According to a recent LinkedIn article, only half of all businesses survive five years. Even grimmer, only one-third survive 10 years. In the current economic climate, businesses are challenged with having to simultaneously cut costs while still retaining customers. Below explains four ways to cut costs without losing customers.
Reduce Marketing Costs
Marketing can consume financial resources without any tangible results. Therefore, base new marketing strategies on solid research and demographic data. A marketing project or campaign must be carefully executed with as few mistakes as possible. Social media has proven to be a cost effective solution for marketing needs. That is, businesses can encourage and manage customer driven marketing content through popular social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, any business can create an attractive Facebook homepage and engage customers online through establishing a community of faithful followers. The cheapest source of free advertising is passionate social media followers who contribute personalized content and publicly interact with the company online. In addition to this, social media reaches a broader audience at a fraction of the marketing costs.
Expand Online Presence
Cloud-based services offer companies the opportunity to virtually expand their business while saving money. Cloud based services offer excellent IT savings through reducing the costs associated with software, hardware, networking, maintenance and electricity. Cloud-based computing services, such as documentation and file storage, offer a convenient and centralized solution for employees. In addition to this, a newly designed website, which integrates with social media, is a great way to attract new customers and keep old ones. A website provides inexpensive solutions when it comes to self-serve customer service. For example, allowing customers to log in and check their product or service update will save money while providing an important service to customers.
Improve Operations Performance
The best ways to improve business efficiency and performance is through a quality management system (QMS). A QMS program focuses on implementing policies, procedures and processes with the goal of providing top-notch quality products and services. A QMS program involves specific procedures for documentation, work tasks, employee training and problem reporting. In addition to this, QMS programs involve regular audits to analyze and correct program deficiencies. They have been proven to reduce waste, eliminate redundancies and correct chronic problems. An efficient, standardized approach to work processes will improve overall operational performance. For example, manufacturers rely on QMS programs to ensure product consistency through regular product inspections and measurements. As a result, the customer will enjoy consistently higher quality products and services.
Business Process Management
Business Process Management software (BPMS) is an excellent way to understand and automate business processes. In fact, according to Forbes magazine, Wikipedia’s secret to success is using business-process modeling for its popular encyclopedia. That is, Wikipedia is based on the concept of being able to continually create text links for potential pages. Therefore, being able to automate processes will decrease costs and wasted time while increasing business efficiency. Even better, the concept of business process management is flexible and can be applied to almost any business field. From a customer’s perspective, the commercial transaction will simply be smoother. Studies have shown that companies that use business process management tools enjoy a 95 percent success rate with project implementation. In addition to this, 80 percent of companies surveyed rated BPM better than CRM, ERP and SCM. Business process management is an excellent tool for bushiness process standardization.
In conclusion, companies can cut costs through reducing marketing costs, expanding their online presence, improving operations performance and utilizing business process management tools.
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