Do you know that social media can help you cut down on operating costs? Managing a business can be a daunting task and growing a successful one requires scaling through the myriad challenges in the complex business environment. Financial issues are one of such common business challenges. The availability of funds or otherwise often impacts on the growth and operations of every business.
When a company is in an unfavourable financial position, its ability to grow, scale, and face setbacks will be shaky. Consequently, many business failures have been attributed to financial challenges such as negative cash flow, bad debt or inability to break even.
While there are a number of reasons for these poor outcomes, some of these can be attributed to poor financial (or expense) management. For every business to achieve maximum profitability, there is a need to achieve its best revenue while keeping its costs to the barest minimum. Marketing, advertisement, recruitment and customer service are some of the critical strategy businesses of all types and sizes have employed in the quest to driving revenue.
For many of them, a significant portion of its expenses is expended on marketing. Traditional marketing can sometimes be very expensive when compared to leveraging social media.
As such, making the move from a conventional to social media strategy to a social media-reliant one can be an effective way to cut cost for a business. For one, it provides the platform to reach customers and clients seamlessly. Some of the specific ways businesses can use social media to reduce their operating costs include:
Brand Management
Growing a brand is often key for businesses. Typically, businesses and organisations engage brand development experts to grow their reach and make the public positively reinforce their products or offering with the assurance of positive customer experiences and expectations. The belief in the authenticity and reliability of a brand is a key driver of consumer preference. This is what every business seeks to achieve as consumers are often drawn to brands that they recognise as opposed to ones that they do not know or have tried.
Social media is now a leading tool for brand development and management through constructive public engagements, position statements, and general interaction. Social media is an effective alternative to the use of the erstwhile traditional brand management methods. Social media can be used to build a community of followers for the business and attracting them through promotional offers while also reducing operating costs to this regard.
Smarter Advertising
Contemporary advertisement channels have been known to be effective; however, they can also be expensive. It provides an avenue for easier reach and it leaves you with verifiable data to make strategic decisions. Social media platforms provide businesses with free to low paying options to market their progress. Business managers can post product descriptions, service offering or promotional offers to followers.
Social media advertising is fast becoming prominent as it captures audience engagement, key data analytics/ customer information, instant feedback from customers which can be further streamlined to the chosen target audience at a relatively low cost. This method promotes a higher return on investment for the business at a rate that is much faster and less expensive.
Improving Customer Experience
Having multiple touchpoints for customer engagement and customer experience is the backbone of having a customer-centric approach to business. The contemporary customer service is to have an on-premise customer service dedicated desk, email or phone number that customers can access. However, social media helps brands engage customers, understand their needs and respond to them promptly at very little cost. Social media is an excellent cost-saving approach compared to the cost of purchasing and running basic customer service.
Smart Recruiting
Although contemporary recruitment advertisement such as publication on a daily newspaper or printed flier can be relatively effective, this is not the most cost-effective approach in reaching out to the target stream of talents. Posting job openings on social media can help reach more people and can easily attract referral engagements.
Social media can be an efficient alternative to contemporary marketing techniques while also offering the benefit of significantly lower operating costs. Driving effective online campaigns can sometimes be expensive, but it is not as expensive as the use of traditional media. The social media platforms are also very easy to manage and do not require the technical and professional expertise that most contemporary media requires.