The great recession of the last 2-3 years has made many small business owners skittish about spending money even if it can help them improve sales in the future. Many of the small business owners are hunkering down to survive till the sky is cleared. They are happy with maintaining current sales and making reasonable profit. While we agree that these are difficult times for all small business owners, you should not have to sacrifice long-term benefits at the expense of short-term survival.
We believe, there are ways to satisfy both the needs of conserving cash and growing your business at the same time. The key is to utilize low-cost marketing techniques to improve sales combined with flexible operations to control cost. We have covered several of these techniques in previous posts. Below we summarize them for your convenience.
Low –cost Marketing Techniques
Many of the traditional advertising tactics used by small business owners are expensive. The cost to print and distribute advertisements in newspapers or magazines is simply outrageous. We believe there are better ways to get the word out about your business without having to spend lot of money.
Your customers are the best resources to utilize for marketing purpose through word-of-mouth. If you treat your customers well and keep them happy, not only will they keep coming back to your business, but they will also promote your business to their families and friends. You can expand this tactic to involve the entire community by actively engaging in community events and promoting your business.
The rise of social media provides an excellent opportunity to small business owners to connect with their customers frequently. Any business that doesn’t participate in social media is missing the boat.
You should also leverage cross selling and up selling techniques we have mentioned earlier to increase sales from each customer while they are already visiting your business.
Generating buzz for your business by spending relatively little money can provide a big boost to your business. There are number of practical ideas you can consider to generate buzz.
To truly understand and appreciate the power of low-cost marketing you should read this article on fundamental rules of marketing that sheds light on why many small business owners are throwing away their money when they focus on traditional advertising only.
Flexible Operations
Darwin’s principle of “survival of the fittest” applies to small businesses perfectly. Only those business owners who are flexible and can change their operations fast will be able to ride the recession. There are number of ways you make your business flexible, all of them will help you control cost. Many of these tactics have to do with converting fixed costs into variable costs such that they go up and down with the sales rather than staying constant even when the sales is down. We have already covered several such techniques in an earlier post.
As you can see there are ways to grow your business without having to spend fortune, which is critical in these uncertain times. Have you used these or other techniques in your business to survive recession and grow your business?
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