At the end of this module you will be able to:

01 Recognise the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.

02 Create and design your own website.

03 Be aware of the importance of social networks and their management.

04 Be aware of the importance of online marketing and recognise tools for online marketing strategies.

05 Manage digital storage and share of documents using the cloud.

Making your family enterprise digitally effective is one of the key points to grow your business and reach success. In this course you will learn how to do it.

One of the most distinctive elements of a family business is its traditional character. This tradition includes the transmission of family values and the culture of each particular family enterprise. These traditional aspects mean that, in many cases, entrepreneurship within the family business is relegated to the background, with more traditional working and organisational methods being chosen.

However, times change, society moves on, market trends evolve and the organisational and management strategies of this type of businesses must also adapt to those changes.

Nowadays, and even with more relevance after the Covid-19 crisis, entrepreneurship in family businesses has become an essential feature for their survival.

Over the years, the generational handover of family enterprises has gradually introduced the entrepreneurial spirit of the new generations, leaving behind the fear of getting involved in unknown or high-risk projects and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship within the family business.

In order to ensure the growth, sustainability and success of family businesses, entrepreneurship and innovation should be promoted with respect to the following aspects:

- Motivation, willingness to innovate and to accept and adapt to changes. In this sense, it is of great importance to transmit the traditional values of the family business through the adoption, use and possibilities offered by new technologies.

- Ease and flexibility to identify possible innovative ideas and intra-entrepreneurs (entrepreneurial people who contribute innovative ideas within a company), whether family members or employees, and to motivate and encourage their development.

- Have clear growth objectives.

- Keeping the core management of a family business together, with a common business idea and goal of growth and commitment.

- Adopting a management model that promotes an entrepreneurial spirit, the flexibility to innovate, evolve and reinvent itself. This includes, in the case of family businesses that have professionals in management who are external to the family, knowing how to take their ideas and decisions into account, keeping an open mind and knowing how to involve these professionals so that they form part of the values of the family business, encouraging innovation and the growth of the company itself.

- Analysing your competitors to differentiate yourself from the rest and make your product or services valuable and necessary for your customers.

With these principles of entrepreneurship in mind, the next step is to make your business digitally active. In the following units we will give you some tips on how to do this yourself.

Nowadays, it is essential for your family business to have an internet presence. This will allow you to expand the possibilities of your business and reach a larger number of customers, which will dramatically increase your profits.

The first thing you need to have a presence on the internet is a website. There are many programmes and applications that allow you to create one yourself. However, before you start there are a few things you need to keep in mind:
- You have to take care of the corporate image of your company and be coherent with the design. Your website will be your external image, what your potential clients will see of you and your business. That is why you must take care of it and transmit in a simple, clear and elegant way the values and the concept of your enterprise.
- You must facilitate the customer experience, i.e., use simple language, short paragraphs, choose an appropriate font size, the content must be relevant, the information must be accessible and easy to find, the images must be of high quality and the website must have a Responsive design, i.e., it must be accessible and visible from any device (computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.).
- You have to catch the attention of your customers, respect your image, but create something that is attractive. It is very useful to do a little research on your competitors or successful companies so that you know what works, and so take it as an inspiration.

You can always ask a professional to create your website, but there are many tools that allow you to create it yourself without any experience in web design and that offer endless possibilities that will be more than enough to launch your family business on the internet. In addition, you can find tutorials that explain step by step how to create it. Here are some of them: 
- Wix. This tool offers a responsive design with more than 500 predefined templates that allow you to choose the one that best suits your business concept. In addition, you can customise them to make it unique and yours. Wix is one of the most used tools for creating websites because it has a free version.
- SITE123. This website builder allows you to create your website for free in a very intuitive and simple way, and offers free support 24 hours a day.
- Wordpress. This tool is one of the most popular and widely used because it allows you to create a website easily, with different templates and formats and has integrated marketing and SEO services, to grow your family business.
- Squarespace. It allows you to create websites with a very professional style and image, and has both free and paid versions. It also includes SEO and traffic analysis tools for your website, which will provide you with valuable information to evaluate your business strategy, get to know your customers better, and therefore improve or modify it if necessary.

One of the most peculiar advantages and characteristics of family businesses is precisely that, their closeness and familiarity, especially if we are talking about small and micro enterprises, and therefore, you should take advantage of that to boost its growth.

Many of your customers are probably lifelong customers and even, over time, friends, so the use of social networks to publicise your business, get even closer to your customers and foster and maintain that "friendship", can have a very positive impact on your company.

In addition, the participation of the new generations, who are more assiduous in the use of communication through social networks, can bring a fresh, modern and more technological air to your family business.

Therefore, the presence of your business on social media will allow you both to show your business strategy and make known your products or services, and to transmit the values of your enterprise to the digital world and show its more human side through these communication channels.

However, you should bear in mind that there are different social networks and each one has its own characteristics and is aimed at a different type of audience.

- Facebook will always be one of the best options for your business. It is a platform that has more than 1650 million users, from all over the world, of all ages, sectors, etc. It is very easy to use and manage and offers multiple functions to promote your family business.

- Instagram is a network aimed at a younger audience, it is more visual as the publications are made through photos or videos that can include a description or comment. It is quite interactive and eye-catching, so it could be a good option for your business.

- LinkedIn is a more professional network and therefore an excellent choice for networking and doing business.

- YouTube allows you to promote and showcase the products and services of your business through videos that will reach any part of the world and any audience. Moreover, it allows your customers and the public interested in your company to subscribe to your channel, and in this way, they will receive alerts that will keep them up to date with the content you publish.

- WhatsApp. Nowadays, it is the app that keeps us connected and in touch with the whole world. You can also use it as a tool to promote your company as it has a professional version (WhatsApp Business) with which you can interact with your customers easily and efficiently, automate responses, start advertising campaigns, create product catalogues, etc.

Although social media is a great tool to grow and raise awareness of your enterprise, you must keep in mind that, to get the desired results, you must invest time and keep them active, i.e., post relevant content frequently.

Furthermore, you will also have to interact with your audience or customers, respond to comments, requests, complaints, etc.  This also takes time. For this, there are tools that can help you manage your social media, which will save you a lot of time and allow you to achieve greater effectiveness with less effort.

- Hootsuite. This tool has a free version (management of two social network profiles) and a paid version (management of up to ten profiles). With it you can schedule the publication of content on all profiles or on the ones you select, on the same day or on different days. It allows you to interact, respond to comments, receive alerts of any interaction with your networks and launch digital marketing campaigns.

- Buffer. With Buffer you can manage your social networks for free and you can schedule up to 10 posts on all your social profiles. You can also analyse the impact of your posts and the interaction, which will provide you with valuable information to define the profile of your customers or audience and thus, being able to improve and adapt your business strategy, your products or services.

Digital tools are a wonderful instrument to expand your business with little effort and investment. Your business strategy should include a commercial strategy in which good marketing plays a crucial role. In addition to the physical and digital image that your company conveys, you should use marketing as a tool for growth and for transmitting the unique values of your family business. Here are some of the tools you can use to engage in digital marketing:

- Hubspot. This software offers free marketing tools such as automated email marketing, reporting, live chat and forms to provide a personalised customer service experience. It makes it easy for you to convert visitors into potential customers.

- Mailchimp. It allows you to send email marketing campaigns, analyse your audience and create a more defined profile with which you can personalise your marketing campaigns to obtain better results, through automatic suggestions for publication and content creation.

- SurveyMonkey. With this tool you can create surveys to better understand the profile and opinion of your customers. This will allow you to change and adapt your marketing strategy and find out which services or products your customers like the most.

- Google. It offers several free tools for data analysis and statistics that will allow you to know the number of visits to your website, trends, analysis of your competition and keywords in the browser. This information will allow you to define your business strategy, improving your website, its presence and positioning on the internet.

- Google Analytics provides you with information about how users act on your website, i.e. number of users, pages they visit, time, visit times and visits in real time.

- Google Trends allows you to analyse search trends and patterns on Google and YouTube for popular keywords, topics and videos.

- Google Search Console helps you to improve your visibility on the internet by analyzing the indexing status of your website, thus optimising your online positioning and improving your website's search results on Google.

Digital document storage in the cloud is one of the best ways to keep your important or sensitive information safe and secure. The cloud allows you to store and organize your documents, download them at any time and have them at your fingertips whenever you need them and from any device, as long as you have access to the internet. There are different cloud storage platforms:

- Google Drive allows you to store up to 15 GB for free. This storage is shared between your Gmail account, Google Photos and other Google services you use.

- Dropbox. Its free plan allows up to 2 GB of storage, although it has paid plans that allow storage of up to 2 TB.

- OneDrive is Microsoft's cloud. Its free version offers up to 5GB of storage. From OneDrive you can create or edit documents and share them without first downloading them to a device.

Remember (now you know about):

01 The fundamentals of entrepreneurship.

02 The importance of creating and designing your own website.

03 The influence of social networks and their management.

04 The importance of online marketing and recognizing tools for online marketing strategies.

05 Management of digital storage and sharing of documents using the cloud.

Keep going!