/ Articles by Toby Cox - Guest Contributor

The benefits package your company offers does matter, and there's a high cost in terms of attracting and retaining talent if you get it wrong. According to Capterra’s recent survey, benefits are critical to employee retention: Most HR leaders (57%) say employee benefits are extremely important to retaining top talent. Among large businesses (1,001+ employees), that number jumps to 67%.*

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to get your brand, services, and products in front of potential consumers wherever they may be online. This type of digital marketing is flexible enough to allow you to advertise across platforms and decide how long an ad runs for. And, you only pay when someone engages with the ad and clicks through to your website, rather than other types of online advertising that charge for simply displaying ads.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing can offer your business a slew of benefits. Its results are easy to measure, and it provides useful data that can inform future campaigns. It’s also simple to set up, all while keeping you in control of how much you spend, the keywords you target, and how long your ads run.

Your company needs new software, and you’ve been tasked with finding it.  The platform you choose could help your business succeed, or it could pose even more challenges than you’re already facing.

At this point, you’ve done all the hard work in identifying your business’s challenges and comparing different software platforms.  You’ve waded through the sea of features each platform offers to finally get to a shortlist of three to five solid software options for your business. You’ve also sat through multiple software demos, asked vendors critical questions about features, data security, usability, training, and customer support, and crunched the numbers to make sure the platform fits both your business’s needs and budget.

Perhaps your website looks outdated and offers an outdated user experience to match. Maybe you’ve gotten feedback from customers that your website is difficult to navigate, or it isn’t mobile friendly. Perhaps you’ve seen a drop in website traffic and sales or want to improve search engine optimization (SEO).

The risk of cyberthreats is rising, and a cyberattack could mean devastating consequences for your small business.  In the short term, these consequences may include exorbitant costs for ransom payments to recover data, lost revenue due to downtime, and legal fees. In the long term, you may experience a hit to your business’s credit rating, which can impact your ability to secure financing in the future.

Your website is an extension of your business—it is the face of your brand, your digital storefront, and your connection to a wider global audience. It can inform first impressions and be a deciding factor in a customer's decision to become a loyal one: If your website doesn't make it easy (or safe) for customers to do business with you, then they won’t come back.

Having a strong financial plan is essential for any small business or startup, and you probably already have one: According to our 2023 Accounting Shortage Survey*, nearly all (90%) businesses already have a financial plan in place.