Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. The most important aspect of any business is its sales. Directly related to that is your business’s marketing. The following contributed post is thus entitled; You’re Not Selling Your Business Enough.
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The most important thing that you could possibly do with your business, is sell it right. There are so many people out there who are just focused on one goal, and that one goal is usually based around getting as many sales as possible. Which we probably think you think this article was going to be about. If you’re not selling your business enough, we must be on about selling products, right? Wrong, selling yourself is all about getting your business image across. Because despite what you might think, a lot of customer appeal comes from the brand itself, rather than the products being sold. For example, think about the brands Nike vs Reebok. No, we’re not saying the Reebok isn’t a good brand, because it really is. But when you think about the two your mind is going to instantly look to Nike because it’s the bigger and better brand, not necessarily the better product! So, before we ramble on in this section too much, we want to show you how you can sell your business as a whole a bit more, so that you can focus on making money, rather than selling products!
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Who Knows About You?
Or should we say, who would you like to know about you? When thinking about who you might want to know about you, your options could either be general, or you might need to be specific. For example, if you were to be selling beauty products, there’s no reason why a car manufacturer would be interested in you. You have a certain target audience to meet, and you need to know everything about them if you want to succeed as a small business, and even progress into a much bigger one. To know your audience, you’re going to have to know their likes and dislikes, and what can put you above everyone else. Market research should achieve some of this for you, but you can also look at buying trends on the internet. Then, you need to think about how people are going to find out about you. As a small company your resources might be limited, meaning you can’t run as many effective marketing campaigns as you would if you had a bit more of a bigger business, with bigger finances. But there are some techniques that are going to work better for you than others, one of those being digital signage. You have to think that everything nowadays is digital, so using digital signage rather than paper leaflets or menus is going to attract a lot more attention. You could display offers or information that could draw new customers in. You can find more about digital signage here! Another techniques that we definitely recommend using is content marketing. It’s a way of getting your name out there through online content such as blogs or vlogs. It will usually be the case that a blog post which doesn’t directly link to the client is produced, and then a link to the client is slipped in discretely.
Have You Attended Trade Events?
If you haven’t attended trade events, then you won’t even realise the potential that they could hold for your business. If ever there were a place to sell your business, it would be here! It’s face to face interaction with the people who are going to possibly change your business. Say if you were a marketing company at an event, and there were big companies walking around trying to find their next marketing campaign to partner with. If you were to sell yourself so much so that you gained a contract with a big company, it could totally change the future of your business! There will no doubt be plenty of trade events in your local area as well, or you might find that you have to travel a little bit. If you do have to travel, you could even have the potential of meeting customers you might not have if you stayed in your local area. You can either attend these events as a customer, and walk around to see all of the stools yourself who might be your competitors. This will give you access to information in depth about how their company works, so you might be able to get some great tips from them! Or, you could pay to have your own stand where you’re able to sell your business directly to the people who matter. It’s a great atmosphere, there’s usually so much to learn, and there’s such a potential to earn as well!
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What’s Your Business Focus?
You should never lose sight of your focus. You always need to make sure that you’re concentrating on the things that are going to push your business forward the most. If you have no forward thinking plan, you have nothing to guide your business. You might not be able to move forward quicker, and you might lose sight of what you originally started your business for. So think about your focus at the minute. Are you focused more on customers, sales, product design… what is it that is driving your business at the minute? If you don’t say everything, then you’re not doing it right. At some points yes, you will have to focus on certain areas more than you would others, but for the most part you should have a clear idea in your head of all of the areas of your business. As a whole, you should be focusing on growth, and how you can always be one step ahead of the other companies around you!
How Do You Design Your Products Or Services?
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling services or products, there’s a few general things that you should be thinking about when designing a new part of them. With services, you should always be thinking about what the customer might be missing in their lives at the minute. So, if you’re selling marketing services, you need to think about what tactics the customers you’re trying to reach haven’t used before, and how your company can provide them. The more services you’re able to provide that are relevant to your line of work, the more money you’re going to be able to earn. You also need to make sure they’re streamlined to provide the fastest services. There are so many companies out there who’s processes for their services are just so long. There’s so many steps to the process, and it can just be so annoying to keep following. Keeping it short and sweet is definitely what you need to keep in mind when you think about your services.
If we’re talking about your products, your design work always needs to be creative. You can’t be the sheep when it comes to design, you have to make yours look better and be better in every way. The best way that you can actually do this is to get product design specialists on the scene. They would be able to tell you what makes a good product, what your design idea might be lacking at the minute, and how you can just make it better overall!
What’s Your Customer Service Like?
We hope that it would be amazing, but that’s not always the case as you might know from personal experience. Sometimes you just get super bad customer service, usually in fast food restaurants or shopping malls. All you can do is walk away and think, ‘damn, that was terrible’. And that thought can stay with you a couple of days, and you’ll definitely be put off returning to that store. Are we right? We thought so! So, now think about how you might be able to change your customer service so that it’s perfect. You can learn from your own personal experiences, and you can also learn from online courses that will show you exactly what is needed when interacting with customers to get the best result possible. You should always be looking for the sale, but you also need to make sure that you’re focused on keeping your customers happy. A top tip from us would be that customers love a bargain, so make sure you’re always offering discounts at the til where you possibly can. If you know you’re getting bad reviews with your customer service, then you definitely have something to be worried about. A bad opinion can go along way, especially to customers who haven’t heard of you before. All they will need to see is a dodgy review or two, and they’ll be searching for your competitors instead. Deal with any customer complaints as quickly as possible, and always make sure that you’re focused on making your customers happy on a day to day basis.
So, do you think you have been given a few good ways that you can sell your business a little bit better, or even more than you have been doing. When you have so many people around you competing for the same customers you are, it’s so important that you’re focused on making your business known!
