3 tips to make the best of a high limit card

It's no secret that growth can quickly outpace profit, no matter what industry you're in. From marketing agencies to tech start-ups and everything else in between, the desire for more financing typically falls into one of two categories: Either the owner wants to increase profits to pursue new business opportunities, or there is a problem preventing advancement to solve. 

Expanding companies need more capital than those tackling challenges alone; after all, whether you earn $100,000 or $10 million annually, there's always another future milestone to reach. Each milestone prepares the journey for more growth, but it's never cheap and usually requires financing more than you have before. As a result, when business owners face an opportunity to grow, they can often turn to high limit cards.

Importance of having a business card

Business cards can be a company's most essential tool, so getting the right one and using it wisely can be invaluable.

Having a separate card for business expenses can make account management much more accessible. In addition, while smaller business owners could rely on personal cards, opting for a business card can often give you better benefits, such as better expense tracking, high spending power, and more generous rewards to earn.

1. Easier expense management

Using a company card streamlines expense tracking, paying suppliers, covering bills, and managing other business financial aspects. In addition, most business cards allow you to categorize types of spending and identify trends in your purchases.

For example, you can track how much you spend on advertising, supplies, utilities, and traveling to meet with clients. As a media buyer you might find that you’ve been spending more on ads than you intended to, causing the ad spend amount to eat up too much of your monthly budget. The same goes for ecommerce business owners, who might notice that their fulfillment partner has been overcharging them for parcel deliveries. Having one statement that breaks down your spending makes it easier to make adjustments and get your budget back on target.

2. Convenient accounting records

Your business expenses might qualify for a deduction when you file a tax return. However, you need clear records of what you spend your capital on, or you might lose track of oft-overlooked credits and deductions for businesses. In addition, mixing personal and company purchases on the same account makes it harder to find everything you need to qualify for the maximum refund.

Managing spending on a single business card helps your accountant find what counts as a tax break for your return. Not only that, but you'll also have a record of everything in case of an audit by your local tax authority.

3. Flexible borrowing

When your business runs low on funds, you can use a card to cover your expenses; then pay off the balance when your cash flow returns. As long as you pay off the balance by the end of the statement, you won't owe interest for borrowing against the credit. However, if you need to borrow for longer than that, you'll owe interest until you pay the total amount.

4. Spending rewards

Many cards attract customers through their rewards programs; when you spend money using these cards, you can earn cashback or points that you can invest back into the business. So running your expenses through this kind of program allows you to generate a sizeable return for the company.

For example, if you spend £100,000 a month on a card with a 2 percent cashback rate, you can earn £2,000 every month; that's an additional £24,000 a year just for using a rewards program. Additionally, as long as you pay off the entire balance each month, you won't lose out by owing interest.

Of course, the more money you can spend each month, the more you'll get back.

How to get a high limit card

Card issuers use a variety of factors pulled from your credit report, your application, and their own internal data to formulate an appropriate credit limit. The exact amount will depend on how an issuer weighs these different factors.

For instance, if your company turns a high net profit each month, the issuer will likely feel more comfortable issuing a higher credit limit. Likewise, having a history of paying your bills on time and maintaining an excellent credit score will likely increase your chances of getting a card.

Because card issuers don't usually advertise limits in their marketing, it's difficult to say for sure if you'll get a high limit card when you apply.

Tip 1: Grow your business with more cash flow

In the same way that starting a business requires cash, so too does scaling a company; growing your business needs more funding for facilities, equipment, working capital, and operating expenses. However, few people understand that even a profitable company that tries to expand too quickly can quickly run out of cash, even if it has only produced successful products and services.

For ecommerce entrepreneurs, the cash flow bottleneck can manifest itself in all types of problems which could be detrimental to the scaling process. One of these is when demand outweighs the supply of a product because there is not enough cash flow available to produce more products. Should this be the case, potential customers might not wait two or three months for you to get the money together, produce and restock more products. Instead, they could go check out one of your competitors and purchase their product instead. All the time, energy, and resources you’ve spent on moving those customers down your conversion funnel would have been for nothing. A high limit card can help you avoid this problem, as it allows you to anticipate the demand and finance the production of more products so that you are always able to satisfy the demand of your customers.

The same thing applies for media buyers and online advertisers. Imagine that you have created a winning ad campaign for Black Friday, one of the biggest sales periods of the year. Your CPC is unmatched, and your ROAS is excellent. Naturally, you want to scale this campaign in order to maximise your profits. The problem is that you do not have the cash flow to do so because your earnings will not land in your bank account until next week, causing you to miss out on huge amounts of profits. Leveraging a high limit card to get the extra cashflow will prevent you from losing out on an opportunity of a lifetime.

A high limit card gives you access to more resources, but one vital challenge for managers is to achieve the right balance between generating cash and spending it. If you cannot find that balance, then even a thriving company can become a victim of its own success.

More capital can solve many challenges, but be sure to dig deeper

It's often inevitable that if your business faces a financial challenge like tax bills or a slow season, then more financing is necessary to press forward. No matter your industry, there are two ways you can solve a money problem. 

The first and most common approach is to grab your card, borrow money, and jump back into business. After all, the problem is that you're not generating enough money. This strategy temporarily solves the problem, but the cycle will continue in the future if you don't tackle the root issue causing it. This also applies to the aforementioned issue of not having enough cash at hand to scale winning ad campaigns, which is something that many media buyers face. When the ROAS hasn’t been paid out into your bank account, it is easy to simply apply for more credit every time. A way to negate that is to build up a specialised cash reserve which is exclusively dedicated to scaling those unicorn ad campaigns which you keep creating.

The second approach is to dig deeper into company operations and identify changes to make, whether that is to eliminate waste, change entire processes, or adjust something as simple as your accounts receivable collection method. This strategy forces you to stop and analyse your company to make essential adjustments.

Growing a business takes more funding at each stage

Even if your business earns higher revenue, it doesn't automatically grow overnight. Strategically growing a company requires you to invest in your business wisely, creating an infrastructure that allows it to thrive. In other words, you must take big strides where it matters.

For example, consider how spending more on marketing can give your company new leads, leading to more revenue. Early on, your business can acquire new customers and still turn a profit with local word-of-mouth recommendations and a minimal advertising budget. However, that kind of success plateaus; unless you have a plan to double your revenue from the customers you already have, you'll need new ones to make more money. 

Investing in a balanced mix of various digital marketing channels can give you the necessary exposure to generate new leads, but it won't be a cheap endeavour; depending on your approach, the most expensive part of the expansion will be hiring a marketing team or enlisting the help of an agency. Additionally, other expenses are involved in gaining a competitive edge, such as making a new website, advertising budgets, and marketing platforms. 

An initiative like this can be a significant financial burden, so enlisting the help of a high limit card can help relieve some of the pressure in a lucrative way. In addition, if your marketing efforts lead to new, paying clients, your revenue will speak volumes.

Of course, it's just as important to focus on the smaller steps. Establishing suitable systems and putting a good structure in place is the foundation that any business needs to expand. Having capital gives you the traction required to achieve the next milestone, such as adding new technologies, relocating, or physically expanding, but the structure and processes are vital.

While you must keep track of the expenses that add up on your budget, not all costs neatly fall into one of these categories. Certain foundational fees are essential and can't be bogged down by direct or eventual ROI calculations; you cannot easily quantify expenses like these, but they ultimately improve your bottom line.

Be strategic and deliberate to get the most out of your high limit card

Funding is often an expensive necessity, but you don't need to go overboard. Instead, calculate exactly how much you need to grow your business, taking into consideration all possible expenses that can spontaneously occur as you achieve your primary objectives. For media buyers, this could be things like taking into account the increased competition on an ad platform like Facebook, which causes the CPC to increase and make advertising on this platform more expensive than when you first started to use it. Similar to how you take monetary inflation into consideration in the pricing strategy for a product, so should you when it comes to the inflation of advertising costs before budgeting for your next ad campaigns. Estimating your costs will help keep you from spending too much on your high limit card.

Tip 2: Become more flexible in scaling marketing campaigns

The reality is that marketing is expensive; in planning a new campaign or organically growing your business, most business owners quickly discover that executing a strategy can cost tens of thousands of euros that cuts into the bottom line. 

To make matters more expensive, your business is never finished growing; growth isn't a one-time deal, and each milestone costs more than the one before it. But, of course, if that cost leads to doubling or tripling your revenue, then it's more than worth it.

However, managing your spending is essential rather than endlessly throwing money at expenses.

A high limit card helps you scale your marketing campaigns

Cash is a business's lifeblood, and it needs to make enough profit from its operations to manage expenses, repay investors, and grow the business to make more revenue. While it's possible to fudge your earnings, the company's cash flow gives away the truth about its health. 

One of the most crucial factors to consider when budgeting for any marketing campaign is your return on investment. In other words, how much value will you get versus what you put into it? A high limit card can help you put more money into advertising, but it's only worth it if you'll profit from the decision. For instance, if you spend an additional £10,000 on scaling an existing ad campaign using your high limit card, but your ROAS doesn’t increase because your potential audience was already saturated, then extra cash for ad spend wasn’t the answer. Instead, those £10,000 could be used to identify a new, untapped audience and build a new ad campaign to target them.

A high limit card gives you the capacity to handle growth

Scaling a well-organised marketing campaign inevitably leads to new customers, given that you have created a sound strategy which ensures that you target the right people with appealing content relevant to their interests. When you have found your winning campaign formula, you must prepare your business for the extra burden that comes with success. If you haven't equipped your company to accommodate a higher number of orders or clients, scaling your efforts could prove detrimental in the long run. A high limit card can help you prepare.

Even if a business does make a profit by spending less than it earns in revenue, you must correctly manage its cash flow to continue seeing success. Cash flow is tied to business activities and operations, including investment activities, such as buying or selling capital equipment, and financial activities, such as repaying debt or raising equity funding. Therefore, the cash generated from core business activities provides the best opportunity for managing cash flow.

Don't spend money where you don't need to

Without a clear plan, it's easy to spend a little money on several one-off campaigns. Too often, the "let's see what happens" approach in marketing leads to wasting lots of time and money. A great way to avoid this pitfall is A/B testing, as it allows you to get an objective overview of what works and what doesn’t. Running several A/B tests for any given campaign will help you identify your winning campaign formula, not based on your subjective opinion, but on actual data. Once you have identified your winning campaign set up, you can confidently leverage your high limit card to scale your campaign.

Another important thing to consider is that wise marketing involves establishing a recognisable brand that customers can trust. It's also about consistent, ongoing communication that gets your messages out; throwing your money at an email campaign one month and then switching to magazine advertisements won't help you successfully scale your marketing campaigns. Knowing your customer, their interests and behaviors will help you map out the type of marketing placements and channels you should focus on first. For example, if you are an affiliate marketer for a crypto platform, then buying ads on reddit is more likely to generate better ROAS than buying ad space in a generic newspaper, as reddit is where your target customer spends most of their time online. The same goes for ecommerce brand owners. If you sell sports supplements online, and you know your highest conversion rate is with males between the ages of 24-35 who come to your webshop via Instagram, then doubling down on Instagram ads and an influencer marketing strategy is the way to go. Like with a lot of things in life, it is better to focus on a few things and excel at them rather than try to do 100 things at once and make little to no progress in any of them. Once you have identified the winning channels and platforms for your marketing campaign, the high limit card can help you get the most out of your winning choices.

Add value, don’t just push product

You already know how to talk about how great your products are, but that's not what your audience wants to hear; they want to see how you can solve the problems they have and how these products make them better. 

To that end, you must first understand what your customers are going through; you learn this information through conducting market research, focus groups, and online surveys, which will inform your marketing strategy. Naturally, these things require a considerable amount of investment and resources, especially if you are looking to generate quality data. Using a high limit card in this scenario will help you build a solid understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. Accurate buyer personas based on reliable data and customer feedback are an essential part of a strategy, so focusing on this will ensure that your marketing efforts and messaging address relevant pain points which your target customer deals with on a regular basis.

Content marketing is a great way to create a balance between product advertorials and brand messaging which adds value to your target customers. If you are an affiliate marketer, media buyer, or run an ecommerce business that sells fitness supplements, then investing in the production of a number of blog articles related to fitness and nutrition is a great way to advertise to cold traffic and bring new potential customers into your marketing funnel. Once they have familiarised themselves with your brand and you have gained their trust, they are more likely to move further down your funnel towards purchase. This long term approach to marketing is often overlooked by marketers because, next to ad spend budget, it requires additional investment into content production. A high limit card can help you manage your cash flow in a way that makes it easier to free up budget for a solid content marketing strategy.

Tip 3: Run More Campaigns at Once

Marketing campaigns are the heart of the process of reaching potential new clients and appealing to your existing ones. Whether you are a media buyer or run your own ecommerce business, the goal of any good campaign is to tell your brand's story over a specified period of time. In doing this, you'll establish a brand image, increase brand awareness, sales and profits, generate new customers, and raise product awareness. That means the more campaigns you run, the more opportunities you'll have to find a new potential audience. And while more campaigns mean more opportunities, it also means more money and resources needed to bring those campaigns to life. That’s why a high limit card can be a great tool for increasing the amount of campaigns you are able to produce and run at the same time.

Keeping Your Campaigns Organised

Staying organised as you analyse your current needs and the consistency of your campaigns should always be a top priority. Doing that and ensuring your clients' needs are met requires top-notch organisation. Here are a few tips to help you maintain multiple marketing campaign accounts without confusing your data:

  • Use a content calendar: Record all of your plans for each campaign to help with the brainstorming process and scheduling content. You can use any recording program you're comfortable with. Use this content calendar to track important events for your various campaigns, such as product launch dates and other essential data.
  • Establish specific goals and deadlines: Identify your goals for each individual campaign. Are they measurable, attainable goals that are timely with specific deadlines? It's also crucial to remain realistic about your capabilities as a marketer; as ambitious as you may want to be, it's never a good idea to make too large a goal than you can handle.

Take Advantage of Project Management Tools

Successfully managing multiple campaigns is difficult for even the most organised marketers. Truthfully, everybody needs assistance sometimes; most marketing companies rely on project management tools that simplify otherwise complicated tasks. They can help you manage communications, calendars, and overall progress. 

The reason the previous two points are so important in the context of using a high limit card, is that organisation and proper campaign management can make or break a successful campaign. When you finance marketing activities on credit, it is important to be able to generate enough ROAS in order to meet the payment deadlines on your high limit card. If you don’t, it puts unnecessary pressure on your business and might prevent you from getting the most out of this financial tool on the future.

Do You Have the Resources for Multiple Campaigns?

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, media buyer, or you run your own ecommerce business - you should already know the answer to this question before choosing to expand your business, but sometimes ambition can overtake sensibility. As a result, it's wise to identify your available resources, including employees who can handle the increase in workload. 

Having the right resources will not only take the pressure off of you, but it will also ensure your business is equipped for multiple accounts. In addition, a high limit card can help provide more funding to prepare your company for a successful business expansion.

Conclusion

A high limit card gives you a secure way to pay for business expenses. It consolidates your spending in one place so you can track everything with ease. As a tailor-made financial platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs and digital marketers, Juni offers high limit virtual cards* which seamlessly integrate into an all-in-one financial dashboard that gives you a centralised overview of your entire business, at the click of a button. Combined with the Juni financial management ecosystem, our high limit cards* empower you to unleash the full potential of your business, including scaling winning marketing campaigns, expanding your audiences, and staying on top of your finances.

*Capital for cards is available for companies registered in UK, NL, SE, DE, FR, ES, IT, NO, and FI, upon eligibility. Fees and terms and conditions apply. Visit juni.co/terms-and-conditions for more information.

Juni serves as an alternative to traditional banking, offers virtual cards designed for online marketing with account management tools designed for campaign managers. Check your eligibility to see what credit limit you qualify for.

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