Customer engagement is the number one thing your business needs right now; you’ve researched your competitors, you’ve gathered a following on social media, you’ve made your first sale, and now you need to boost your numbers for continued success. To help you do that, we’ve covered a few of the best ways to bring customers to your door, with a smile on their face and something nice to say about your business.
One of the best ways to get customers involved in your company and any marketing campaign you’re putting together is to give them an incentive. Something that’ll both draw them in and ensure they stick around until the end, such as when the new product goes on sale.
And one of the best ways to incentivize an audience is via competitions and giveaways. You’ll see these a lot on social media; a lot of brands like to give people the chance to win by simply tagging two or three friends in the comments under a post. Why not give this a try yourself, and see if your numbers ratchet up?
Personalize Their Experience
Next up is the idea of personalizing a customer’s experience, on a case by case basis. Of course, this is hard to do when approaching your customer base as a whole - even just asking for feedback after a customer service phone call can cause some people to immediately put the phone down!
But if you give them a platform to use, that they can tailor to their own needs, which then feeds information back to you, you’ll be able to meet them more than halfway. One of the best ways to provide this option is via the development of your own app; it’s easier to hire app developers than ever before, if you don’t have your own IT department.
The main benefit here is giving customers a way to customize how you approach them; they can save searches, allowing you to better recommend products to them, and a higher user count is very impressive if you want to attract further investment. This’ll help your app to become better in the future.
Offer Something More
Be sure to offer something unusual or different to your usual service, especially if you already have an established customer base, and you’re looking to capitalize on repeat custom. You need to be able to bring them back, even if you sell ‘one time’ products,
One of the best ways to offer more is via collaborating with other small businesses, both in and out of your niche, to provide product bundles or new features that’ll be very beneficial to the person on the other end. Above all else, you’ll want to work with companies that provide products your customers already want to buy, to ensure the collaboration is worth it.
Customer engagement is a tricky game; make sure you’re playing with the stakes above.
The pandemic has convinced businesses to digitize their activities. Many small businesses have even seized the opportunity to set up their first website! Building your digital brand can be challenging. Ultimately, with over a billion websites, it’s fair to say that the competition will affect your visibility. So, you’ll need to work hard to make sure your website gets noticed by your audience group. There can be no digital presence without a strong search engine optimization strategy. Your SEO strategy will need to include relevant and achievable keywords for your brand – beware of generic search terms that are highly competitive and lack targeting –, regular and informative content, and dull and irrelevant content. But there’s only so much you can achieve with web content. Building your digital brand begins offline! Here’s how:
For small businesses that only created a website during the pandemic, chances are that you never needed an online presence before. Therefore, now’s the best time to capitalize on your offline brand awareness to enhance brand visibility and online visits. A small shop, for instance, could consider an added merch item for loyal customers or big spenders. Useful items such as cell phone stands to promote your brand can be a neat addition to the brand strategy. They increase not only brand awareness but are also likely to boost the brand reputation. Trade shows and conferences are also a great platform to share meaningful merch items.
Be the expert they invite
Most SEO strategies include blog management, with the underlying thought that writing a blog will attract more visitors to the site. In reality, the competition for bloggers is harsh. It’s unlikely your blog article will get noticed. Instead, it can be a better idea to become a guest expert on popular platforms. As a rule of thumb, avoid becoming a guest blogger as it’s time-demanding for little results. On the other hand, becoming a guest on a podcast show will showcase the brand’s expertise and encourage people to find out more about your business.
Local visibility can be a game-changer in a small community. Branded car wraps or local charity sponsoring can make a huge difference because they are memorable. Most people will not visit your website. But if you give them a reason to look your name up online, they are more likely to engage with your content. Therefore, making your brand visible in traffic with a whacky car wrapping design or as a sponsor for social cause charities will build up interest.
Use Big Data
Enhancing your visibility may also require big data. Today, there is a treasure trove of information available via the internet about customers, marketing campaigns, websites and products. If you can get an AI marketing company to help you leverage this data, you can often increase your brand’s visibility tremendously.
Today’s big data is nothing like it was ten years ago. Now, it is multi-channel and often open-source. This means that you can tap into it almost immediately, without having to go through the painful process of collecting data yourself.
Join meaningful projects
Don’t ask for change. Be the change you want to see.
Except that being the change is no easy task for small businesses. It can be expensive and out of their technical range. But a small business can join a common project with a partner or promote an existing project relevant to their audience group. You don’t have to be the change if you can’t afford it. But you can be the one who talks about the change.
Building a digital brand is a long and involved strategy. For small businesses that have just launched their first digital platforms, it’s the perfect excuse to leverage their existing offline reputation. You don’t have to separate your offline and online strategies. Chances are, the people who spot your brand offline will become your online customers.
These days, building a website can be a purely design-oriented task thanks to the plethora of web builders that allow you to drag and drop various elements and use templates that can be customised to your liking. You don’t really need to focus on the technical aspects of building a website because it’s just not needed. Everything is handled for you and it’s not something you need to spend time learning.
But that’s not true for all websites.
If you’re looking to add specific features to your website then it’s extremely important that you consider learning about the technical side of website building. Here are some ways to help you get started.
There are loads of free tools and systems that you can use to practice with before you decide to invest money. For example, an Application Programming Interface (API) can help you scrape a lot of data that can be displayed in various ways on a website or even be used to help optimise your website. You can use a public API to help you learn about interacting with different applications before you decide to invest in a paid service for a specific web API or an API for some kind of application.
Don’t be afraid to use trial and error
One of the best ways to learn about website development is often through trial and error. For example, changing something in your source code or settings, saving the changes, then seeing what it does can help you understand the various functions and programming languages that are used in website development. This is a much more hands-on approach than just reading a book and it allows you to get comfortable with the idea of coding. It can be a little discouraging at first, but once you get accustomed to all of the words used in programming, it can be a surprisingly effective way to speed through the basics of a new programming language in the future.
Have some kind of goal in mind
It’s always good to start with some kind of goal in mind before you decide to learn about the technical side of website building. For example, if you want to speed up your website, then you may want to learn about how to optimise the various web applications that you use. Similarly, if you want to offer up-to-date information on things such as cryptocurrency prices, then you should learn how to incorporate an API into your website features.
Consider taking online lessons about website development
It can be hard to wrap your head around some of the concepts of website development, hence why we’d suggest that you take some online lessons to learn more. There are loads of lessons and tutorial videos on YouTube if you’re looking for something free, and there is a plethora of blogs and websites dedicated to free learning resources. However, you can also go the professional route and consider using a skill-sharing website or academic courses.
Are you starting a new business? If the answer is yes, then now is the time to do so. The market is in a good condition, and there are no names that have big backing that you have to worry about. But, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to distinguish yourself from the rest of the people there. How are you going to do this though? In this article, we are going to be taking a look at how you can give your new business a leg up over the competition. Good luck.
The first thing that you are going to need to do is learn how to manage social media. There are a lot of people on there who are trolls, but you also don’t want to give them any ammunition to use against you. We highly recommend that you have your personal accounts on Instagram and Facebook private. Always be careful what you post online, because once it is out there, there is no getting it back as much as you would like to.
Having a private account means that you can look into how to remove followers on Instagram if you want. This way, you know that the only people who have access to your social media are the people you want to. It’s also a good idea to have a professional profile that potential employers can see.
Consult Customer Research
If you want your new business to have a leg up over the competition, then you need to consult the customer and market research that has been conducted. Listening to what people want should always be something that a business strives to do, and we bet that a lot of other new businesses didn’t go through this kind of trouble to obtain research. This is already going to set you apart from the others that are trying to establish their name on the market, but you will know better than them what people actually want.
If you’re not sure how to conduct the research that you need, you can hire someone to do it for you. In fact, this might be your best option because then at least you will know the information is accurate and as up to date as possible.
Time To Open Early
It might be the case that you are set to launch your business around the same time as a few others. So, beat them to the punch and open your business early. While it might not make a lot of sense now, you will see why we say this when you go in store and talk to them about it. People are waiting for the product or service that you can supply, and if you are the only person open who sells it, then they are going to come to you. If they enjoy the experience of using your company, then they are going to become repeat customers you hope.
The other businesses on the market don’t stand a chance against the research and proposal.
Ensuring The Funding Situation Is Fine
If you want to get a leg up over the competition, you’ve got to swing it over yourself. You need to know that the funding situation is fine, so going to talk to the investor is the logical thing to do. It’s essential that you know you can trust this person to provide the money for the business without backing out half way through, or deciding that the project simply isn’t for them, before cutting off all funding. This would ruin the business, and be another devastating blow to your career, and would result in heavy consequences for the investor,
Luckily, the investor isn’t looking anywhere else right now, and is dedicated to helping you get this project off the ground. You need to spend money to make money, but if you don’t have any, that’s when you need the help of an angel investor who is willing to try and make your dreams come true. If you find one of these people, you’re certainly one of the lucky ones.
We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now see some of the things that you can do to give your business a little leg up over the competition. You’re going to want to win, and you should be willing to do anything to achieve this goal by now. Do whatever it takes to get ahead of the other businesses, and this way, you know you will succeed.
When growing a business, one of the most important considerations that you need to keep in mind is advertising. With no advertising, your business has no hope of gaining any traction or exposure, making it almost impossible to grow your business. Thankfully, there are many marketing agencies that can help you lift your business off the ground and into the limelight.
But is it really worth the investment?
The alternative is to do the marketing yourself. It’s not the most difficult thing in the world, but it’s going to take some serious planning and dedication if you want to make it work. But how worth it is this approach compared to hiring an expert?
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at some of the major differences and reasons why you might want to pick one choice over the other.
Perhaps the biggest draw to hiring a marketing agency is being able to make things a whole lot easier for yourself. Instead of worrying too much about things like how to approach your audience or how to get noticed on social media, you can just focus on growing your business while marketing specialists handle the rest.
Working with a competent advertising agency means that you’ll easily be able to focus on other tasks while your team of experts gets you noticed. Since there are so many decisions and skills needed to market a company, it’s not something that you should be doing without experience. People often say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but these days, if you don’t make an impact on social media or create a bad first impression, people will forget about your business and just seek out alternatives that probably already exist.
Agencies also have many different connections to the industry that you want to grow in. This means it’s much easier for those teams to reach out to designers, website developers, and other important team members that will assist your business’s growth. In short, hiring an agency is definitely the way to go if there are lots of other responsibilities that you need to take care of and there aren’t enough people in your company to grow your business.
Doing it yourself gives you a custom approach
One of the biggest benefits of taking a solo approach to marketing is that you’re able to completely define the way that you present yourself. For example, if you choose to use radio advertising to grow your business, then you’re the one that gets on the radio and you become the voice and face of your business.
Putting a face to a brand is an excellent decision if you’re able to spend the time required. If you have other staff members in your company and they’re able to take care of the bulk of the responsibilities for growing your business, then becoming the public face of your brand is never a bad idea and can work out in your favour.
If there is one thing that every business leader may have noticed in recent years, it’s the changes in technology. The advances in workplace technology is there to improve the way that we work day to day, and with all of these new technologies comes a whole new batch of training that’s needed. Sure, it may not be in the forefront of your mind at all times, but it’s certainly something that you should be considering if you want your employees to keep up with the changes. One of the best ways to ensure that your business is keeping up with the times is to be on top of your employee training.
Getting your employees in front of the right, relevant training as much as possible will help your company to improve exponentially. You want to know that you can increase the results in the workplace, and one of the best ways to do that is to put education at the top of your planning list for your employees. People want to do well in their roles and the best way that you can help them to do that is to offer as much training in the workplace as possible. You can gear the training toward the topics in which people are interested in individually, and you can also choose to train your staff with Live SEO Sessions to keep their skills updated. Your employee talent pool needs to be strengthened as much as possible, and with the seven reasons listed below, you’ll see why you need to be offering training to your employees.
Improving Skills. The people working for you aren't there just to fulfil the tasks of one job: they’re there to improve as much as possible on what they already know, and enhance their knowledge in new fields. If you have sales and customer service individuals working for you, they may have a bigger interest in marketing, too. So, you can improve their skill set and working knowledge with better training in other sectors related to the one in which you hired them initially. When you do this, you positively impact your company and you improve productivity, too. As a byproduct, you’ll have more profits and much better efficiency, too.
Better Appraisals. When you host performance appraisals for your staff, you may know that you’re not just appraising their skills: they're appraising you as a business leader. You need to ensure that when people ask you for more training, you are giving it to them as part of their continued professional development. Training can address problems in the workplace and help you to help your staff to overcome those difficulties. Training will also help your staff to overcome identified problem areas and do better in the future.
More Responsibility. By offering more training, you are preparing your staff to have more responsibility in the future, which - if they want to succeed - they will appreciate. You will find that the right training programs can also help your employees to prepare to move into higher roles and take on better responsibilities.
Offering Value. Everyone loves the pat on the back to tell them that they are doing a good job, and when you offer extra training, you are telling someone that you value the things that they are doing for your organization. You are telling them that they are valuable, and that is a huge thumbs up for an employee who may be unsure as to whether they are working for you the right way.
Performance Efficiency. Employee training programs are going to help you to test whether your staff are efficient in what they are doing. You can establish clearer expectations in performance, too, and this will help you to reinforce the fact that you want your staff to do well. They will appreciate this, and so will your HR team because they will be able to help your employees to map out better individual goals.
Improving Computer Skills. When you offer specific training, you can help your staff to do better with their technology knowledge and this is exactly what you need when technology is constantly being upgraded.
You Gain Employee Loyalty. When you are paying attention to the needs of your employees, you are going to gain their loyalty in ways you couldn't imagine. They will find that your approach is in their interest and not just the interest of the business, which they will appreciate from you as an employer! Training your employees will make you a better leader as a result.
