Everything around us is constantly changing. Many changes happen in the background or at such a slow pace that we’re not even aware of them.

Take the development of mobile internet over the last 15 years, which has drastically changed overall consumer behavior. It happened in the background but is now considered a given for many. In contrast, a crisis like COVID-19 emerged out of nowhere, giving consumers and businesses only a few weeks to deal with the sudden change.

Without being ready to adapt, we may find ourselves in serious trouble – especially if you’re a business owner. The only way for a business to stay relevant, valuable, and at the forefront of the competitive edge is by successfully adapting to changing conditions.

Which then leaves us with the big question: How adaptable is your business?

What makes a business adaptable?

Nature has a simple recipe for this: evolution. Adaptable organisms are more likely to survive and reproduce, leaving less adaptable organisms to go extinct.

Just like in nature, adaptability and survival go hand in hand in business. Nature ensures that a central question is answered in a permanent experiment: What works and what doesn't. This is the blueprint for the principle of adaptability, which businesses must also understand.

As the world is becoming more digitized, more businesses find themselves pressured by the challenges of an ever-changing online landscape.

Building for adaptability should, therefore, be an integral part of every business’s agenda if it wants to survive in the digital age.

Measures of adaptability

Businesses should embrace the idea of "digital evolution" and understand that they can only thrive with a strong commitment to change and constant improvement.

There's great business potential in systematically adapting through lessons of regular and continuous optimizations.

Sometimes it’s just about small but significant improvements that have a great impact on success.

Here are four factors of adaptability that are crucial for businesses who want to reach a higher evolutionary stage in today’s world.

Experiment and learn to adapt

Adaptable businesses embrace experimentation and learning.

A willingness to experiment and a certain tolerance for error allows businesses to successfully adapt and position themselves sustainably. You try out a few variants, weed out the failures and iterate on the successes to constantly improve.

Digital marketing, for example, is hardly imaginable without recurring experimentation and the improvement based on what has been learned for future campaigns. You try out different messaging, visuals, and channels to learn which ad configuration works the best.

But it’s important to fail methodically by running experiments that make failure survivable. The goal is always to adapt by learning quickly how to maximize the return on failure.

Adapt through your website

A business is only as adaptable as its website.

Nothing reflects the adaptability of a business more than its website. The website is at the core of business success in the digital age.

But to effectively turn website visitors into paying customers, you need an online presence whose structure, content and design can adapt to the changing needs and expectations of customers.

Think of our mobile-centric world where customers expect a seamless and aesthetically pleasing online experience across all devices. Businesses who don’t meet their expectations put themselves at a drastic competitive disadvantage.

To achieve a flawless experience across all touchpoints, businesses rely on responsive websites that dynamically adapt to different screen sizes. This requires tools that replace the traditional web development approach and help businesses adapt at pace.

JAMstack offers a way to build high-performing websites and applications by removing the need to worry about static web architecture. JAMstack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, and is considered the next evolution in modern web development.

More businesses rely on JAMstack to create responsive sites that are easy-to-navigate and user-friendly regardless of the device. It offers a new way to build websites and apps that are faster, cheaper, and more secure. Embracing the power of adaptability, Cobiro now enables businesses to build modern JAMstack websites for free.

Adapt to customer needs

Customer focus is a major driving force behind adaptability.

Businesses that are committed to improvement believe that without seeing the world through the customer’s eyes, they cannot successfully adapt.

Customers are normally only a few clicks away from turning to other options, making it a positive user experience crucial. Providing a great user experience is important because only a happy customer is likely to become a loyal customer who can help boost revenue.

Having close to ties with customers is necessary to identify and anticipate the direction in which their needs are moving.

Equipped with a strong customer focus, businesses can consistently create more value by improving their offering and optimizing the user experience based on what their customers are demanding.

Leverage data to adapt

Without measurable data to analyze, it'll prove difficult to adapt.

By implementing data-driven practices, businesses can leverage data to identify the early signs of change, make sense of them, and adapt accordingly.

Adaptable businesses don’t just understand the value of data, they also work with tools that help them obtain valuable information, recognize relevant patterns, and gain insights.

Cobiro helps businesses gain data-driven insights at every stage of the digital evolution – from building responsive websites to running optimized ads.

Easy-to-use tools translate the data into actionable insights and allow businesses to adapt their online presence in unparalleled ways to build a competitive advantage over competitors.

An advantage that continues to grow as more relevant data is generated.

Adapt or die

In an online environment that is constantly and rapidly changing, adaptability has become more crucial than ever before.

To survive as a business isn’t just about static capabilities in delivering an offering online. It’s about the capabilities that foster adaptability.

"Adapt or die" may seem like a harsh statement, but it's a necessity to constantly move forward, seize new market opportunities, and achieve online success.