When you are starting a business or perhaps even considering expanding, the costs add up thick and fast. Entrepreneurs are looking for where they can save, rather than spend but sometimes you need to spend a little here and there to accumulate elsewhere. Most business owners have sunk money into something, only to later find it wasn’t as beneficial as they first thought.
Here are a couple of places where money is always well spent.
Branding
It doesn’t matter if you a Joe Blogger down the road, or a massive corporation, branding matters. Putting time and effort into getting something solid designed and implemented is essential – and worth it. Why is it worth the spend? Good branding helps you create some common ground with your prospective customers. Different shapes and colors have very defined psychological and emotional responses, and good branding will tap into that. Great branding is linked to business performance, perhaps that isn’t that much of a surprise. The heart and idea behind your business should be represented in the branding and very clearly aimed at your target audience.
Social Media Management
You can always tackle this one yourself. By purchasing subscriptions on some automated drip feed campaigns via MissingLttr, or for full social media scheduling you could use Buffer, Social Oomph, Hootsuite or Social Sprout. You would be remiss to not have social media built in as an integral part of your business plan and marketing at all times. Why should you spend out? Well, it’s a constant conversation. The engagement will lead to customers understanding and having a relationship with your brand, and then turning that into a sales conversion. Essentially you are the expert on your brand, use social media to write to the story and guide the press.
Support
From organizational support to IT support, you need to have it ready. Often the best support will be local to you, however, you could have IT Support in Houston and a Virtual Assistant in Venezuela. The most fantastic thing about all of the technology available is that you have access to everything 24/7. So let’s talk about administrative and organizational support. Behind most ‘work from home’ types, you will find an absolute wizard called a Virtual Assistant. They can manage everything from arranging your appointments to booking your travel. And, see that social media management above? They are a dab hand at that too. The supporting players in your team actually play a pretty crucial role, it is worth spending out to keep them sweet and pay for quality.
Market research
The largest amount of cash will likely be spent here. When you are writing your business plan or reviewing your old one ready to expand again research is crucial. Without either employing a specialist company or getting out there and doing it yourself you are basically operating blindly. Do people actually want that service? Is that really the price they want to pay for it? Without having some solid research-based evidence, you could be spending money on product development and staff and so zero return. Market research can invalidate or validate your whole business – and it pays to be sure.
