As an e-comm business owner, you’ve probably heard this before: reduce your COGS.
Your cost of goods sold are most likely our most basic expense.
Having higher cost of goods means lower margins resulting in less space for innovation, research, marketing, and so much more.
It’s the key to taking your business to the next level.
If you read our previous post about reducing COGs, you may be wondering where you should allocate money to improve your brand.
Our best suggestion is research and marketing!
Let’s start with research.
Read More: How to Decrease your COGs and Increase your Profits
Research
Whether it’s product research to improve or innovate your product, or market research.
Researching to innovate your product will not only keep your customer happy, but will keep you ahead of your customers.
And, market research allows you to get to know your customers better to improve how you market to them.
In both cases, it’s a win win!
Even if you don’t have the budget for big research campaigns, there’s still a lot of benefit you can get from doing small scale research like social listening.
Looking at your social media comments, searching for what people are saying about your brand, and digging deeper into why people like or dislike your product are key ways to improve your product.
This can be time-consuming, so you might need to hire someone to do this for you, but it’s something that you can just do periodically instead of constantly.
Research is an expense that feels more like an investment. You might not reap the benefits immediately, but the impact that it can have on your bottom line can be lasting.
Jumping in marketing
Marketing
Increasing your marketing budget when you have the margins to do so allows you to get more customers through the door.
You can spread your budget amongst different platforms allowing you to reach different audience groups as well as retarget them as well.
More marketing spend also means you get to run more campaigns, test more platforms, explore new angles.
All are incredibly significant to growing your brand.
Some other notable ways you can divvy up your saved COG spend is digging into your customer experience, improving your operations, improving employee satisfaction, and so much more.
The important thing to note is that, although you can save money from COGs, you need to make sure you’re putting that money back into your business, improving and growing it bigger and better for your customers and team.
If you want to hear more about COGs and how you can make them work with you rather than against you, check out our other content on this topic.
