The world has significantly changed over the past years: technological advances and a more hectic lifestyle posed challenges to industries that needed to change to stay profitable, competitive on the market, and correspond to consumer needs. Last year’s pandemic also brought its corrections and forced mass digitization for businesses to survive.
So here we go with the industries that experienced the most drastic changes:
Restaurant business
The restaurant business is now far from what we knew several years ago. It especially suffered during the COVID pandemic in 2020 where during lockdowns they were closed for visitors. This caused the demand for reformatting traditional restaurants to takeaways and delivery services.
Special software like Untappd for business, booking solutions, and platforms for managing online orders and payments help to make running the restaurant businesses easier. And even now, when we can enjoy our favorite meals on-site, QR menus that allow owners to update menus in real-time and minimize expenses as well as other digital changes remain relevant and are not going away soon.
Technology
Technology is the pioneering sector where many innovations are born, and later on, they spread to other industries. The most recent changes are global cloud adoption that helps to increase uptime of all services operating online. Software development has evolved a lot over the past few years with products often now designed and built as native to a cloud environment.
Significant is the progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning that help to analyze the data inputs and act proactively. Consequently, these changes allow automating the critical processes in all the spheres where they are used and minimize human intervention.
Marketing
It’s no more about more discounts and ads everywhere to promote products and services. Now, the marketing industry becomes more user-oriented and the main marketing aim is finding a perfect match between a product and its audience. Marketing experts started relying more on analytics and other smart solutions that find patterns in user behavior, can predict and recommend goods based on previous choices. Another thing that becomes popular in this sphere is customer segmentation to better target their users and tailor marketing messages so that they are relevant to the needs
Real estate
Another industry that experienced changes is real estate. Typically associated with offline activities, it’s getting more digital. Thus, real estate is embracing new technologies to promote services and communicate with customers like CRM systems, online learning to help experts to obtain their licenses, and interactive online tours so that people can review property they are interested in without leaving home. Safe online transactions and ways to confirm the identity online makes operations like signing contracts, buying and selling property much easier.
Takeaways
There are many lessons to learn and trends to spot from observing these industries and changes that happened to them, like the following:
- Mass digitization is not going away anytime soon, so the demand for building and growing the online presence will become even more popular.
- Artificial Intelligence and smart software to help businesses interact with their audiences.
- Unexpected circumstances like pandemics open new opportunities and can significantly transform the way businesses can provide their services to their consumers.
- Customers are the true king when it comes to business relations, and instead of generic campaigns, businesses need to personalize their communication.
There are a lot more challenges to come, and industries that are able to quickly adapt to them and change their development direction will thrive. The COVID and economic crisis showed us that we need to prepare for the unexpected and search for creative ways of delivering value to the customer as the food industry did. And last but not least, with time, the consumers’ habits are also changing, so businesses should constantly monitor the market and keep the portrait of a target user persona always actual to correspond to the demands.
