Business is business, but it’s also costly upon starting up and can leave you profitless for some time when getting all aspects into place. To be successful, you need to have a good USP, an excellent online presence, be well marketed, have good customer relations, and always be looking forward. For small businesses or entrepreneurs, that’s an awful lot to be asking.
So it’s no wonder help is needed. Many people put this help off due to budget constraints, but there are actually areas of business that may be cheaper than you think, or there are certainly ways to cut those costs…
Website Building
Businesses can invest tens of thousands of dollars into building a website, with huge costs across designs, development and hosting. Investing in a graphic designer and developer can be worthwhile, but there are cheaper alternatives that are just as effective.
Website building platforms like Duda offer thousands of professional website templates that are flexible and can be adjusted to your brand. They’re considerably cheaper with flexible price plans, while also getting the full support you need when creating your site. If your business is largely ran through your website, it’s an incredibly important aspect to get right, and while you may think it’s a part of your budget you need to go all out for, you’d be surprised by just how effective you can be with a website building platform.
They provide websites for thousands of businesses that have gone one to become multi-million pound outfits. So, why not yours?
Customer Service
Customer service is a key element of any business, particularly those in Ecommerce. However, employing someone to run that aspect of your business is costly. Try and do it on your own, and you’ll have no time to focus on growing and operating your business.
Customer service tools are becoming increasingly popular, and while they will naturally be more expensive than you taking on the role of answering queries yourself, the loss of business and growth you’ll suffer as a result of that makes these tools much more cost effective.
Tools such as the Hubspot Service Hub, Olark and Mobile Monkey offer various automated live chat style functions that can keep your customer support running smoothly without the need to have it manned 24/7.
Social Media & Marketing
Social media is a huge part of business these days and there are a number of methods you can use to make sure that your channels are well-maintained. Firstly, you can invest in tools such as Hootsuite, which are reasonably priced. These allow you to schedule posts in, meaning you can get all your posts out of the way in bulk.
Alternatively, social media is a career many young professionals are pursuing currently. Why not consider apprenticeships, work experience or graduate programmes to get a fully fledged member of staff at a much more manageable salary than hiring an experienced social media manager.
They can be just as effective, have new, fresh ideas, while also growing your team and understanding the core values of your business and its offering.
This is also a useful option for marketing too. While it may also be more cost efficient to hire an agency rather than developing an in-house team if you’re wanting to go all-in on your marketing, PR, social, PPC and SEO strategy.
Agencies can cost various prices, although you will typically find something for all budgets. Start-up marketing agencies will ultimately offer you a lower price, and could be a more apt business for you to work with, given you’ll be on a journey together as well as being more likely to get more attention, compared to bigger agencies who tend to chase bigger clients.
