Will 2022 be the year that you turbocharge your business by boosting digital sales? That's easier said than done—but it is possible.
Thanks to new technology and a new suite of business solutions that are truly aligned with your success, you can embrace the new calendar year with gusto and a little extra cash.
Here's how it all works.
Small business lending and tech.
Once upon a time, taking out a loan meant you needed to walk into a large bank and hope that the loan manager had some sort of insight into the waxing and waning of small business fortunes.
You also needed to prepare extensive documentation to convince a skeptical large bank that the business you pour your heart and soul into is worthy of their time and money. Luckily, financial tech providers such as SpotOn Capital are changing that by harnessing the power of payment tech to make real-time decisions around your business.
A lot of payment tech providers around the world are getting into lending, harnessing their unique advantage to provide a better deal to small-business owners. What's that advantage? Data.
By having access to a business' information, such as payment flow and payroll data, a provider can make decisions on lending viability almost instantly. Meanwhile, having access to a lot of small businesses' data means it can glean insights on an industry level to offer more value.
How data creates understanding and alignment.
All of that data tells SpotOn Capital about the key elements of small businesses, such as seasonal cash flow, to punctuate their inherent understanding of companies built by people just like you.
For example, SpotOn Capital is able to offer a simple fixed-rate and fixed fee with payments made as a fixed percentage of daily sales.
When sales are slow, you don't pay as much. When sales are plentiful, you pay more. Having repayments connected to daily income means SpotOn Capital is incentivized to see you succeed, rather than burden you with unreasonable debts.
Tech and small business expertise has led to the creation of lending solutions geared toward the business owner rather than the lender. But how do you take advantage of small business loans to drive digital sales?
3 key investments you can make with a smart business loan.
1. Hire marketing specialists.
One of the more effective ways to boost digital sales is to enhance your digital marketing channels. As a small-business owner, it's hard to find enough hours in the day to work on all aspects of your business all the time. Hiring a freelancer to solve a particular business problem can be a great way to build your sales.
For example, you could hire a social media specialist with experience building ecommerce flows and give them a budget to boost social reach and conversion (the proportion of followers who actually buy something).
A lot of freelancers work on a project fee basis, meaning you'll need to hand over a stack of cash instead of giving them an ongoing salary. While freelancers often don't require expenses like insurance or worker's compensation, these large one-time payments can complicate poor cash flow in an otherwise good business. With a quick loan, you can hire a freelancer on a fixed-term project and have them look at your sales funnel to diagnose and fix the problem.
Once that project is done, you'll ideally have a robust social media presence and higher sales—meaning a lender like SpotOn Capital gets paid back sooner (good for them), and you're left with a greater baseline of sales (good for you).
2. Buy more equipment or stock.
It's difficult to sell more goods when you're busy putting up the "sold out" sign. A lot of businesses can only create so many physical products before they run into supply issues and have to tell customers that an item is out of stock or back-ordered—and very few small businesses want to tell their customers no.
This issue can be especially acute during times of heavy demand for your product, such as the holiday season for retailers. Having out-of-stock items on your product page means you're missing opportunities to boost digital sales. By investing more heavily in manufacturing capacity or materials, or by ordering larger quantities from your supplier, you can make sure you don't miss out on precious digital sales.
If you provide services rather than physical goods, you can take a similar approach and think about using a loan to augment your workforce with short-term hires during periods of peak demand.
3. Build something new.
Of course, there are more ways to boost your sales than to build more stuff. Try building different stuff.
For a lot of small-business owners, diversification is the key way to break out of a cash flow rut—but diversification takes a lot of time and, crucially, money. It takes time to research the vertical you want to move into and how to best approach it. Meanwhile, your core business may suffer.
Extra cash from a loan can indirectly help solve these planning or research problems. You could hire a consultant to do the investigative work for you, or you could hire staff for your day-to-day operations to make sure the business doesn't suffer while you're busy expanding it.
Then there's the cost of setting up an entirely new product line or expanding into a new vertical—which isn't cheap. You're going to need either a lot of time or a lot of money to expand your business into new areas. And small-business owners know that sometimes opportunity only knocks for so long. In the absence of time, a cash boost can be the difference between grabbing an opportunity and letting it slip through your fingers.
Underpinning all these ideas to boost your sales is the ability to have cash delivered to you by people who truly understand your business and its numbers. By aligning your success with their success, providers like SpotOn are well-positioned to ensure their investment succeeds—and, more importantly, to give your small business the leg up it needs.
