How to Cut Costs Using the Internet

The recession is forcing broad reductions. Worse, the era of excess consumer spending is over. In response, most business around the world, whether they buy or sell video surveillance, will have to tighten their belts. Even if your company was growing quickly and is still growing, these forces are likely to reduce the ultimate growth potential of your business.

You can either accept this (layoffs, hiring freezes, eliminate perks, etc.) or you can use the Internet to lower your cost structure  This report examines how both end users and sellers of video surveillance can reduce their costs by up to 20% through using the Internet.

The smart way to respond to the recession (long term) is increase efficiency - to increase the productivity of the assets you use.

End Users (Buyers of Video Surveillance)

The two biggest inefficiencies of buying video surveillance are:

• Getting the wrong solution
• Paying too much

This happens all the time and is almost an inevitable consequence of traditional sales and marketing. Indeed, a key motivator to build these large product manufacturers is to get you to buy sub-optimal solutions at more money (or as we discussed a few months ago, the problems of buying from big companies).

Solution for End Users

End users need to use the Internet to educate themselves and to control their selection process. The problem is fundamentally insufficient information. While the sales person has more information they do on what they are selling, their interests are generally not aligned with yours. Use the Internet to educate yourself. Steps you should take:

• Read the "Security Manager's Guide to Video Surveillance"
• Go through the tutorials
• Read reviews on different technologies and products
• Scan the directory of video surveillance companies
• Talk to other people on CCTVForum and the SecurityInfoWatch Forums
• Price check products using Google product search (not all video surveillance products are available but more and more products are being priced online).

The bottom line is that the Internet is already a huge force and video surveillance companies are extremely poor at taking advantage of this.

Given the recession, it's fairly obvious that the importance of the Internet will only grow with buyers.

And online marketing is very inexpensive. The small online stores that dominate the search results clearly do not have a lot of money. Despite this, for tens of thousands of dollars they get over 500,000 visitors every year. Compare that to your trade show expenditures.

Using the Internet can let you reduce traditional marketing while increasing the revenue each salesperson can generate (by providing more high quality leads cheaper).

The question then becomes: How can companies improve their online marketing to take advantage of this?