With the sheer amount of competition out there and the future of the economy being so uncertain, small business owners everywhere are always looking for ways to trim expenditure and make their capital go further. Being cautious in this way, you might feel like you simply don’t have the money to actively market your business’s website. The reality of it, however, is that your website has the potential to save a lot of money. Here’s how…
Free Customer Service
Most customers to any business will have a lot of questions both before and after purchasing a product. By using your site as a platform to answer these questions, you can free up time which can be invested in other areas. What are your opening hours? Do you stock this or that brand? Is this or that service insured against (insert accident here). After converting, your customers are going to have various other questions, regarding things like product maintenance, how to fix a certain problem, and so on. When you have all this kind of information up on your website, it will save you a lot of time that would usually be spent answering sales questions, which you can then use to chase other sources of revenue.
Reduce the Cost of Printed Materials, or Eliminate Them Altogether!
All too often, I hear about businesses which invest a huge sum of money in a bulk order of printed marketing materials, and end up regretting it. While printed media can certainly be a useful marketing tool for a lot of businesses, it’s pretty common for a few months to pass, various changes to happen, and for most of the information in these printed materials to be rendered inaccurate. Then, you’re left with a load of leaflets or programs which aren’t good for anything but kindling! Considering how accessible cheap web hosting is these days, there’s no real reason to put yourself at risk of this kind of disaster. A well-oiled website can cut the cost of your printed media considerably, or even eliminate the need for it altogether if your business fits the bill!
Save on the Cost of Expansion
If you were running a business that relies on a physical store, and you decided to expand your operation into some other niche, you might feel that you need to source the capital to open another physical store. This isn’t necessarily true in this modern, digital world of ours. Instead of spending the money on opening a completely new physical store, you can simply extend your reach with a new e-commerce store for considerably less. Even if you’re running a small venture that provides a physical service like landscaping, catering, locksmiths and so on, you can maintain that original base of operations while expanding into related markets through additional websites. This can totally eliminate the massive expenditure it would take to open a new physical outlet for the next step in your business.
If you thought your site was nothing but a drain on your capital, I hope this brought you around!
