In business, it pays to have priorities – and you may already have in mind various things that you consider especially worth prioritising. Obvious ones include recruiting staff of the right skills and quality and investing in effective marketing. However, you should not overlook how vital it is that your company’s systems run smoothly – especially if it is an Internet business. Here are several reasons why those systems could exert a surprisingly big influence on your company’s success.
Several marketing strategies that can deliver impressively
Now, we don’t want to play down the true extent to which good marketing can help your business. Indeed, there is a huge range of marketing techniques for you to utilise, as Marketing Donut outlines. With content marketing, for example, you could regularly post useful and interesting content online, such as on your website and blogs, to engage potential customers – while email marketing is fast, cheap, and suitable for getting advertising to people you are targeting.
There are also the options of online and PPC advertising – which, unlike traditional advertising, can immediately attract visitors. You can measure online and PPC advertising’s effectiveness through taking account of the number of clicks that the ads garner. Also, the influence of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter has entrenched itself in the corporate world – especially as these sites provide new channels via which your firm can communicate with existing and potential customers.
While your company’s website can be useful for informing its visitors about new products and special offers, it has even more clear relevance if you sell your goods or services online, rather than just through a bricks and mortar outlet. Selling online – or e-commerce, as it is otherwise known – can be great for bringing in more revenue. However, you might have noticed that all of the marketing methods we have mentioned above rely on an Internet connection – and so, if you turn to these methods, you don’t want a connection that is slow when you need it.
A crucial link between marketing and Internet speeds
So, whether your company is an Internet business because it sells over the Internet or routinely uses the Internet for many of its internal – rather than customer-facing – operations, it’s now obvious why you can’t neglect to keep your systems running hitch-free. Yes, effective marketing is crucial, but you could find your marketing attempts to be seriously handicapped if your Internet-based systems are lacking. Here are a few examples of how this situation can arise.
Imagine that your customer support staff are using company-owned accounts on Facebook and Twitter to promote the business. They might be posting content advertising new products or services that your firm has recently introduced, or helping customers through problems that they are encountering with such products or services. Now, imagine if a slow Internet connection prevents them doing all of this quickly. That could be especially bad in conversations with customers, where timely responses could prevent a big problem becoming even bigger.
Alternatively, imagine experiencing regular delays in updating your website with fresh content simply due to the slow Internet connection in use. That could leave the website’s visitors with outdated information that might slightly inconvenience them or, worse, give them the impression that your firm is sloppy with how it updates its website. Would you have faith in Apple’s website if you saw it advertising a model of iPhone which you knew was discontinued?
Slow Internet could hamper your firm in other ways
However, the speed of your company’s Internet connection can affect much more than just marketing endeavours. The UK-centred Startups website notes that “a fast, reliable internet connection is crucial for many business functions these days.” Emailing, web browsing, using VoIP phone systems and analysing data are among corporate tasks that rely on the Internet, the site points out. Slow Internet speeds can also hit employees’ motivation and efficiency, due to tasks taking much longer to complete, if they are finished at all. Such delay would adversely affect productivity.
These issues can be especially pronounced for rural businesses due to their long-standing poor access to speedy Internet. Therefore, these businesses are hindered in their attempts to grow and can struggle to reach as many potential customers as urban competitors.
How many people are sharing your Internet?
Do you find that, when using the Internet to complete particular tasks or run particular systems, slow online speeds compromise your effectiveness? If so, one way of rectifying this is arranging for the installation of an Internet leased line for regular use by your business.
One common misconception concerning Internet speeds is that they are affected solely by how the Internet is used. While that is indeed a factor, the Internet’s speed is also influenced by how many people are using the network at the same time, as business.com explains. So, if your office has about ten people using the same network simultaneously, the speeds which each of those people experience will be lacking compared to speeds possible were only two or three people using that network. The situation would be especially negative for firms reliant on data-hungry routines.
Why a leased line can prove useful
If your office has just three workers who all use the company’s Internet connection largely just for looking at websites and reading and sending emails, a relatively basic standard of Internet service could suffice. However, should that office have workers tasked with video editing or programming, which could see them downloading and uploading huge files, a leased line can prove useful.
This is because a leased line will give your workplace its own, private line. Therefore, that line’s bandwidth won’t be shared with people outside your work premises, allowing you to confidently predict how zippy the Internet will be. You can start your journey towards finding the right leased line service when you make use of our leased line comparison service. This will let you compare leased line offerings from several different providers.
