What you do with your profits will determine the future direction of your small business. Smart reinvestment could take your company to the moon, or it could see it take two steps backwards.

Let’s examine the main priority areas for reinvesting your small business’s profits.

Should You Pay Yourself First?

The main goal of any business owner is to make money and enjoy a higher standard of living. Paying yourself is an essential component of allocating your end-of-year profits. However, taking out too much can leave your organization stagnant.

In particular, many inexperienced entrepreneurs experience “lifestyle creep” whereby the more they make the more their living expenses rise.

Paying yourself is important but keep tabs on your living expenses and never pay yourself more than you need to enjoy your life.

1. Expand Your Business’s Infrastructure

Small businesses that turn a profit have often reached capacity. Upgrading your infrastructure for expansion could allow you to improve the customer experience, enhance efficiency, and take on greater levels of capacity.

For example, if a furniture store has a long customer waiting list, this is not a good thing. It means customers who don’t want to wait for that custom wardrobe will go elsewhere.

By expanding your business’s infrastructure, you can take on bigger and better projects, which means greater profits.

2. Upgrade Your Existing Equipment

Most entrepreneurs opt to bootstrap their business because they have no other choice. When starting, the chances are you’re purchasing older, used equipment to get your organization off the ground.

Unfortunately, older business equipment is often slower, performs to a lower standard, and breaks down more often. This can cause significant disruption and costs to spiral.

Take a restaurant kitchen as an example. If the old grill or deep fat frier breaks, how much money would that restaurant lose from the loss of custom and repair costs?

Reinvesting your profits by upgrading your existing equipment now can make your operations more efficient and more reliable.

3. Hire New Employees

Hiring new employees is a big step to take. Small businesses are often hesitant to make new hires, even when they need additional staff to handle increased workloads. Much of this is due to the hidden costs of hiring.

Companies spend an average of $4,000 to recruit, hire, and train new employees, with new hires taking an average of five months to reach full productivity.

However, the right hire could transform your business in anticipation of major growth periods. Reinvesting profits into new hires could be the best move you make.

4. Go Into Marketing

Marketing should make up the majority of your expenditure. The days of free, organic marketing are gone. Whether it’s on the street or social media, we live in a pay to play environment.

Much of the reason for this can be traced back to 2008, where the great recession forced tens of thousands of people into self-employment. The trend towards self-employment hasn’t relented. This increased competition means you need a big budget to set yourself apart from your competitors.

Reinvesting a portion of your profits into marketing could bring in more customers, as well as up-sell existing customers.

5. Improve Your Cash Flow

Did you know that 82% of small businesses closed their doors due to a lack of cash flow?

Plenty of profitable businesses have fallen by the wayside with great ideas and big clients simply because they lacked the funds necessary to maintain themselves. When outside funding isn’t available, entrepreneurs often turn to their personal bank accounts.

Improving your cash flow when the sun is shining could protect your business from future failure.

6. Pay Off Your Debts (When it Makes Sense)

Given the circumstances, small businesses that pay off their debts are often in a better position to elevate themselves going forwards.

Paying off outstanding debt is an option when there are minimal early exit penalties. If you can minimize your interest payments by eliminating a portion of your debt now, it could make sense. Alternatively, you may be able to pay off part of your debts via consolidation.

Before making this decision, calculate the total value of your interest payments in the long term and what you need to do to reduce or eliminate this amount.

For example, it makes little sense to avoid $5,000 in interest payments as a small business if you’ll need to pay a $60,000 lump sum to do it.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to reinvest your small business’s profits. If you’ve had a bumper year, take the time to sit down and reflect on where you want your business to go.

Contemplate what you can do right now to get the biggest returns in the following year.

The post 6 Priority Areas for Reinvesting Your Small Business Profits appeared first on SiteProNews.

Although Apple touted the changes as responding to consumer concerns over privacy, many cynically assumed it was a direct attempt at hurting Facebook’s revenue streams.

There’s some merit to addressing concerns over the level of security offered by major companies. One study revealed that 87% of consumers would not do business with a company if they had any security concerns.

In the wake of data breaches around the world, including the leaking of the personal data of 530 million Facebook users in 2019, it’s no surprise that iOS 14 is popular amongst the general public.

But where do these tougher privacy rules leave businesses who need detailed data to finetune their ads, and what can they do about it?

What is the key change you need to be aware of?

iOS 14.5 was launched on Monday, April 26th, therefore the changes have already been implemented. Although there are a tremendous number of technical changes, there is one key change: the idea of initial consent.

Advertisers are now required to ask the permission of users to track them. All apps in the App Store are now required to show this prompt to conform with the requirements of the App Tracking Transparency framework.

It’s never been easier for users to opt out of advertising. Of course, users could always do this, but it required some initiative on behalf of the user.

Naturally, most people opted in. This meant businesses were able to track, collect, and utilize their data to sharpen their advertising campaigns.

What does this mean for your Facebook ads?

Unfortunately, small businesses must now adapt their advertising strategies to comply with the changes Facebook has been forced to make.

Here’s what you can expect from your Facebook ads served to iOS users:

• Less efficient ads.
• Less effective ads.
• Fewer website sales attributed to ads.
• Loss of ad personalization, which could lead to a 50% drop in revenue.
• Increased difficulty in reaching your target audience.

On the other hand, these disadvantages could well lead to lower click costs.

The growth in popularity of Facebook ads has meant rising costs. As recently as 2019, 85% of marketers were concerned about spiraling ad costs.

Are potentially lower costs worth the blunted impact of Facebook advertising? That depends on who you ask.

Here’s how you can adjust and adapt to Apple’s advertiser onslaught.

Exclude iOS devices from your future advertising campaigns

The easiest option is to simply exclude iOS users from your advertising campaigns. The new privacy changes aren’t universal and other operating systems aren’t required to implement these changes.

How long this lasts is currently unknown, but Android has announced no plans to follow Apple’s lead.

This is crucial because the fact is just 14.3% of Facebook users access the app via iOS. The vast majority are Android users, meaning you can avoid many of these changes simply by excluding iOS users entirely.

Set your eight campaign conversions

Facebook has launched the Aggregated Event Management (AEM) platform to coincide with the launch of iOS 14.5.

Businesses are limited to tracking just eight-pixel events per domain. What this means is Facebook will only track a maximum of eight conversion events. This could be anything from a website view to adding a product to a shopping cart.

You can set the order of priority through Business Manager > Events Manager.

The key is to set your rankings according to your overall business goals. You’ll need to take more care over this than before simply because of these new limits.

Compare 28-day attribution to 7-day attribution

Previously, businesses could always rely on looking up 28-day attribution. Apple’s iOS 14.5 has banished these changes, along with 7-day- view-through attribution.

Your historical advertising data will continue to be available via the API, so you can still download your old data.

The easiest way to plan for the future is to take the 28-day window and compare it to 7-day click conversions. This will offer you an idea of how your reported conversions will be impacted in the long term.

Launch campaigns outside of your primary conversion objective

Advertisers have been blessed by an all-encompassing Facebook pixel that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to tracking.

Lend more weight to your own website’s internal tracking instead. Remember, Apple’s privacy changes only apply to apps within the App Store. It doesn’t apply to your website, so you can get around most of the tracking restrictions after a user lands on your website.

This means you can run web visit campaigns through the Facebook pixel and then get your tracking framework to follow the rest of the user’s journey.

It won’t negate all of the iOS 14.5 changes, but it can limit their impact.

Break down your conversion flow on landing pages

Although Facebook cannot harvest as much data as it used to, it isn’t the death of custom audiences for advertising.

An easy way around this is to request user information earlier in the conversion process. Basic data types, such as first name, last name, and email addresses, can be uploaded back to Facebook for ad retargeting later on.

It’s a roundabout way of doing what you were doing before, but, again, it can help you focus on more engaged users who are more willing to supply you with a small amount of personal information.

Facebook Advertising Post-iOS 14.5: Conclusion

Regardless of your industry, targeting iOS users has become infinitely more difficult. However, by implementing the above strategies, you can still analyze your audiences and increase the effectiveness of your ads.

It may take time and money to get the results you were used to, but Facebook advertising is far from dead.

Adapt quickly and you can still run profitable ads on Facebook.

What have you done to adjust your advertising strategies to iOS 14.5?

The post 5 Ways Facebook Advertisers Can Survive the Apple iOS 14 Privacy Update appeared first on SiteProNews.

Social media has proven to be the one e-commerce avenue that has remained undisrupted by the last year. And companies have taken advantage of that.

Between February and June 2020, social media marketing spends increased by 74% for businesses.

If the pandemic taught us anything, social media has never been more crucial to business success. But how can your business take advantage of social media?

Here’s what you need to know about social media success in a post-pandemic world.

1. You Must Increase Your Advertising Budget

The reasoning for this seems obvious. Returns are at their highest level in history. Businesses reported that the contribution of social media to overall company revenue has risen by 24% since February 2020.

Naturally, with returns as high as these, it makes sense to up your social media spend. There is another reason, though.

With more players in the market, click costs will also increase as more businesses compete to get their ads shown and clicked on.

To continue to get the results you had in 2020, your post-pandemic spend will need to go up.

2. Play with New Channels on Existing Networks

As competition grows fiercer, marketers need to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Big business tends to move slow but hits like a truck when it gets going.

Use your superior ability to pivot by investing in new channels on existing networks.

For example, Instagram Reels launched in the summer of 2020. It focuses on short-form videos, which is essentially the platform’s attempt at taking advantage of TikTok’s success.

Playing with new channels and pivoting to what people want will increase engagement levels, which ups your chances of making a sale.

3. It’s All in the Video

Social media experts have espoused the benefits of video content for years. Video is easier to consume on all devices, but particularly on mobile devices, and it adds an air of authenticity.

If you’ve hesitated to invest in video content, now is the time. The roaring success of the TikTok social media platform is a testament to how important video content is.

TikTok was one of the most downloaded apps throughout the pandemic and average engagement rates are high at all levels. While it’s true that the majority of TikTok’s users are under 30, businesses should still take heed of the lessons TikTok’s success has delivered.

Videos across all social media networks acquire 21.2% more engagement than static images. And this is consistent across every age group.

Investing more in video post-pandemic is not only a way of gaining a competitive edge, it’s something consumers expect.

4. Don’t Ignore the Baby Boomers

Companies primarily targeting the older generations have dismissed social media as a channel for connecting with them. In previous years, this was true. Any company whose target audience were baby boomers would have been better off investing in more traditional advertising products.

The pandemic has altered how baby boomers discover brands. More than 25% of baby boomers are spending longer on social media, as a result of the pandemic.

If reaching older consumers is part of your strategy, investing in social media is now a viable option.

5. Social Justice Issues Should Be at the Forefront of Your Marketing Strategy

One side effect of the pandemic was how it changed the priorities of the average consumer. With no work to go to and shelter-in-place orders in effect, many people have had the time to focus on larger issues of injustice.

Throughout 2020, the world watched as Black Lives Matter took the media spotlight in the U.S. The campaign for a $15 minimum wage hit the headlines like never before. The accessibility of healthcare became a key issue. Finally, the Capitol Riots added further fuel to the fiery debate over white supremacy and extremist politics.

Regardless of your stance on any of these key issues, companies took the time to speak not about their brands but about social justice issues.

Ben & Jerry’s took advantage of this perfectly. They were bold, to the point, and did not attempt to appeal to all sides. The company has been widely praised for its campaign against white supremacy, but don’t forget that this is still a corporate form of marketing.

And it worked.

Ben & Jerry’s has been highlighted for its political activism by everyone from marketing undergrad students to major news networks. This level of publicity has blown its competitors out of the water.

So, how should you take advantage of that in 2021?

Activism has traditionally been an area avoided by companies for fear of upsetting people. Today, it works both ways. Although 55% of customers said they would boycott a brand that doesn’t align with their views, a third of customers said they would recommend a brand that does align with their views.

Taking a stand has become the new normal. Know your customer and take a stand on the issues that matter most to them.

6. Stop Talking about the Virus!

The final change you need to make in the post-pandemic world is to stop talking about the virus. Although you might think that showing off your new office layout to keep the virus at bay is a smart option, it’s not.

Studies have shown consumers are sick of hearing about coronavirus and anything related to it. As early as May 2020, 41% of consumers said they wanted to hear about topics from brands that were unrelated to the pandemic.

Almost a year later, it doesn’t take a genius to assume these numbers have risen drastically.

The biggest change you can make on social media post-pandemic is to look forwards not back.

Adapt to the New World of Social Media

The key takeaway here is that the pandemic changed consumer behavior like nothing else. This historical event has made your previous strategy obsolete.

You must adapt to what consumers expect today. Whether that’s championing a cause or trying out formerly unconsidered channels, it’s time to acknowledge, adapt, and change.

What post-pandemic social media marketing changes have you got in the pipeline?

The post 6 Social Media Changes Businesses Should Make in a Post-Pandemic World appeared first on SiteProNews.