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Last Updated on April 23, 2024 by Team Experts
Small businesses need all kinds of technology in this day and age. It’s essential to getting work done, catering to customers, and keeping up with the competition. Technology isn’t cheap, though, requiring much in terms of infrastructure, expertise, and maintenance.
For small businesses with not-so-deep pockets, it’s often easier and cheaper to outsource technology-related work (or use external tech resources). Today, Techsprohub shares some suggestions on tasks your business could be outsourcing to save money and time, as well as benefit your bottom line.
Website Making and Maintenance
Websites are important, being lead-generation and frequently money-making tools (when you’re building an e-commerce store for example). Business websites are hard to make properly, especially if you want them to offer a top-tier user experience, look beautiful, and perform well on a range of devices. Then there’s the maintenance angle – websites need to be maintained, updated, as well as optimized every once in a while. Employing professionals (whether that’s agencies or individual freelancers) is typically the best way forward.
Content Marketing
As businesses continue to shift to an online presence, having great content marketing is essential to stand out from the competition and attract new customers. With the rise of social media, blogs, and email marketing, your content needs to be engaging, informative, and compelling to make an impact. Hiring a professional copywriter can help take your content to the next level by crafting messaging that resonates with your target audience and drives conversions. Investing in exceptional content marketing will not only improve your brand’s visibility but can also lead to higher ROI and customer loyalty.
Business Apps
Business apps are tools that automate day-to-day business processes. Many big businesses have custom-made apps, tailored to their employees and core competencies, built from the ground up. For small businesses, creating an in-house IT team for app development is not always feasible. It’s easier and more affordable to outsource the app development (and maintenance) work. Note that small businesses can also use third-party apps as a workaround (more on this below).
Invoicing
Ensuring that you have an efficient invoicing process in place is crucial for getting paid quickly and on time. Utilizing an invoice generator can greatly simplify this task. These tools offer a variety of pre-made templates, allowing you to create customized invoices that include essential details such as text, photos, your logo, and more.
By selecting an invoice template free from these generators, you can tailor each invoice to reflect the professionalism of your business while accommodating your specific billing needs. Additionally, look for an invoice generator that allows you to download your invoice in your preferred format, whether it’s PDF, DOCX, or another file type, ensuring seamless integration with your financial management practices.
IT Infrastructure
Businesses need IT infrastructure – servers, processing power, storage, network capabilities, and more – to function. Instead of purchasing and maintaining these systems in-house, it’s possible to “rent” what you need from a third-party provider (remotely via Cloud and other technologies). The provider takes care of the maintenance and troubleshooting for you, and you can scale up and down according to your needs to save more money.
General IT Support
You can hire experts – dubbed managed service providers (MSPs) – to take care of almost any general IT-related need you can think of. Some examples are installing operating systems on your devices, backing up files, managing your internet network, configuring your software, and providing troubleshooting assistance to your customers. It’s important you look for the “right” provider. Veritis covers some considerations – culture, technical expertise, certifications, and market presence.
Cybersecurity
Almost 47.63 percent of small businesses get hit by cyber-attacks, according to a BusinessDIT report. This puts not only their important data but also their reputation at risk. Again, it’s hard for small businesses to institute their own cybersecurity in-house. The security offered by MSPs and software vendors doesn’t quite cut it either. Hiring cybersecurity experts can help you better secure your systems, have your systems audited, and come up with a disaster recovery plan.
Build Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is crucial for any business looking to stay competitive in today’s dynamic marketplace. By retaining loyal customers, companies can secure a steady stream of revenue and ultimately, boost their bottom line. To build brand loyalty, businesses must first deliver on their promises and consistently exceed customer expectations.
Additionally, offering personalized experiences, implementing loyalty programs, and actively seeking feedback can all help foster greater customer loyalty. Ultimately, building brand loyalty requires a long-term commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences on every touchpoint and going above and beyond to build lasting relationships with customers.
Social Media
Social media is important for your marketing efforts. Moreover, potential customers and clients could choose to engage with your company through your social media profile. Putting social media experts in charge of your accounts could help with your marketing – you could release higher-quality content for better results. A
Also, experts could manage your customer interactions for you in a timely way. However, it never hurts to learn more about digital marketing and SEO strategies so that you can manage some of your marketing yourself or at least be an informed participant in your conversations with your marketing team.
Business Tasks
You can outsource all kinds of administrative and organizational tasks – WordPress services, onboarding processes, policy and standard operating creation, social media marketing, digital management, and more. This would leave you free to focus on what matters – business decisions and other things only you can do.
You Can Use Software Instead of Outsourcing Tasks
As mentioned earlier, you could use third-party software for your IT-related tasks, instead of hiring external workers. These days, there are apps for almost every process you can think of, including accounting, inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), research, and human resources (HR). TechRadar lists some must-have apps that are worth checking out.
Also, while you might want to hire someone to handle and keep track of your promotions via social media, there are other ways you can supplement these efforts yourself. Brochures are one example, and these serve as an excellent, tactile addition to any solid marketing campaign.
Create a Strategy for your Business Tech
Strategically outsourcing your IT needs, whether that’s business tasks to a VA or the maintenance of your e-commerce platform to a developer, can help you save big on resources. It may be a good idea to double-check your strategy and have an ROI check first to determine whether outsourcing is worthwhile for you or not.
