie but you get a ton of shows to watch and exclusive content for it; how could they afford to offer it at that price, it’s not because building a service like Netflix is cheap. The internet allows businesses to sell at towering volumes and they could drive the price low because of that; offer a service at P400/month to sell to 5000 customer online gives you P2,000,000/month at relatively lower cost of selling. But why state something so obvious, it’s because people tend to underestimate the scale of the internet. The Internet scales the work that is needed to reach and serve customers that it doesn’t take that much effort to go from selling to 1,000 people from 10,000; imagine doing that offline.
Innovation
With the penetration, accessibility, and capabilities of smartphones and computers, the internet offers endless ways to create new products and services; it is the culprit behind most of the disruption happening today in traditional industries like film, transportation, hospitality, and retail. The biggest innovations that we see were built on the internet, but it doesn’t mean that the internet is only for startups, there is still room to innovate and transform traditional businesses by taking a look at different areas like Sales, Distribution, and Customer experience, to name a few, and find things that could make use of what’s possible with what we have today. Through this businesses may be able to stay undisrupted by all the new things that come out.
The Internet is full of endless possibilities and business, of course, is one of the main forces behind seeing those. By having a good understanding of the internet, we could make better strategic decisions when it comes to investing in it; websites, apps, and other pieces of technology become strategic tools and even actual products or services for the business. What we’ve talked about above barely scratched the surface but looking at the internet in that perspective already shows how the internet is more than just a place to waste time and watch Game of Thrones.
Don’t forget to give share this if you got a thing or two.
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