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Hi, this is John Lenaghan from SavvyWebMarketing.com and today I just want to share a few thoughts
on choosing tools for your business.
Over the last couple of days you've probably seen a whole bunch of promotions going on
for a new all-in-one video player. This tool records video, it plays the video back - it
has the player built in - it has analytics built in, all sorts of different things in
a single tool.
All of which you can get from other services, of course for separate costs for each. The
benefit for this is one is in theory you're only paying one time and you get all these
tools in one place.
Now, all-in-one tools have their benefits but in my experience they're rarely the best
at any particular function. So of all the things they can do, they don't do any of them
the best in the market.
The thing that always comes to mind when it comes to these tools goes all the way back
to when I was a kid, as a Boy Scout. I remember going to camp one time and one of the kids
came with a knife that had a spoon, a fork, and everything built into the one knife.
And the rest of us thought it was the coolest thing ever. The whole thing was in his hand.
We all wished we had one until it got to the time when we were eating and this knife with
all the tools in one suddenly didn't work very well because you couldn't use the knife
and the fork at the same time.
And any time I look at an all-in-one tool, that's the thing I think about - all those
years ago when I was at a Scout camp out in the middle of nowhere.
All-in-one tools in your business are similar to that. They often look great and the idea
seems good, particularly only having to pay for something once instead of an ongoing subscription.
But when it comes to actually implementing them, you may find that certain things don't
work quite the way they should or you're not able to do multiple things with them at the
same time. There's lots of different variables that you can run into.
Another big problem that you can run into with these kinds of tools is that if one part
of the tool goes down, the whole thing is generally down. For example, with this video
player that's going around right now, if the service goes down, your player may be out,
you're not able to upload or record videos, your analytics are down - everything's gone.
Where if you have separate tools or services for each of those things, if your analytics
was to be out of service for a day or two it wouldn't affect the playback, and so on.
What you want to look for is redundancy. And this applies to everything, not just these
tools. It applies to your hosting, it applies to your email service - anything.
You never want to be relying on a single service or a single tool that can bring your entire
business down if it goes down.
In my experience, you're much better off to use separate tools for the different functions
in these things and look for the services or tools that do that particular function
the best.
What you'll usually find is in the short term, your costs are going to be higher. You're
going to have to pay more for separate tools than you would for something that does everything
all in one place.
Or you may pay less up front, but there would be ongoing subscription costs that you have
to pay so in the long run you're paying more. But by using the best tool for the job, in
the long run your cost is going to be lower.
You're going to have less downtime, there's going to be less frustration because there
may be little things that are just not quite right or they may be things you're trying
to do that it's just not really made to do.
The big one for me is in comparing a one-time cost to an ongoing subscription. While it
seems like a good thing up front because you're only paying one time, in the long run it can
actually cost you because there's a lot less incentive for people who make these tools
to continually upgrade them and improve them when a large percentage of their customers
have bought from them months or even years prior and they're not making any more money
from those people.
Whereas a tool where you're paying a subscription on a monthly basis, they know they need to
keep it up and maintain it in order to keep the subscription going.
So there's a lot more incentive for those people to continue developing the tool over
the long term.