One of the harsh realities of the contemporary business world is that in order to stay afloat, businesses of all sizes and industries constantly need to improve and move ahead. The world around is changing at such a rapid pace and so many new players enter the arena with each passing day that staying idle means nothing more than lagging behind.

Even so, numerous business owners, especially the ones working in the SMB sector are afraid to engage in thorough reforms fearing they will overstretch the companies budget and their gambles eventually won’t pay off.

We are here to break some good news. Effective improvements of your small business can be successfully pulled off in a very straightforward and budget-friendly manner with little to no risk involved. Let us take a look at some of the most intuitive mentions.

Establish relevant KPI for marketing

The success of some effort can only be assessed if we set up some parameters we will measure the overall results against. This knowledge is for measuring how far we have gone down the road, but also to make necessary course corrections. Marketing is, unfortunately, one of the business sectors that suffer the most from this lack of accurate and relevant metrics. So, do your best to remedy this problem by setting up Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the following tangible results:

• Number of conversions
• Conversion rates
• Cost per conversion
• Number of leads
• Cost per lead
• Cost of customer acquisition
• Sales growth
• Search rankings

Set clear and tangible goals

Of course, relying on the KPIs to lead you through the business maze will amount to very little if you don’t have a seat of clear, measurable, and tangible goals you are going to work towards. Aside from the requirements we have listed above, your goals should also be productive and lead to effective progress. So, growing your customer base indefinitely is good, but knowing how many new clients you need to, for instance, launch a new product. This way of mechanical thinking combined with incremental short-term objectives will expose you to clear and concrete measures you need to make to get the ball moving.

Move your infrastructure to the cloud

Cloud computing offers a plethora of tangible benefits. It’s more affordable than maintaining on-site infrastructure, offers a great level of scalability and versatility (“pay-as-you-go” pricing model), and creates endless possibilities for collaboration, outsourcing, and remote working. What’s even better, you don’t even have to develop new departments within your company to use this novel technology. For instance, if you plan to start using Amazon Web Services, you can hire a remote team to perform the migration, maintenance, and managed AWS professional services.

Upgrade the sales funnel

If you are not familiar with the term, the sales funnel represents the set of steps people need to take to become your customers. No matter whether it exists in the form of a retail store, online store, sales team or personal consultations, a good and streamlined sales funnel usually consists of these four basic steps:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

What can you do to refine and streamline these four steps? For a start, you can segment your customers into different, distinct groups and create the most suitable approach for each of them. Second, you can adjust your portfolio to suit these customer groups and make your sales items more approachable. Last but not least, you can reduce friction on checkouts and forms to make the purchasing process convenient, easy, and versatile (you should include as many payment options as possible).

Put some effort into team building

This advice may sound beaten to death at this point but it’s good advice nevertheless. The recent survey says that 86% of employees cite a lack of collaboration for workplace failures. On the other hand, efficient workplace collaboration can increase innovation by 15%. These numbers are something you should by all means keep in mind if you want to keep your company competitive long-term. Fortunately, the opportunities for efficient team building are as abundant as they are affordable and the constant evolution of digital tech only makes this plethora of activity options more expensive.

Boost your online and social media presence

We are not even talking about some convoluted online strategies. For instance, small upgrades like presenting the contact info on every page of your website can go a long way in making your business more streamlined and approachable. Furthermore, hiring a team to develop a content strategy for your social media channels and keep them open 24/7 can do wonders for your customer relationship as well as lure in new people who were not necessarily interested in your products and services. Finally, you can never go wrong by investing more money into your SEO efforts since 70% of marketers today consider this form of marketing far more effective than PPC.

We hope these couple of tips gave you some idea about the general direction on which you should take your company in the following months and years. In this day and age, constantly pushing your business forward is the only way to stay profitable. Still, spearheading your way through the business arena doesn’t have to be all too hard, or for that matter expansive. Now that you know the basics, all you need to do is to take some action.