Having a competitive advantage is crucial for any business. When there are so many services and products that offer almost the same as you, falling behind or even keeping the same pace as competitors is just not good enough. Businesses need a sustainable way to keep their competitive advantage. What can this advantage be? It can be anything from more affordable pricing, faster delivery, a better variety of products and services, and many more.
Technology advances so fast that keeping your competitive advantage is easy if you embrace those changes quickly. Flexible and technologically advanced businesses usually find better working methods and are able to optimize their processes and offerings at a faster speed. Pushing your company's capabilities to reach new limits all the time will be the key to success. If you are the first to adopt the technologies that can help you, you will be the leader that keeps a constant competitive advantage, and others will have to catch up with. In this article, we will talk about some of the technologies you might want to embrace to get to the market leader position.
Leverage data analysis
Data is everything. It can be the data for your clients and all their needs, behavior, feedback, etc., or data for the market in general. Collecting enough data is the first step. But the most crucial part is analyzing it and making it work for you. Getting the right information from all the numbers you gathered is how you get the relevant insights you need to use as a competitive advantage.
Thanks to the advanced technology for collecting and analyzing data, you can do so much more than before. There are already many tools and methods you can use to your advantage. Improving your data collecting practices and analysis methods can give you precisely the information you need in a matter of minutes. You will be able to make decisions based on the numbers you have, and you will know which products your customers want and need, what they will be willing to pay, how you should promote them, etc. All this, of course, will be, in the end, a way to improve your bottom line by having a higher return on investment.
Leverage UX design
With so many competitors out there, you need to use everything in your power to keep customers with you and attract new ones. Something that is getting more and more important for people is their experience while on your site, application, or software. This is why you should think about their user experience (UX). How something looks like will often be the factor that can turn the scales in your direction. If you and a close competitor offer almost the same thing, but your site looks better, is easier to navigate, the instructions are more explicit, then the customer will be more willing to choose you even if it will mean paying a bit more.
The UX of a product now has such a prominent role, and technology supports you in the uneasy task of making it work to your advantage. Part of coming up with the right UX is to collect data for users' behavior and understand their preferences. After that, there are many tools to help you test different designs with the help of, for example, A/B tests. In this way, you will be able to collect even more data on what people liked or didn't and optimize even further.
UX is not something set in stone, and it can evolve with your brand and with trends. Make sure you are constantly exploring and analyzing more about your customers. Maybe their preferences will change with time, and you need to be the first to notice and apply the changes they want to see. This is why UX and data analysis go hand in hand. Make sure you are on top of the trends, and you answer the wishes of your customer in the best possible way when it comes to what they need as a product and how they want it to be presented.
Leverage automation
Digital transformation usually starts with automating tedious tasks and improving productivity. This can bring you a lot of competitive advantage because you will be able to move forward faster and be more efficient. Automating back-office functions and making workflows more efficient is just a tiny part of what you can do to leverage this technological advantage.
Many software solutions can help you with the automation of your daily tasks. Most of them are very easy to use and will be a valuable tool even for people without a lot of technical knowledge. Sales workflows are a perfect example of something that can be easily automated. You can create different workflows that will help customers perform a purchase, but you can also use them for lead nurturing. It is easy to create different email flows that will be sent to the right leads and then feed the information about their reaction into a sales automation tool. Then a sales manager will receive a notification when is the right moment for a personal call with the client. This will make the work of your sales team so much more efficient. Sales managers won't have to send manual emails every day to 50 customers but will be able to focus on the really important tasks like selling your product to the right people at the right moment.
Leverage AI and machine learning
AI and machine learning help many businesses get very useful insights for many aspects of their work. Those technologies can help improve some of the services. Thanks to machine learning, your data can be transformed into valuable insights that are easy to understand. Analyzing an enormous amount of data in a matter of minutes is something that an AI can do with no trouble.
Getting such insights faster will allow you to act proactively and gain a significant competitive advantage. Maybe your competitors will need weeks or even months to notice something your AI pointed out to you. Adopting AI and machine learning technologies is the way to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage because you will always be on top of issues, trends, and improvements.
To sum it up
Technology can give you the means you need to achieve a competitive advantage and make it sustainable. Adopting the right tools, techniques, and technology advancements will mean that you can implement changes faster and in a more efficient way. But not only that — all the improvements you make will be justified and will answer the concrete needs of customers. The results of this can be more sales, better customers, improved customer communications and of course higher return on investment.
