Every business fights a daily battle for the sustainability of its profit margins. They need to constantly find ways to increase revenue while driving down costs wherever they can. All without compromising on the experience that their customers expect or sacrificing the standards upon which their brand was built.

It sounds like quite a tightrope to walk, and in many ways it is. Nonetheless, it’s much easier when organisations identify and rectify areas of wasteful spending within their operations.

Yes, it’s important to invest appropriately back into your business. No, it’s not appropriate to cut corners at the expense of quality. Nonetheless, there are a handful of ways in which many businesses are still throwing money away in 2020…

“Spray and Pray” Marketing

The 21st century approach to marketing requires a scalpel, yet so many businesses still use a sledgehammer. A digitally led approach to marketing enabled brands to deliver highly targeted and ultra-relevant campaigns to the kinds of people who will benefit from seeing them. This far more effective and cost-efficient than old-fashioned “spray and pray” marketing techniques which get your message in front of everybody whether they are likely to use your business or not. Use AB testing to see which marketing materials drive traffic to your website and which fail to resonate with your audience. It’s an important way to keep marketing costs manageable and increase your ROI.

Replacing When They Should Be Repairing

If your business manufactures its own products or has an industrial component of any sort, your productivity is intrinsically tied to your plant. But when something goes awry with your equipment, repairing it through a reputable company like ERD LTD, Inc. will often be far more cost-efficient than replacing it outright. While it’s understandable that businesses might feel the urge to mitigate risk by replacing faulty equipment, a high quality repair will lend you the same level of assurance at a fraction of the cost.

Vanity Spending

Yes, your branding implies that you need to be ahead of the technological curve. Yes, you need to be able to outpace your competitors. But there’s a difference between investing in the tech that will give you an edge and vanity spending. Over-spending on tech for appearance’s sake can leave you with a large and expensive tech surplus that can eat into your cash flow, bottleneck your profitability and even impinge on your operational efficiency.

Letting Paid Ads Do All the Heavy Lifting

Returning to marketing costs, paid ads are an important means of getting your message to the right audience. But over relying on paid ads can lead to a black hole of costs which you’ll never be able to properly plug. Paid ads can build a surge in interest in your brand, but consumers have short memories. It’s important to follow up paid ad campaigns with organic lead generation techniques like content marketing. When you post regulatr blogs and vlogs as well as cornerstone content like white papers or ebooks, you can build on the momentum generated by paid ads instead of throwing more money into the void.