Why digital is a growth engine?

As an employee, an entrepreneur, or a job seeker, it is urgent to digitize!

The use of digital platforms is now our everyday routine, as the world becomes more and more mobile, with a plethora of digital tools available.

The word “transition” digital seems to be thus obsolete today. We should rather speak about a digital “era”, already largely in place.

As Frédéric Mazzella of BlaBlaCar emphasizes: “We are living during a third industrial revolution. We had Steam and Electricity revolutions, and now it is the Digital revolution”.

According to Sage figures:

• 80% of people go on the Internet to find information.

• 2/3 of BtoB buyers get varied content before making their purchase decisions.

• 72% of B2B buyers use social networks.

• 7 out of 10 French customers have already purchased online.

• We spend about 4 hours a day on our smartphones.

• Our first gesture in the morning and our last one in the evening is to look at our mobile phones.

Present to be visible!

It is clear that our customers have long been on the Internet to buy our products / services, which is why it is important to be online to maintain a sustainable business!

We need to have a coherent presence online with a clear positioning showing our value. We shouldn’t make the mistake of wanting to be everywhere, without coherence to our activity. Internet requires quality and not quantity!

Indeed, the Internet is an incredible tool for collecting targeted information. A myriad of information on all chosen domains is offered to us whenever and wherever we want. “Benchmarking” is needed to obtain info we want, in due time via alerts or specific tools.

Are you starting a project, or have you already launched a business? If so, how are you doing this? If you haven’t done it yet, where would be the best place and what would be the best time to get started? What added value will you bring? To whom, how, where, and why?

By obtaining information about your field of activity and your future customers, you will have a better picture worldwide and “live”.

So, tuning in to your prospects online is recommended.   You can discover, talk with people via social media, identify what they like in your industry, and understand what they really want …

This analysis and this gathering of information are essential to knowing whether your project or activity is credible and if there is an existing demand …

Build up our own network with “qualified contacts”!

The Internet is not just a tool to acquire knowledge at any time. It is also a great way to meet with competent people and build up our qualitative network.

A lot of people search just to get the most contacts on Linkedin or Facebook …And then realize that this number does not generate any business at all!

Why? Because these contacts are not qualified.

This number does not represent the quality of your business and is not a guarantee of commitment. A quantity of “LIKEs” or contacts without any follow-up does not lead to anything!

Applying the same communication on social networks as mass emailing is doomed to fail.

It is therefore necessary to ensure a marketing strategy that makes sense, with a communicative approach adapted to media networks, enabling you to obtain a quality network within your community.

It’s so much easier, thanks to the Internet, to find people we are looking for and to improve our relationships. We can now recruit the right people, even if they are at a distance.

There are now some applications in France that link long term jobless people (RSA) with local, small and middle societies (PME), such as the new application Job 41 from the start up Neolink.

Stronger together with a “win win” relationship

Several platforms promote interactivity between different groups and involve all economic actors.

– Focus groups that speak about a common subject, and share experiences, advice or answer questions.

– Within a company, several departments can communicate with one another directly and remotely.

For example, the start-up Klaxoon in Brittany, FR, which has created software that facilitates the interactivity of meetings, or the company Epson which has just launched a software that allows people to communicate “live” between them and devices.

– We can also contact our partners, prospects and customers from anywhere. Through targeted information gathering, we know what they want and what they don’t want.

This is beneficial for us because it saves time and decreases logistics costs. By analyzing their behavior regularly, we can bring up our expertise, respond exactly to their needs, and thus create a “win-win” relationship.

From now on, our competitors are no longer our rivals, but they are complementary. The data collected can be so precise that it is possible to identify what they do better than us and what can be brought to them with our unique added value…To work together and offer a complete service to our common customers!

This is the reason why we see the breakdown of the old silos of companies.

Via digital data, collaboration between the various economic players is promoted.

Flexibility is thus created at the level of company management.  

Also, we now prefer to ask for external resources in order to obtain the appropriate Expert for the company.

We’ve started to copy the very flexible Anglo-Saxon approach, where employees can manage their working time, as they wish, via teleworking and thus be result-oriented towards their tasks and no longer following hours of work, required at a fixed office.

What is good is the cost reduction that is obtained through the Internet, especially at the logistics level, advertising, etc…. so a lot of activities today are attractive and accessible compared to before.

Some even use the Cloud daily to lighten their internal structures and thus obtain maintenance savings. Less time is spent in transport, more economical, more ecological, more focused on our profession … de-materialization optimizes work!

Media facilitate the era of consumers

Digital changes and improves our way of working because everything is oriented toward the consumer.

It provides us the tools with which to adapt our products / services to the daily uses of our target.

So please, don’t be present on social networks just to talk about yourself in an impersonal way, as we used to do in advertising.

We must be there to discover, know and converse with our prospects. And it is the interaction with them that will bring a coherent visibility and thus a notoriety.

It is the same thing if we want to find providers; we will conduct research, communicating via the Internet in different ways in order to unite with the right people.

We improve concretely our activity!

Digital communication must indeed be efficient and unique.

The data collected can be so precise that we can segment our target. There are so many accessible and free tools to obtain traceability that we must select some, to improve our field services and thus optimize our activity. No more field surveys and the Excel table! Welcome to statistical robots and integrated KPI*! *KPI: Key Performance Indicators

For some of us, this will be efficient to analyze the whole cycle of operations; for others, it will be to prospect easier, even to stop waste or avoid the unpaid… What is interesting is that we can correlate several aspects of our research (economics, politics, social, commercial) in a Dashboard and thus anticipate things easily.

We express the same message online through a different way according to the selected tool…

Each digital platform is specific, so we will not communicate in the same way.

After selecting the appropriate tools for our targets, the communication must be varied, adapted to the chosen network and must always correspond to our identity.

It is of course interesting to see what successful people have done, but we should not do a “copy, paste” of what they’ve done. We must remain authentic and apply coherent communication.

You may ask me: I do not know how to do it and where to start?

Indeed, you can call me to outsource your communications and increase your sales thanks to an adapted marketing strategy …

Opportunity to discover and learn remotely and instantly from home.

Whatever our profile (employee, entrepreneur, boss, unemployed), we can get trained for life, for free, about anything and via several ways. I mentioned the MOOCS in a previous article, but you also have all the video tutorials on Youtube, or Webinars that allow you to understand a subject.

Again, it is not necessary to be a technical connoisseur of the Web to understand this.

On the other hand, even if most of the tools are available and free, it is better to be accompanied by an Expert and rather focus on our business to avoid wasting time and to get quality.

If you want to train yourself, select your training medium to learn easily, in a playful and remote way. This ability to learn when and where we want, opens our critical mind. That is why we can either launch our project and test it, or diversify it over time to the market, and even innovate!

It is obvious that for those who do not have the time, the desire to get trained or write on the internet – whether to make a website or to publish quality content on social networks, to get customers, we are at your disposal to listen to you, understand you and help you to write relevant content …

In our view, it is essential that your provider:

– Knows and understands you perfectly

– Is close to you at every stage of your evolution

– Writes as if she/he was you!

– Sends strong and relevant messages

– Proposes personalized offers to your targets, for them to be identified and concerned … To “fall into your basket”.

What is your position compared to your clients?

In France, even if we are very far behind our European neighbors who have already integrated the Code at school.

Many French companies have not yet switched to Digital, compared to their customers who are all already online on mobile devices, comparing data and services before making a decision.

Fortunately, some entrepreneurs like Xavier Niel encouraged the launch of Start-Ups via his “Station F” in the Île de France and its digital school “School 42” …

Two former students at this school, Anna Stépanoff and Romain Cœur, came together to create in France 2014 Wildcode School, based in Orléans, Chartres, Fontainebleau, Bordeaux, Lyon and Toulouse. This school of Code brings an alternative pedagogy: in 5 months, the trainees integrate the Code by leading 3 projects of which 2 with real customers. A job is guaranteed when leaving school …

Since we are now oriented towards “consumers” via the Digital, we can now obtain precise data with traceability in real time and thus propose the product / service that the demand wants … or even launch an innovation that will bring an improvement.

Let’s talk about some French start-ups:

In April 2016, 2 young entrepreneurs from Toulouse created Eyelights which offers a GPS on the motorcycle helmet. Also, the French Tech of Occitania, called Velocomotion thought of a digitized padlock for rented cycles with repair service. And the French start-up Donecle offers a time reduction of inspection for the aircraft cabin on the ground, thanks to a swarm of autonomous drones, passing from 8 hours to 30 minutes!

We thus see that we should not seek great innovation at all costs, but rather propose an improvement of existing product / service based on a lived experience.

We know of course the reason of the creation of the Bla Bla Car business so let ‘s talk about Crosscall, a French company created and run by Cyril Vidal, who is passionate about extreme sports, designed robust and waterproof phones with great autonomy … currently sold to more than 700 000 copies in the world.

Digital is omnipresent since the creation of business

Here are some examples of project creation, but Digital platforms are essential for every stage of a company’s life.

– We can boost our business and stand out from the others, by appropriating digital tools to optimize the business. For example, some real estate agencies offer a virtual visit of apartments in 3D to their clients. This new offer is interesting to both parties since customers come to the agency only once to make the virtual tour of several apartments, thus saving time for all!

– The payment can be simplified and accessed automatically on mobile devices for ultra-connected consumers, via “chatbots” or by the banking technology called “NFC: Near Field Communication”, inserted in smart cards and mobile phones.

– We can also have a strong positioning in relation to our competitors, by improving the customer experience via digital tools specific to our business.   Most of us know the tools that enable us to chat with our clients / partners / colleagues…

Tools that are constantly changing, taking a prominent place to communicate on a daily basis, such as Whats App, Messenger, Skype …

These platforms that offer the ability to use voice/video messages and insert links from the net, add value to the simple communication of sms and mms.

They are also revolutionary for our deaf and dumb clients with whom we can easily communicate remotely now, in sign language via the visual chat embedded in these mobile platforms. It was not possible before!

Thanks to the internet, we can also save an activity by giving it better visibility and allowing it to sell more.

For example, the family business in Marseille, Pellegrin & Fils, which had to rejuvenate the activity of jewelry by making accessible on-line more than a thousand pieces of its historical catalog.

Via the internet, the house is going to brand entry-level models “by S & F” to present its know-how, and will also offer stones of high value, over 50K euros. As his young boss, Arnaud Pellegrin says: “The market demands more services that traditional boutiques cannot meet. With the Internet, we want to extend the experience to our customers’ living room. ” He is not the only one. The online sale of jewelry has already accounted for 10% of French spending in the sector.

Towards experiential marketing and personalized approach…

As for the improvement of the customer experience, we can also talk about the installation of sensory marketing in stores that values ​​the well-being of customers during their visits.

Also, connected objects that bring real added value in certain areas like Medicine, where they help doctors to monitor their patients.

Finally, there are applications that encourage speech and communication with others, such as the French start-up Capanovi installed in Evreux in the Eure, FR, which developed the application Vocalyx. It gives the floor to people with language disorders. Thanks to a practical and playful approach, we can learn how to speak orally.   We talk about interactions between people, because indeed it is the creation of a link between all of us that occurs on the Web in all its forms of Emotions that lead us to sell our “know how”.

The Digital brings a link between us, and prompts us to leave our isolation, and not the opposite as some thought at the beginning of the digital transformation … This can be seen with numerical applications, like the ones that bring neighbors closer together. Let’s mention the start-up of St Malo, FR Mon P’Ti Neighborhood, which offers the proximity and 44K objects/services shared among neighbors via this collaborative platform.

Proximity … more and more, so Security is essential!

With the internet, we see that our behavior is changing, and we are increasingly moving towards a direct relational transaction without an intermediary, since we can do it now on our own.

Many applications and services are therefore created for and between individuals, such as the start-up Parkego, born in Nice, FR in 2014, which launched a platform for renting parking spaces between individuals.

But people who say “no intermediary” say “more responsibility” and therefore there are more risk. This is why we see a multitude of initiatives to obtain online security (data, applications, Cloud, external backup, SaaS software, etc.).

It is therefore necessary to select contacts and to protect ourselves to the maximum, considering that all content we put on the web can be read, and that some people may be not ethical, integral, and thus derived.

The internet is global with different laws in each country so protection must be done upstream effectively, in each market, even if risk 0 does not exist.  

Facing the constant and fast evolution of the online universe, we must maintain a balance between transparency and confidentiality of our data, and between real life and virtual life (that would impose a disruptive immediacy).

So, “YES” to :

• All things Digital to build knowledge constantly.

• Digital for simplicity, flexibility, speed, agility, reactivity, economy and orientation-use.

Let us therefore be open to our Digital world and adapt ourselves to our everyday life, so that we can constantly evolve with it, while preserving our real and unique identity.

But before you log in, make sure you have an available network!