Digital expenses can cost a business a significant amount of its revenue. However, reducing these costs is a challenge for most businesses, because most of these costs seem fixed. Besides, most managers don’t know what to prioritize and what not to when it comes to reducing digital costs. With that, let’s look at the top 7 steps to cut digital costs in your business.
Begin with simple cuts
As we know, cutting costs for business is not easy. But, if you are willing to cut your digital expenses, start with projects that are not bringing you any money. Yes, it might be a challenge to admit that a bright idea didn’t perform as you expected—but you’d rather accept this, as it will help you stop channeling money into the wrong areas.
You can use Google Analytics to analyze your marketing strategies, and determine which strategies are not benefiting your business. Then, you will need to cut these strategies. You’d rather stop spending on digital marketing strategies that are not bringing money to your business, and channel the money to other essential areas.
Automate whatever you can
Automating most of your processes can make a big difference when it comes to reducing your digital costs, as well as increasing productivity. The availability of SaaS tools has made it possible to automate almost every other business function.
Thus, you should capitalize on tools like Xero and Freshbooks, as they can lower your headcount. Moreover, you can perform activities like taxation, accounting, payroll, and invoicing from one tool. You can use plenty of great free invoice template out there. This can help you free up your resources and time, and allow you to focus on growing your business.
Migrate your IT infrastructure into the cloud
Whether you run a business with a simple website or an online business with a multi-currency and multi-lingual website, you will require servers to host your site. And why is this? The software you use to manage your online business requires hosting services. Previously, businesses did this by buying and maintaining their physical servers.
The challenge is, this required business to spend a lot of money right from the start. And, as the business continues to grow, so does the computing needs. This also required businesses to expand their hardware, which was also costly.
But, this shouldn’t be the case anymore—thanks to the growth in cloud computing. Today, it’s possible to host your site on servers that are owned by third-party vendors like HostGator and GoDaddy. These vendors provide their services on a Pay as you go basis. Now, when your business grows, you’ll only need to upgrade on the next package, without any depreciation or fixed costs. Thus, your data will be safe on cloud-based platforms like Google Drive or DropBox.
Consider using free tools and apps
Today, you can also cut your digital expenses by taking your time to search for the best software before spending most of your money on expensive software programs. When you do the due diligence, you will realize that there is a free version for almost every software that you use daily at your business.
For instance, you don’t need to subscribe to analytics tools, while you can use Google Analytics for free. Also, you can do away with landlines, and replace them with VOIP—which are cheaper. Today, we also have platforms like zoom, FaceTime, and Skype that provide free video conferencing services—and they can save your business a lot of money. Lastly, you can use free versions of email services such as MailChimp in case you want to reach out to your customers.
Redesign your content marketing strategy
Always capitalize on your current marketing content. To do this, you must create versatile content, which can be used for different projects or for a long time. For example, you can create product descriptions that you can use on your social media platforms, website, flyers, as well as e-commerce platforms. Also, you can opt to create a copy for a product ad, and then expand it into an infographic, blog post, or a video.
Repurposing your content can go a long way in reducing your digital marketing expenses since you will not need to hire someone to create new content whenever you need it.
Consider independent reporting
Most agencies tend to be very choosy when showing data and metrics to impress their clients. With that, you need to have independent reporting for your business, so that you get real-time updates on the performance of your business. As said, earlier, you can consider using free tools like Google Analytics to have better insights into the performance of your business. This will also help you in reducing the costs since you will not need to hire an agency to assess your business.
Use email and phone validation tools
Most people consider validation tools, such as the phone validation tool by Byteplant to be costly. However, that’s not true, as it will significantly cut your digital expenses in the long run. Think of this—without a validation tool, you are more likely to target emails and phone numbers that don’t exist—which is a waste of resources. With the correct number and emails, you’ll always reach the intended person. While most businesses downplay the importance of validation tools, they are very effective in reducing digital costs.
