There is a common theme of small and medium-sized businesses being reluctant to the idea of digitising their business processes and infrastructure especially if they have physical products.

But little did they know what they were actually uncomfortable with is their leadership mindsets that were not conducive to change and innovation. The survey conducted by Deloitte in 2016 highlights the reasons that only 44% of business leaders prepare for such disruption despite 87% of businesses knowing they are going to get the hit of digital disruption at some point yet no action gets taken. A self-induced catastrophe!

Some of the common barriers to digital adoptions are as following:

Resistance to Change

This resistance to change is reflected in all levels of an organisation such as IT department where a lack of digital processes slows down the entire workflow, leading to slower delivery of secured projects, and lesser capacity to take on new ones.

Digitally maturing companies stay ahead of the growth curve and their workforce by actively engaging in risk-taking agile collaborations, partnerships and projects. Statistics showed agile organisations achieve 30% higher profitability and 37% faster growth than non-agile businesses.

This can be achieved if the benefits of the digitised process are effectively communicated to the company hand in hand with continuous training to foster culture where innovation is valued and change is not considered a huge discomfort.

IT capacity

IT performance can easily be jeopardised if the right training is not provided to IT leaders which effectively leads to a tunnel vision towards both short-term tasks and long-term goals.

So if IT team leaders are provided adequate training and investments are made in the overall IT structure, this can help make the business scalable, resilient and flexible.

Investment in continuous Training and Education

Digital adoption training and learning opportunities for senior-level management is a key factor that further translates into creating and fostering an overall company’s culture. Therefore, it is crucial for senior management to keep their knowledge in check and look out for training focusing on future skills, digital adaptability.

In our 2^nd Module of Digital Adoption of Help to Grow Management Programme, we peel the concept and practical frameworks of Digital Adoption such as the role of digital leadership, stages of digital adoption and recognising where your business is at and many more. The session will be conducted by our Expert Speaker, Eugene Fisher.

About the Speaker:

As a transformation consultant and product manager Eugene has worked with C-suite leaders in start-ups to Fortune 50s drive growth by enhancing leadership capabilities, building innovative teams and launching new products.

He takes a pragmatic and design-led approach to delivering growth; a few recent projects include testing new business propositions for a convenience foods chain with 1.2k locations, helping a new team generate £10m of business value within one year of formation, and developing the enterprise strategy for a £1b retailer.

You can find out more about the programme here: Small Business Leadership & Management Certificate Training Courses UK (kingstonuniversitybusinesstraining.com)

We all heard of Nike’s “Just do it” or California Milk Processor board, “Got milk” and other popular marketing campaigns that changed the landscape of business world. Those would not have been successful without having marketing strategies in place that distinctively identified their customers, segmented, and targeted the most receptive of them, and positioned their business at the right place in their customers’ life. But would they still win if they were to use the same content marketing strategy as they used decades ago?

Probably not.

But being an SME in a hyper-competitive business world, it is even more critical to have a targeted content marketing strategy as small or medium sized ventures tend to run on shoestring resources. So how can businesses still cleverly utilise their resources and reach their customers at the same time?

Robert Rose, a bestselling author of ‘Managing Content Marketing’ has some frameworks for SMEs. In an interview on Marketing over coffee podcast, Robert highlighted his 3 strategic pillars of content marketing.

First, coordination How we coordinate the content we create in a business and how we create what a business wants to say is to be the single biggest challenge, he said, its function is to establish charters of teams and define what those teams do. It is also to plan out the operational models and set some clear goals for the teams.

Then, comes, managing platforms.

He said the marketing platforms are the experiences themselves. How we manage our website, our emails, newsletters, blog or event – determines how effective our communication strategy is.

The last pillar is a bridge that conjoins first two pillars. It is all about establishing workflow systems and essentially making sure that coordination is efficient, and management of these platforms is also going smooth.

Tag: content marketing strategy

Why do SMEs resist Digital Adoption and how to overcome it?

3 Pillars of Content Marketing Strategy