Tech Solutions for Small Businesses

For decades small business have been limited to their immediate community, unable to break out into larger markets unless they physically expanded into other areas. Over the past two decades small business have increasingly turned to technological solutions to help expand their custom base and bring more money into their balance sheets. Small business owners who aren’t establishing an online presence and exploiting its low-cost advantages are effectively limiting their growth potential at a time when few small businesses can afford to do that. Here are some simple tech solutions for small businesses.

Build a Website

Having a website opens your business up to an entirely new potential customer base, even within your own community. Not can you get more attention from people outside your immediate area, but people from within your community who may not have known about you will have more opportunities to stumble across your site and peruse what you have to offer. There are three ways to build a website. First, you can hire someone to do it for you. This will get you a more professional look, but it will cost you. You can also buy website building software or use a do-it-yourself service like GoDaddy, Hypermart, or Verio.

Create a Business Email

If you don’t have a business email, potential customers just won’t take you as seriously. If Joe’s Guitars sends you an email, will you take them seriously if the email if from joesguitars@yahoo or gmail.com? Or will you be more confident if it comes from customerservice@joesguitars.com?  It may sound petty, but customers want to have confidence in the businesses they patronize and having a business email is a small, but crucial step toward building it up.

Construct a Customer Database

One of the biggest advantages small business owners have today is the ability to construct a customer database. This is an effective way of keeping track of your customers and potential customers, their history with you, their needs and desires, and any quirks you need to remember. Customers always appreciate being remembered and a database will help keep you on the ball.

Online Sales

Depending on what kind of business you are in, opening your products to online sales can be a major boost to your bottom line. There are many services that will give you the ability to build and stock and online store. GoDaddy has monthly plans for as low as $9.95 a month, though there are more comprehensive services that can charge as much as $95 a month, like Interland’s Platinum Business Solutions. While GoDaddy offers a no-frills, basic service, Interland offers a host of options to help you publicize and sell your product online. There are, of course, services prices between these options, like Affinity Internet’s ReadyWeb, which costs about $50 a month.

Lower Costs

Technology gives small businesses the opportunity to lower operational costs. Better record keeping and streamlining work means the ability to keep quality up and labor costs down.  And, of course, higher quality for lower costs means more profit.