Budget ideas for boosting a small business

Small may be beautiful, but left untended, allowed just to grow ‘organically’ with not pushing and shoving, small can wither to nothing, leaving you with a business that’s dead in the water. Instead, it’s vital to look at every opportunity, grass-roots and bigger, and spot every chance to maximise your company, increase its fame and reputation, and therefore swell the coffers so that you stay afloat.

When you want to take your company up another rung or two of the ladder, sitting back and just hoping it will happen will end in frustration and failure. You have to take steps, even the ones that don’t seem to have an immediate or quantifiable impact. And the more steps you take, the more likely it is that one or more of them will bring rewards. And then, when your business grows and phone rings all day, emails coming in at an unprecedented rate, you’re left with the dilemma; either you do everything yourself and burn out, or you employ people but have to be careful all your income evaporate paying other people’s salaries.

The first thing you can do to safeguard your business and give it a shot in the arm is to zoom in on a single product or service. Don’t start with a plethora of things, trying to please everyone. Just pick one element of your business and then market and promote it to heaven and back. You may have started out with a business idea with several off-shoots and subsidiary services. Let these simmer in the background for now, while you push just one element of it with whatever promotion you can afford. Costly advertising may be off limits for now, but social marketing is relatively painless and inexpensive.

Now that you have a single service that people like, it’s time to bring in the additional things that complement it. Your expanded product line will please your existing customers. If your business idea is a service of some kind, then make sure the additional services dovetail logically with your original service. Come up with deals, which encourage people to use more than one service. If your business idea is an actual product, and you’ve managed to stock it with retailers, it will look better on the shelves once you have a few more products that  go with it.

After this, strengthen your relationship with existing customers. For a moment, forget about measures you can take to find new customers. Instead, come up with deals, like discounts for bulk buying, to solidify your contact with happy customers. Two-for-one, for example, could work well. Alternatively, a loyalty scheme that rewards customers once they made ten purchases, is another relationship-strengthening method.

Business could now be building, possibly beyond your original forecast. It’s time to think about extra pairs of hands to help you stay buoyant. This could come in the form of an employee, a freelancer or even family members. You’ll start cultivating relationships with a network of potentially life-saving and talented people. If you need more people on-site but want to save on office equipment, get in touch with an office removals london company and see if they have materials and furniture kicking about and unwanted.

If you haven’t already done so, think about your web presence. You need a website and the full complement of social networking accounts, from Facebook to Google Plus. You can skip the option of using an expensive web agency (anyway, everyone is sick of elaborate Flash intros and other bells and whistles), although going that route could mean useful data capture. It’s much easier to create your own website, using inexpensive online options which require no technical knowledge and which only need a few pounds a month to keep rolling.

You’re up and running now but there are still countless moves you can make to keep developing, including partnering with similar companies, targeting markets you’ve hitherto ignored, starting electronic newsletters and much, much more.

Taken from: Guest Post (article, By Samuel Joyce), Google (images).