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Small Business Cost Savings?
Best Answer
I really like Edward's answer: getting lean on the tech side can result in significant savings. I'd suggest crowdsourcing too: how can you get your employees and customers to participate in content or product development efforts, then profit from that free labor?
On the marketing side, Edward is right although I would qualify the use of Social Media. Internet Marketing is a fairly broad field, and social media is just one part of it. Even though it is free, there is a learning curve involved and it requires a different kind of communication. So I would definitely recommend making a shift from traditional to online media, but I would also recommend investing time (not necessarily significant money though) to learn how to market online effectively.
As far as IT budgets go - for SMBs, it makes so much more sense to use SaaS (cloud computing) for your CRM / Email / Accounting needs.
here are the SaaS solutions I use and suggest to a lot of my clients:
http://bit.ly/free4gent - FreeAgent Accounting - fantastic service with a flat fee per month no matter how many employees.
http://bit.ly/S360CRM - Solve360 - contact management, project management, tasks and calendering - integrates seamlessly with Google Apps.
Google Apps for email and documents.
In most cases, those three products are going to run you about $60 a month, with amazing customer service, all your backups / networking / syncing etc. taken care of.
The beauty of SaaS is that it's "software as a SERVICE" - no upgrading, no re-installing, no un-installing, everything is always up to date and it all just works.
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Related Activity
Ways to cut small Business costs:
Do without landline phone: VOIP is the way to go if the business is using a lot of domestic or international calls. You can Have even Hosted VOIP/PBX and more importantly many of these services comes at fixed costs irrespective of the number of call made.
Host Applications: whether it is Accounting application Hosting, Tax software or CRM application Hosting can reduce IT support and management costs, make application accessible anytime, comes sat fixed monthly prices. Not only is the access trouble free you are left to manage your business in a more focused way.
Managed IT: outsource you IT management to a third party. Right from server support, network security and remote troubleshooting everything can be outsourced to the MSP so that you have peace of mind as well as fixed IT budgets.
Cut advertisement cost and still achieve more: Social media is the thing to consider if the small and medium business is to reach new markets or build loyal customers. Social networking and social media marketing are very low cost promotional and brand building tools which can be favorably used by Small business.
Telecommuting: Research shows that having some resources work from home is advantageous for small business in terms of transportation costs saves, work efficiency. This also translates into the option of using some low cost outsourced manpower.