Staying on track when it comes to your budget is undoubtedly important, but the budget itself is often malleable – changing with the shifting circumstances of the wider business landscape. This process can often feel reactive, and it’s easy to notice when your spending becomes more restrictive.
Therefore, it’s natural that you might look for ways to be on the offensive instead. In order to add extra financial space to your budget, you might have to shift your thinking. Instead of going big, you might make smaller adjustments that are capable of adding small profits here and there which stack up to big differences.
Monetization Efforts
This might be a prime area where thinking of small payments can add up. In gaming, this is a tactic that’s commonly deployed under the banner of ‘microtransactions’. These don’t refer to whole games or projects themselves, but rather small, (often cosmetic) items that players can pay for after they’ve already got the game. These can make an enormous amount of money without requiring much effort on behalf of the developer, but the catch is the negative connotation and the impact that it can have on your brand perception – potentially harming the relationship with your customer.
This won’t be as true everywhere, and monetization can be used in a way that is much more seamless and natural for the platform. API monetization is an example of this, where you have similar options (like freemium), but also pay per transaction which can allow you to get the most out of your gateway without impacting your audience experience.
Low-Cost Marketing
Going bigger with your marketing might always seem like the right thing to do, but oftentimes this might just lead to you sinking more money into something without a guarantee of return. Marketing is about the efficacy of the approach, and that means that utilizing your free social media platforms effectively can be just as (if not more) impactful than a business who runs a mediocre video marketing campaign.
This doesn’t mean that you neglect the more costly approaches entirely, as they all can have an incredible amount of practical value. However, it might mean that instead of employing them consistently, you simply use them occasionally as impactful campaigns that help to revitalize the more consistent, lower-cost marketing approaches you use.
Harmless Cuts
While the idea of making harmless financial cuts might seem like a myth in business, there are undoubtedly going to be areas where you can afford to spend less. The previous example of being more specific about when and how to use higher-cost marketing methods is one option that you have, and if your business operates a hybrid or remote structure, you might also question the need for a workplace (or at least investigate how you can cut down the size of it). If these cuts start to infringe on your employees’ job security or your business’ capability to offer its best services, that’s when you know that you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
