Top Four Business Investments to Make This 2018
Proper budget allocation is key to consistent and sustainable growth for any business. Pouring your capital into prototyping a new, untested product line or purchasing cheap leads that don’t get converted into paying customers can hurt your business’ finances. And for a cash-strapped startup who doesn’t have the financial backing of VCs and angel investors, making even the smallest investment mistakes can bankrupt your company. To add to the pressure and stress of budget allocation, industries are also currently undergoing major overhauls, with new technologies being introduced on a regular basis. To help guide you through the tricky process of budget allocation, here are the top four business investments to make this year:
Online Presence
Some companies invest up to a quarter of a million dollars for the most cutting-edge and user-intuitive dedicated website for their business. Fortunately, you don’t need your pockets to be this deep in order to gain the online presence you desire for your brand. With the help of the best eCommerce platform, you can make your presence known not just to your target audience but to other niche markets around the world as well. But even eCommerce is undergoing big changes that will serve to refine and influence itself in the future. For instance, AI, particularly machine learning, is becoming increasingly commonplace in the world of eCommerce with the increasing amounts of data that businesses are working with. Digital wallets, thanks to blockchain technology, is also becoming fairly attractive to today’s generation of consumers, which is being taken on as a newly added feature of modern websites.
Digital Marketing
Done right, digital marketing is always a wise investment of your company’s budget. Sadly, many startups make the awful mistake of waiting months or even years before they put in any real investments into digital marketing strategies. In some cases, failure to invest in digital marketing stem from the lack of knowing where to start. Simply put, you cannot lose any investments put towards performance metrics. Always monitor your marketing campaigns and modify them as needed. If you have little to no experience with marketing, you always the option of outsourcing it to a third-party.
Workforce Training
Investing in your team is another no-brainer. The more competent your team members are, the more productive they become and the higher the quality of output achieved. Building a better workforce also fosters a strong company culture that can attract the best talent. Allocate a portion of your budget and profits into human resource programs, such as continuing education and certification for your employees. Make sure your employees stay up-to-date with the latest industry technologies, policies, and knowledge that affect their day-to-day work. Last but not least, investing in your workforce boosts your employee retention rate and lowers hiring costs. Keep in mind that hiring a new employee is at least six times costlier than keeping an existing one.
Customer Relations
It sounds like an overhyped buzzword that doesn’t really mean anything or means something too vague, but customer relations is a serious and very important organ of any healthy business. Negative or nonexistent customer relationship management in a business can lead to high attrition rate within your customer base, meaning you lose alarming volumes of customers frequently. As a result, you end up spending more money on lead generation and marketing channels, which ultimately eat up your profits and disable business growth. With the help of a CRM platform, you can cultivate stronger relationships with your customers and suppliers/vendors.
Conclusion
These are only few of the many business investments to make this 2018. The greater your budget, the more areas you can allocate money into. Keep in mind that there is no specific area or department to invest in as this ultimately depends on the type and size of your business as well as its current circumstances and future objectives
