The goal of any business is to grow and thrive. As the old adage goes, though, you have to spend money to make money – and that’s not as easy for small businesses as it is for larger ones. Growth requires investment. If you’re a small business owner, though, that’s not always a straightforward proposition because you don’t want to make investments that could hamstring your ability to continue day-to-day operations as normal. You need to make high-ROI investments that produce quick results. We’re going to highlight some of those investments in this article. You want to stimulate fast growth for your small business, and you want to do it while spending as little money as possible. Here are a few ideas to help you get started.
Reduce Your Supply Chain Costs
The best thing about this investment is that it doesn’t require anything other than your time. You’ll have to spend some time on the computer doing research and crunching numbers, and you’ll probably have to do a bit of talking on the phone as well. However, you won’t have to spend any money that you’re not already spending.
One of the fastest ways to make your small business more profitable is by finding a new wholesaler or renegotiating your prices with your current wholesaler. After all, anything that reduces your product sourcing costs will immediately translate to increased revenue – either because you’re able to reduce your retail prices and win more business or because you’ll earn higher margins from your existing customers.
Regardless of what you’re purchasing – whether it’s wholesale vape juice or something else — your existing wholesaler isn’t the only company that offers those products. In every industry, wholesalers have no shortage of competition. Find out who those competitors are and get some quotes. Eventually, you’ll find a wholesaler that’s willing to supply the same products at a lower price. Once you’ve obtained a lower quote, get on the phone with your existing wholesaler and start negotiating. The time spent will be very worthwhile.
Improve Your Website’s Content
Regardless of the industry in which you do business, your website will always be your best “salesperson.” Finding your website – particularly on search engines such as Google – is how most of your potential customers will discover your business. Once people have discovered your website, the information that they read there will go a long way toward helping them to decide whether they’re going to buy from you or not.
With that in mind, your website’s content plays two extremely important roles. It helps people find your business, and it also helps to convert potential buyers into paying customers. The better the content is, the more sales you’ll make. It’s important for your sales-oriented content to be as helpful and informative as it can possibly be. Having a blog that’s regularly updated is also extremely valuable because it can help to increase the variety of search keywords that bring people to your website.
Improving your website’s existing content and adding high-value informational posts to your blog is another investment for which the only cost is your own time if you write the content yourself. Many small business owners find that writing their own content is impractical, though, because it would take them away from the more important task of running their businesses.
If you’re unable to find the time to write new website content, you’ll need to hire an outside writer. While that’s obviously more expensive, the benefit of investing in online content is that the content is yours forever. A successful blog post or high-quality product description can bring consistent traffic to your site for months or years and can potentially be worth many times what you paid for it.
Build an Email Marketing List
A website is the greatest marketing tool that any business could ever have. Even when you and your employees are all sleeping, your website remains available to bring new prospects your way and convert those prospects into customers. The downside of relying on your website to generate business, though, is that a website can only do that job if it receives traffic. For that to happen, you need to rank well on Google. In that sense, a large part of your business’s success depends on a factor that you don’t control at all. At any point, Google’s ranking algorithm could change, and your rankings could drop. You could lose some or all of your traffic as a result. What would you do if that happened?
Relying solely on Google to supply your website with traffic is a recipe for disaster because whether your business succeeds or not is of no concern to Google’s ranking algorithm. Search engine traffic will always be a major part of how you win new customers, but you should never depend on a third party as your only source of revenue. You need to supplement your search engine traffic with another source of traffic that you can control more directly. You need an email marketing list.
The great thing about email marketing is that you don’t have to have any specialized technical knowledge to do it successfully. There are many affordable email marketing providers who make it incredibly easy for you to get started. They’ll generate a signup form that you can simply paste into your website’s source code. An email marketing provider can manage your subscriber list for you and will even provide an interface that makes it easy to compose and send newsletters.
Before you can start sending messages, though, you need subscribers. An email list typically needs many thousands of subscribers before it’ll begin to earn significant revenue, so the time to start getting subscribers is right now – when you’re not counting on that revenue to sustain your business.
One easy way to get people to opt into your email marketing list is by offering a reward such as a single-use coupon code for new signups. You could integrate the coupon code into your signup form, or you can include it in the welcome email that’s sent to new subscribers. Offering a coupon code to new subscribers isn’t just a worthwhile expense because it’ll encourage people to join your mailing list. It’s also worthwhile because it can help to convince people to buy from you if they’re on the fence.
Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the views of IWB.