When it comes to running a business, there are a lot of things vying for your attention and it’s easy to let long-term elements, such as marketing, slip in favor of immediate demands, like supply chain slowdowns. That’s where having a detailed business plan helps you both run the business today to help your business succeed and manage the day-to-day necessities demanding your attention. Setting priorities and delegating work (and responsibilities) to others means you have more time to focus on long-term strategies.
With this in mind, it can be tough to know what changes to make when you hear business pundits sharing the tactic of the day, many of which are incompatible as well as exceed your resources. You need to parse through this advice to determine which tactics make sense for your long-term strategy and don’t take on more than you can handle. Adopting ideas sequentially might make sense so you can optimize one tactic at a time rather than struggling with a lot of new tactics. If you are looking for some ideas and changes your can make to help your business succeed then these tips are among the best and apply across almost every industry. Implementing them helps insure you reach your long and short-term goals. So, read on!
Tips to help your business succeed
Research and understand your target market
When running a business it is really important to understand your target market and the way it changes over time. If you don’t create a marketing strategy directed at your target market, nothing else you do in your business matters much. Marketing and increasing your customer base becomes a lot harder when your products, promotions, pricing, and distribution don’t fit with the expectations and decision-making criteria employed by that market.
To understand your target market, you first need to do some research, this is best done by directly questioning your current customers to determine factors motivating them to buy your brand. You can do this with questionnaires and feedback forms that you send out via email or give out to them. In these surveys, you can ask questions about what they like about the brand, what sort of social media they interact most with, etc. Once you have this information, you can look for patterns like the ages and gender, lifestyles, economic resources, education, and attitudes of the customers who purchase the most product, what is the most used social media for these customers, and what they like the most about the business. With that information, you can do more targeted marketing for the market because you align more closely with their wants, needs, and interests.
In the age of social media, you can also listen to the conversations users have around your industry, your competition, and even how they talk about your brand.
Improve your marketing tools
With marketing, it is best to hire a marketing professional to ensure you’re using the best marketing tools to reach your target market and using them effectively. However, if you feel comfortable with marketing due to your training and experience, you can do it yourself. You may find it’s even cheaper to use an agency to handle your marketing as they’re often more effective and they can spread the costs of marketing tools like automation and analytics across multiple clients, as you can see below.
Over time, promotion transitioned from traditional media, like TV ads, to social media, especially for small businesses on a tight budget. This is why gleaning social media usage information from your customers is important. This allows you to pick the most effective social media platforms that fit your target market rather than trying to post to all of them with your limited resources. You need to utilize social media right for the potential it represents to reach new customers on social platforms is huge. Having a social media presence also helps you stay in touch with customers to build a strong, loyal community. If users see you interacting with other customers on social platforms, it makes them more confident about your business, positions you as a trustworthy partner, and increases the likelihood of bringing in new customers.
When marketing, you should also consider using online ads, as the reach of organic social media dwindles. Consider advertising using Edge or Google Ads, and they help you reach new customers through organic search. Additionally, most social media platforms offer advertising options (TikTok is currently Beta testing such ads).
When setting up ads you need to choose keywords that trigger the ad to show on the potential customer’s web search. You can derive these keywords from a mixture of relevant words for what you offer, so if you offer massages and use health as a keyword then people searching health may see your ad and may click through to your website. The more specific you make the keywords, the more likely you are to show up, however, it may not reach as many people. The key is using keywords that resonate with your target market.
On social media, instead of focusing on keywords, you build an audience that you think will respond to your ads. Knowing your target market really helps with this.
Try to outsource where you can
For some reason, a lot of businesses try to do everything themselves rather than considering outsourcing. If you have both the expertise and slack needed to perform all the tasks on an ongoing basis, then this is fine. But, recognize that mistakes could cost you a lot of money, reduce your ability to grow, and potentially damage your reputation. This is why outsourcing works, as demonstrated in our example of hiring an agency used above.
Outsourcing can really take the pressure off of a business and save on the amount of stuff you have to perform in-house. Many companies outsource finance, especially accounting, as they don’t have enough demand to justify a full-time employee. With taxes and accounting being quite a difficult thing to get your head around having a professional deal with this is really important, if your taxes and finances and wrong it can cost you in terms of fines and other issues down the line.
Marketing is also a popular task to outsource due to the rapidly changing nature of the discipline, which requires constant up-skilling. Below, you can see the demand for non-traditional marketing skills necessary to effectively compete in today’s marketplace.
When outsourcing, you might also consider hiring a business consultant, as they can help you streamline your business, help create policies and procedures to improve performance, and provide tools to help you stay on track to reach your goals. Should you, for example, use Amazon Web services for your business data storage, then you could consider hiring mci business consulting solutions, which can take you through software tools and help get you them up and running properly. Consultants are a huge asset to business owners as they help pick up on things you may have overlooked or not noticed based on their wide experience in similar and unrelated businesses.
Another great use of outsourcing is for your customer services. Fast, courteous, and knowledgable customer service is critical for the survival of your business. You might not need a massive call center or numerous staff on-site to handle customer inquiries and complaints, you can outsource to virtual call centers that offer 24/7 your customers a better service than you could provide internally. Similarly, you might use a chatbot to handle online customer support with a backup of a human if the bot can’t address a particular concern.
Increase customer retention
The lifeblood of a business is its customers. If you can’t retain customers you can’t help your business succeed as the cost of replacing an existing customer is 5 times that of retaining them in the first place. Existing customers also represent high average order sizes, on average, than new customers. Thus, it’s a lot more cost-effective to retain customers than it is to have to spend money marketing and trying to get in new customers all the time.
One of the best ways to increase customer retention is by providing a superior customer experience. A customer experience is how customers interact with your business from start to finish (see below for the process to evaluate and improve the customer experience you deliver).
If you provide a good interaction throughout the customer journey, you’re more likely to retain that customer. But, providing a good customer experience means converting visitors to your business rather than encouraging them to try a competitor.
Having great customer service that’s always available to address concerns effectively is important as the quicker and more completely you deal with an issue, the more likely you are to keep the customer and build trust that encourages loyalty and brings in new customers. The best thing you can do to improve customer service is to request feedback, as this allows customers to share issues they think need changing and what works. This then allows you to make those changes; making the customer experience better based on what users want.
You also need to look for ways to reward loyalty, such as implementing a loyalty program or increased savings for customers for their tenure with your organization. For instance, Amazon and Chewy offer a lower price if users subscribe to automatically deliver products every month. These loyalty programs encourage loyalty, larger order quantities, and help gain favorable recommendations. Loyalty rewards are a sure-fire way to increase retention and help keep customers coming back for discounts and little freebies.
Conclusion
If you want to help your business succeed and help it reach the goals and targets you set, but you are unsure where to start. Then hopefully, these ideas will help you to increase your success and push your business to where you want it to be.
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