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Building a profitable startup is hard at the best of times. Right now, when the world as a whole is going through an unprecedented crisis, this task seems impossible. However, some companies manage to succeed and boost profitability despite the odds. Learning from their examples and restructuring your own business’s strategy will help you adapt and get through this difficult time.
Turn Your Brand into a Story
Even with lockdowns lifted, people today are reluctant to leave their homes and just shop around. Therefore, the importance and efficiency of online marketing have grown even further. But the level of competition has also increased. Therefore, you can’t just be satisfied with ads and a blog. You need to take your brand marketing to a new level. And one of the best ways to do this is to become a storyteller.
Story marketing is complex in the meaning that the story you tell about your brand must span all your marketing channels. Basically, you need to turn your brand’s message into a story and show different parts of it through videos, Instagram posts, ads, and even your participation in and support of different causes. Making marketing videos, in particular,
Top brands like Disney, Guinness, and Coca-Cola all use storyteller marketing with great success. But it’s even more important for small brands that strive on building a small but close community of customers.
Converting your marketing strategy to storytelling can help both increase profitability in crisis and improve customer retention.
Start Using an FX Broker
The cost of foreign currency exchange (FX) is often overlooked by business owners. However, this is an expense that might be eating a big part of your revenue without your knowing. Today every business needs to do its best to attract new customers. Therefore, going global is a necessity. With multiple international online marketplaces and easy worldwide shipping going global is easy.
However, international payment processing remains expensive if you do it through “traditional| channels. With a bank, every transaction will cost 3-7% of the transfer volume, on average. With Amazon or PayPal, the cost is 3.5-4% per transaction.
Unfortunately, small businesses that go international have a low profit margin. Therefore, these costs might be too high overall. The solution to this is to use the services of business foreign exchange brokers. Companies like WorldFirst, Moneycorp, or OFX can cut the costs of international payments to under 1% of the transfer volume. That’s because they use low FX margins and have low fees.
Moreover, these FX brokers also offer hedging and other useful currency services. These services are usually unavailable for small businesses through banks. However, if used right, they can save your startup a lot of money by mitigating currency risks. It will be easy to use these services right even if you aren’t a professional because they offer currency counseling as well. All things considered, you increase profitability by lowering your costs and possible risks caused by FX volatility.
Start Offering More Personalized Luxury Services
It’s true that the COVID-19 crisis reduced consumer shopping across all industries. Moreover, these numbers will take a while to get back to pre-pandemic levels as the global economy is in recession. It’s also true that millions of people have lost their jobs and millions more are at risk of unemployment.
Therefore, many consumers are focused on cutting their expenses and increasing savings. However, you mustn’t forget that not everyone is in this position. And it’s the consumers that still can and want to pay for your products and services that you need to focus on for this. It might be impossible to increase profit by attracting new sales. Therefore, you should focus on increasing the order price. Simply put, try to offset the loss in the number of sales by increasing the average profit you make on every order.
In this light, launching the line of luxury and personalized services will be very effective as your work to boost profitability. Moreover, this approach will improve customer satisfaction, which means better retention. Recurring sales are one of the foremost profitability boosters because you avoid the cost of new customer acquisition.
Also, don’t forget that in the current conditions, people are more willing to pay extra for personalized services. They can help them feel safer during the pandemic.
Restructure Your Business
It’s never easy to lay off staff. It’s even harder now, when you know how hard it will be for them to find new employment. However, in the matter of business survival, cutting down payroll is an essential step.
Right now is the best time to maximize the power of machine learning and automating everything that can be automated. The rule of thumb for a startup in a crisis is to cut off everything that doesn’t add value directly. And when you can’t do that, you need to try and replace services and components with cheaper alternatives. Hence, letting go some people from your team and using technology to keep your business running at maximum efficiency.
Bottom Line: Use Every Angle to Boost Profitability Overall
Increasing profitability should always be a priority for startups. However, it’s important to understand that you can’t really succeed in this if you focus on one thing, like marketing. In order to achieve the best results, you need to improve, restructure, and adapt your business on every level. Never forget that profitability comes not only from increasing the number of new buyers. It also results from reducing costs, streamlining the business process, innovating, and forming new partnerships, among other things. Therefore, you need to look at the issue from every angle and work on them at the same time.
