How to Spring Clean Your Digital Places: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how you can give your online places a good clean. In this post, our focus is going to be on wider digital spaces, with emphasis on digital devices, web and mobile applications, file storage, and software. You’ve probably put this type of detailed spring cleaning off in the past, but with COVID-19 temporarily closing the doors of hospitality businesses around the globe, now’s a good time to optimise these digital places for easier operations. 

We recommend the following activities to polish your digital places and make technology work harder for you: 

1. Start by Weeding Out All of Your Devices

Do you have more than one digital device lying around? Your answer’s likely going to be a big “yes”. It’s time to round the lot up and organize their contents. Transfer useful files from older devices onto the devices you are currently using. Organise files so that they can be easily found, delete irrelevant files, and uninstall apps that you no longer use. This way you will have a cleaner user-interface on each device and you will have tons of space for new downloads going forward (which is important because your business is going to have to rely on new technologies and applications in the future). 

Now, you can safely store your older devices for later use or you can donate them to a good cause and create some extra space for yourself in your physical workspace. 

2. Polish Your Apps

The future of digital marketing is going to be very much web and mobile application based. Since you’ve cleared space on your devices, you should be able to store more files and programs. You can 1.) download new helpful and innovative apps and 2.) declutter and reorganise the applications you’re already using. 

Popular apps for the hospitality industry include:

• OpenTable (a table reservation app)
• Flypay (an app that allows patrons to choose a listed restaurant or bar location, enter their table number, and have their bill instantly retrieved)
• Bamboo HR (assists with streamlining HR processes within your business)
• Mind Meister (an app that assists with the planning of events, restaurant, and coffee shop marketing)
• Typsy (a staff training platform for hospitality businesses)

Electronic Point of Sale Systems have also become an essential component of most successful hospitality businesses. You may want to use this time to get to know your current ePos system better or research other options that may better suit your niche. 

When it comes to organising your apps, you can look into removing users who are no longer with your organisation, improve your layouts to make them more user-friendly for your staff, and you make sure that everything is working systematically as it should (.i.e. get to know your apps back to front). 

3. Just Do the Updates

Update reminders can be a thorn in the side of daily work life, but we cannot keep putting them off indefinitely. If we fail to do software updates, then we threaten the security of our digital devices. They will also run more slowly. As a result, the work we try to do on them will be completed at a reduced pace (which is no help when you’re trying to implement the best promotion techniques, for example).  

When you have downtime, then use the opportunity to prepare some non-computer work. This way you can allow your computers, tablets, and smartphones to run their hour-long (or maybe five-hour-long) update processes to optimise their systems. 

Tip: don’t forget to back up your files beforehand, just in case something goes awry! Which brings us to our next point. 

4. Take Advantage of File Sharing

You probably have a plethora of work files just hanging around on your desktop. Keeping these files on your computer alone, however, can present risks to your businesses’ security and knowledge base. If your laptop is stolen or loses functionality during a power surge (for example), then all of this important information will be gone – possibly forever. And that’s where file-sharing can be your saving grace.

If your business has a shared server, you can store your files under your umbrella. Alternatively, you can look to cloud storage solutions so that you can have access to your files from anywhere at any time. For documents that are more team-beneficial than sensitive, we suggest you look to Google Drive, Dropbox, or other file-sharing platforms for an effective solution. 

Once you have your file-sharing process set up, you can organise your information so that it’s even easier to access – and you can create some extra space on your devices at the same time!

4. Declutter Your Email Account

Some may refer to their email accounts as the central data hub of their business. If you receive your notifications and communications from customers and suppliers via email, then this will hold to you. 

Now’s the time to declutter your inbox and file your emails accordingly. You can:

• Delete all the emails you no longer need
• Delete and block junk mail
• Store the emails you want to hold onto by using cloud storage solutions
• Delete email accounts you no longer use

By removing important information from your email account and storing it on a safe file-storing server, you can reduce the chances of your email account being hacked for your private information. It also gives you a clean and organized account to work from going forward – think of it as room to breathe! 

With COVID-19 (and other unforeseen events) interrupting systems as we once knew them, it’s always good to prepare for the future of marketing. So, once you’ve spring cleaned and spruced your platforms, then it’s time to research new types of marketing and what they will mean for you going forward.

For more information on intelligent marketing tools that will help you push through tough economic times, please contact Stampede.