One of the first things you want to do if you’re trying to increase profit while decreasing operational costs is to organize your priorities. Integral tasks need to be at the top of the list, optional ones should be at the bottom. Oftentimes in order to get your top priorities accomplished, you’re going to have to axe some of the ones down the list.
That said, if you can expand your budget, you can organize your prioritize in a way which allows you to retain all your goals rather than having to pick and choose based on resources. One of the best ways to do this is to use modern technology available throughout today’s business world.
Perhaps start with marketing. You’re going to need some means of getting your name out there, and you want it to most effectively reach your target market. Additionally, you want this to happen in a non-obtrusive way which produces many leads ready to convert. One of the best ways to do as much is to combine online marketing techniques. There are several worth considering.
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, and it’s a marketing campaign where search engines post your ad, and you only pay for it if someone clicks on it. SMO stands for Social Media Optimization, and it’s a process of getting your products or services in front of those on social media networks. Then there’s SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
Applying Solid SEO Solutions
SEO techniques commonly reach more target leads with greater swiftness than most methods. There are a few reasons for this, chief among them the data which is gathered through varying SEO campaigns. This information paints a picture, and will tell you if you’re seeing ROI or not.
If you’re seeking SEO tips for your San Diego business, RocketPilots.com has information for you; according to the site: “There are four main types of SEO: Local SEO, Technical SEO, On Page SEO, and Off Page SEO and plenty of industry nomenclatures. So it’s no surprise when business owners have difficulty distinguishing good practices from outdated tactics.”
Something else you’re going to want to do is put the cloud to your advantage as much as you can. You don’t have to make the transition all at once, either; you can start out slow by merely putting one echelon of operations on the cloud. Take payroll, for example.
You can find certain applications that will help your business outsource payroll while conserving resources, like Clockspot , which provides an: “…online time clock [that] makes timesheets and payroll painless. No more paper, messy spreadsheets, or manual calculations.” You can process everything with the click of a mouse, essentially.
Implications
When you can erase an entire department, or the majority of it at least, from your budget, that will free up tens of thousands of dollars which you can put toward accomplishing the priorities you’ve set for your business. And with cloud computing tech, there are a lot of areas where you can optimize in this way.
Consider this: with cloud computing solutions, it has become possible to essentially outsource your entire suite of tech needs. From internal servers to end-user portals like tablets, laptops, desktops, and smartphones, to backup and data recovery, cloud computing does it all.
There are several specific services through cloud computing solutions which facilitate this. There’s IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, SaaS and DRaaS. These stand for: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Desktop as a Service, Software as a Service, and Disaster Recovery as a Service.
Now these are just a few of the many provisions which the cloud makes possible, another which is burgeoning is a secondary DaaS which refers to Device rather than Desktop as a Service. This is where you’d get managed endpoints at a monthly fee which are cutting-edge and maintained by professional organizations. If one breaks, you just trade it out; some turnover is built into the monthly fee. As yet, this secondary DaaS has yet to hit the mainstream.
$190k In Annual Savings?
So imagine this: you outsource your entire internal staff through BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, which utilizes your new cloud’s DaaS, or Desktop as a Service, so that employees can work anywhere they’ve got a reliable internet connection. Now the cost of the office space where they would have worked is excised.
You were paying $5k a month for it; you’ve just saved $60k a year. You save another $20k a year through reduction of server hardware costs; or thereabouts. Then you save a good $60k through the tech employees you no longer need on staff, and another $30k for the devices of your employees, and then another $20k for the backup server array you were using in case of emergency.
In one year, cloud computing could potentially save such an operation $190k. Granted, this will differ per business; but it’s easy to see why operations large and small increasingly become friendly to the cloud.
Between cloud computing solutions and modern SEO solutions, there are a lot of ways the modern business world can be conducive to those in large and small businesses. Consider your own situation, and see where you could upgrade things cost-effectively. You may be leaving money on the table and not even realizing it.