In this article, we advocate for business owners to take a step back, analyze each line-item of their operating expenses, and make sure their balance sheet is prepared for the worst-case scenario. Here are some tips to optimize, reduce, or eliminate your current liabilities:

1. Leverage High ROI Marketing

In times of crisis, it can be easy to look at your marketing expenses as the first weight to cut, but you shouldn’t use a slash and burn strategy for your marketing budget. Instead, look at what marketing strategies, campaigns, channels, and more are performing well from a return on investment (ROI) point of view.

If, for example, you are spending equal amounts per month on Google search ads and social media branding campaigns, before cutting either or both, consider how they are driving real results. If your google search ads continue to garner real sales and you are finding it hard to measure the impact of social media marketing, it can be an easy decision to cut your investments in social media while continuing to invest, if not double down, in search ads.

2. Reconsider Expensive Office Space

One thing many businesses are realizing is that their workforce can still be productive remotely. Consider the quarantined period as an involuntary test for transitioning to a distributed workforce.

If your business still depends heavily on face-to-face communication, and video conferencing is not ideal for your collaboration needs, instead consider a desk-sharing or co-working space format for your office space. This can save most businesses thousands of dollars (if not more) in real estate expenses every year.

3. Utilize Your Human Resources

Layoffs are the absolute worst-case scenario for most businesses and unfortunately, in times of crisis, they are inevitable as funding, liquidity, and revenue dry up. One way to ensure your company is operating effectively is to make sure every employee is utilized at full capacity.

This means being very cautious when hiring to make sure each and every new hire has a full plate, or close to it. Although difficult to achieve balance, it’s recommended that current employees remain slightly over-utilized in order to prevent a large under-utilization when new employees are hired.

When considering each new hire, it’s also recommended to think about how contractors and freelancers could be better leveraged to gap-fill your requirements. This is especially important for one-time projects, new research and development projects, and more.

4. Recalibrating to New Normals

As we continue to navigate the new global economy, it’s important we recalibrate our expectations and financial plans. Economists are predicting a recession with near certainty, and the possibility of a depression that could even surpass the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Business owners must learn from this time and understand the importance of sound financial planning and the need for a safety net. The unfortunate reality of the Fed’s involvement in economic downturns is that businesses have grown complacent with the need to prepare for financial hardship, knowing the invisible hand of the government will be there to feed them with bailouts and more.

What’s even more unfortunate is that these business bailout plans are reserved for those deemed “too big to fail” and won’t offer much, if any, support to the millions of small businesses around the world.

If your business has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are steps you can take to remain lean, and stay solvent during these turbulent times. If you need some more ideas for expenses your business can cut from its operations, the visual below features 16 expenses your business should reconsider:

What is UGC?

User-generated content is any content created by a brand’s customers or even employees. It is the most genuine content as users share their experience with the brand’s product or service. UGC is not paid by the brand’s and the users share it willingly.

Download the Exclusive Ebook on User-Generated Content.

UGC can be in the form of text, video, pictures, reviews, or a combination of these. In a nutshell, you can say user-generated content is the content created and shared by a brand’s users.

For example, let’s take a use case of Canon. It promotes UGC on its social media platforms aggressively, more than any other marketing messages. The wonderfully captured photographs by Canon’s users are loved in the community.

Why use UGC in Marketing?

User-generated content is the tool to bring the humanization angle to your marketing campaigns. Here are the main benefits of capitalizing on user-generated content in marketing:

1. Your Audience Trusts UGC more than other Marketing Material

Nothing can beat the real-life experiences shared by your users. Your target audience knows what they are looking for when buying from a brand. Your promises don’t appeal to them as much as your loyal customer’s reviews will do. 93% of the customers rely on UGC when making their buying decisions. So using UGC for promoting your brand will help you win over your target audience’s trust.

2. UGC is more effective than paid ads

Most of the brands today are now realizing the importance of using UGC for marketing purposes. They have seen their UGC led campaigns being more effective as compared to the paid ads. It also helps cut down costs of marketing to a great extent.

3. Drive conversions

UGC is nothing less than an effective conversion tool. Because people are more likely to buy products after they see them with their peers or influencers. It’s a human tendency that people wish to buy products that they have seen with their peers. So when you show UGC, your target audience will be more interested in buying from you, thus increasing your conversion rate.

4. Engage your audience and build a community

With numerous brands selling similar products, it’s difficult to cut through the competition and become the top sellers in the market. But leveraging UGC means creating a memorable impact on your audience. By promoting UGC, you can actively build a community of like minded consumers. You can give them a platform to engage and share their experiences.

How to collect UGC for marketing?

Now that you know how UGC is great, you are probably thinking: how do I get this user-generated content for my brand? Here is a list of ideas for you which will help you collect UGC.

1. Run hashtag contests

You can run a contest on social media and create a hashtag for it, so when the participants share their entries, they will use your hashtag. Then using this hashtag, you can keep track of all the content created during the contest and use it for your brand marketing.

2. Reviews

There are many review platforms to find reviews from your customers/employees. Like Google reviews, Yelp, Facebook reviews, Airbnb, etc., are the platforms from which you can collect UGC.

3. Collect UGC from social media

If your brand is already popular on social media and your customers have shared their experiences with your brand, then you can easily find UGC. Search for hashtags around your brand and products, and you will find posts from your customers.

Best Practices for Marketers

1. Use a UGC platform

A UGC platform will help you collect, manage, present, and analyze your UGC for marketing purposes. You can make your work easy and hassle-free with a UGC platform.

2. Credit the creator

Whenever you are using any form of UGC, it is always important to credit the creator. It helps build trust and a loyal customer base.

3. Be clear with your purpose for using UGC

Understand what you are looking for when selecting UGC because once you start going through it, you will find a lot of raw content. A lot of it might not be good enough to be displayed on your marketing front. Also, keep in mind that your UGC should be helpful to your customers and authentic, not fake or made up.

4. Show entertaining UGC

When people are continuously browsing online, the best way to hold their attention is to show them engaging content, so when selecting UGC, select the engaging ones.

Conclusion

Now that you have an idea about the user-generated content. Get ready to capitalize on it. Start collecting UGC, then you can add it to different marketing touchpoints. Like you can add it to your website, display screen, email campaign, etc.

Authentic UGC will take your brand positioning to the next level.

What is bad data?

The sales and marketing efforts at any company are mostly based on the data they have in their CRM. If a company has a list of 50,000 names, most of its outreach efforts – emails, cold calls, event invitations, etc., would be based around those people. Bad data means that the data in the CRM is either consistent, redundant, incorrect, or incomplete which ultimately takes a toll on the effectiveness of the outreach efforts.

So if you have 50,000 emails in your CRM but say 5% of them are redundant, 6% incorrect, 10% outdated, and 15% incomplete, your sales and marketing campaigns are running at only 64% efficiency.

To make matters worse, data isn’t eternal- people switch jobs, job titles change, companies upsize/downside, and more. By some estimates, data in your CRM decay at around 70% every year. To continue with our earlier example, if you are running at 64% efficiency at this moment, it would be reduced to a mere 20% in a year!

With that out of the way, the next question is – how exactly bad data hurts B2B companies? The answer is pretty simple – loss of productivity. As explained earlier, if a sales and marketing campaign runs at just 60% efficiency, that means 40%  of the efforts yield no result which is a huge leakage of productivity and by extension, revenues. It is estimated that the average company loses around 12% of its revenue due to bad data.

What’s next?

While the obvious answer to this problem is to clean data, the process is more complicated than it may initially seem. On the surface, you can assess the sources of data, audit the existing data in your CRM, and try to fill the missing gaps. The deeper problem, as mentioned before, is that of data decay. Even if you take extensive measures to ensure 100% accuracy of your database, it would start decaying from the very next moment. While you can theoretically, assign time and resources to periodically cleanse and update your data, the cost it would incur is simply disproportional.

The only practical solution is to outsource the whole process- instead of collecting data and then be bogged down with its maintenance, its far more efficient to simply subscribe to a reliable data platform like SalesIntel who would provide all the data you need and would be responsible for its upkeep for a fraction of cost that you would have to spend otherwise handling the process yourself.

Here are five pointers to help guide you through the process of successfully beginning your dream business.

1. Do Market Research

Before you start looking for money to purchase stock or leasing a place to set up a shop, you must do thorough market research. Study the trends, the businesses available, the products lacking in the market, and the laws governing similar enterprises. The information you gather will help you to determine the best niche to fill and what to expect from the market. It is dangerous to invest blindly since you may get into a flooded market or face unfavorable competition that may limit your growth potential. You should also keep tabs on the regulations of the target area and all the certifications and permits you need to operate successfully.

2. Prepare a Business Plan

The next step is preparing a professional business plan. The contents of the plan will come from your market research findings. The plan should have details such as:

• The funds required to start and run for at least a year
• Realistic business goals
• Clients you want to serve
• The marketing strategy
• The uniqueness of your service or product

Once you have all these details on paper, you can come up with a realistic strategy for moving forward and looking for the required capital.

3. Look for Funding

If you want to start a small company, you should have enough money to cover the starting expenses and cushion the company for several months. This amount should carry you and help you purchase stock and pay the rent, utility bills, and suppliers. If you have enough money, you will not get a roadblock if some customers don’t pay their invoices on time.

You can raise the money on your own by saving over time and reducing your unnecessary expenses. However, if you need a huge amount that you cannot raise on your own, you can try borrowing from financial institutions, family, or friends. Venture capital can also be a good option if you are willing to share your company’s ownership with another individual or institution.

4. Look for a Business Location

After you identify what business you want to establish, you need to look for a suitable location. The perfect place should be accessible to your target customers and give you the potential to expand operations. One quick way to find warehouses for sale is by visiting websites that deal with advertising, selling, and leasing warehouses. Here you will find various options in your desired area, and you can choose what fits your budget.

Ensure that you also physically visit the available options to analyze their size, accessibility, and availability of infrastructure. The place should have easy access for large vehicles, be close enough for people to come, and have enough space for all your products. Checking the security of the building and surroundings is also very crucial to ensure your business will be safe from bandits.

5. Start Marketing

Do not wait until the business is up and running for you to begin marketing. You can start using word of mouth to tell your friends and family of your intention so that you can garner their support. While they spread the news of your venture through word of mouth and referrals, you can build your website and start publicizing it on social media platforms. Email marketing, content marketing and paid advertisements can also help reach out to people outside your circle of close friends.

When using social media marketing, ensure you use the platform that will effectively reach your target audience. Specialize on one or two platforms and ensure that the accounts do not remain dormant. This will help represent your brand effectively and always remind potential customers of your company.

Conclusion

The journey to growing a successful business begins with effective planning. Once you lay out your plans clearly and set realistic goals, you will enjoy steady growth and expansion. However, it is crucial to give yourself time for your brand to grow and be patient even if it struggles to take off. It will only be a matter of time until you develop customer loyalty and your business begins to expand. Finally, always remain accountable and keep clear records of the finances you receive and spend around the company. This culture will help you manage the funds effectively to avoid unexplained shortages.