Starting and maintaining a business in this day and age of fierce competition is getting to be more challenging than ever. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, modern business involves a lot of learning and adjusting due to the quickly changing trends, but the global village enabled us to get useful information and adapt to the new circumstances quickly.
The following strategies might help you improve and grow your business. Modern business is all about trial and error, and It’s always better to learn from other people’s mistakes than our own.
1. Use Social Media
You have to have a service or a product that people want or need. If that’s not the case, make them think they need it. That’s where social networks can and will do a great job. Do not underestimate them. No matter if you love them or not, they are essential in the modern market. If social media management seems hard, you can always hire someone to do it for you.
Even though this is a slippery ground with fast-changing surroundings, it should not be ignored. Social networks are a fast, productive, and often free way of delivering your message to the public. Of course, you also have to make your messages so that people would want to share them and improve your visibility.
2. Build a Website
Online presence is essential. If you are not online, your firm doesn’t exist. Goggle has more than 3.5 billion searches each day. But the average Google search session usually lasts less than a minute. Creating a good website with a suitable and helpful landing page can get you a share of those searches and make people stay on your website.
3. Work on SEO
You would want to be found, right? You can have the best service and products in the world, but if no one knows about them, it won’t do you any good. That’s why it’s important to be on Google’s good side. It’s just amazing what it can do for your business, but only if you allow it to. Doing a proper job on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can make all the difference in how Google sees you and how it will present you to the world. SEO is such a broad topic and can be overwhelming for a beginner. In that case, hiring the right SEO agency is the best thing you can do.
4. Do Local SEO
User behavior studies show that about 50% of all Google searches are local. So, if you want more buyers, you should invest time and effort into doing a good local SEO. Also, user reviews are very important for high Google rankings. So, it’s not enough to have good SEO, but also be good at your job.
5. Look After Your Employees
Remember, employees are not an expense but an asset. A business without good employees will have a short life span, and taking good care of them is essential. The process of selecting and training an employee is both time and money consuming, and high employee turnover rates make many businesses fail.
Concentrating only on customers, without any regard for the people who work for you, is a mistake you can’t afford. Good and safe work conditions, employee benefits and recognition, and good communication will make great work surroundings that will make employees want to stick around.
Keep in mind that what you may think is important may not be important to your employees. Proper communication, even when the employee is leaving the company, will give you an insight into the things you should change.
6. Communication is the Key
Maintaining a business is tough and comes with a lot of responsibility and stress. Very often, that stress can make us lose empathy, or it will seem that way to others. While struggling to earn enough to pay employees’ salaries, we forget to treat them as human beings. We believe that their wages are more important than communication in business. “Road to Hell is paved with best intentions,” and this is a perfect example of that. So, even though we have employees’ best interest in mind, they will leave the company because of inadequate treatment.
7. Expand to other business channels
No matter if you are in retail, services, or online business, expanding to other sales channels is crucial to keep your business flexible. That way, even if one part of the company takes a plunge, the other channels will keep you afloat.
The best example is the current coronavirus crisis. Companies with multi-channel business models didn’t suffer much damage, and some even improved their results. So, look for new opportunities in the online shops, affiliate marketing, brick-and-mortar shops… the possibilities are endless.
8. Use Modern Ways of Communication
Making communication more modern is not just about having online conferences, video meetings, and similar. It’s also about not having meaningless marathon conferences that only burden the employees. The trend is, and rightfully so, to keep the meetings short, meaningful, and give people the chance to speak about their ideas. It’s not enough just to get the latest video conferencing tool – the meetings have to be modern too. The times when it was a monologue held by the company CEO are long gone.
9. Automation
It’s important to look at this not as a way to take away people’s jobs but make them more comfortable by removing some of the workloads from their shoulders. For instance, a good interactive voice response system can make your job a lot easier and enable your employees to take care of things that need a human touch. It will also help distribute the tasks to the right employee, thus requiring less time to complete.
10. Keep Your Customers in Mind
It’s not enough just to be online. You have to provide your customers with an easy way around your website from the moment they arrive on your landing page, help them find what they are looking for, or even suggest another solution to their problem. That way, you will not only get customers – you will establish a trusting relationship. It will make your website their first stop the next time they are looking to make a purchase.
11. Keep Financial Score
While big companies keep a close eye on their incomes and expenses and get the process down to an art, small business owners mostly don’t think that they should have precise insight into their costs and revenues. They believe that’s not important in a small-scale business. That’s a very bad way to conduct business, and you should have precise information about daily, weekly, and monthly numbers to be able to adapt to new market trends.
12. Set Goals
It’s important to know where you are going, right? Although an idea about vacation with an unknown destination sounds adventurous, it will only lead you to company bankruptcy if you try that in business. Set clear short-term and long-term goals. That will keep you on track and enable you to evaluate your business’s performance. Of course, short term goals can be altered to adapt to the constantly changing market.
13. Have an exit strategy
Although it’s not easy to even think about leaving your company, it’s always better to leave it under your own terms than someone else’s. It would be best to make a plan of action for the time when you achieve your goals or when the company starts going down. Are you going to hand it over to your children, or are you going to sell it?
14. Get to know yourself and your limits
You should get to know yourself before starting a business. Don’t set goals you can’t achieve. If your job makes you too stressed because you are not achieving them, it will only damage your business. Keeping a clear mind and being truthful to yourself is very important, both in life and business.
15. Delegate responsibilities
Small business owners are often a one-man-show. Taking more work than you can handle is not only damaging to your business but also your health. You can’t do it all by yourself. Let your employees take over some of the heavy liftings, but also include them in the decision-making process. You can’t expect them to make the right decisions If they don’t have a good overview of the company. If you can’t afford to hire more employees, you should consider lowering your expectations and adjusting your plans accordingly.
16. Take a break
It’s hard to leave a business you’ve worked so hard to build and go off on vacation, and it’s completely understandable. But remember that a stressed-out and overworked manager is doing absolutely no good to the business. Everyone needs a break; it’s only human.
But you would want to leave your business in inexperienced hands, which’s why it’s crucial to have well-trained employees who can make the right decisions. Again – delegating responsibilities is important.
17. Do a good research of the market
You may be thrilled with your business idea and think it’s the best thing in the world since the wheel is invented, but will other people be interested in it? Before setting off on a business adventure, you better be sure there is a place on the market for your service or a product. Do good research. Investigate if there were others before you with the same idea. Try to find out why their businesses failed. Maybe it was a bad idea in the first place, or the management and marketing were bad. Or perhaps it was just bad timing – a selfie stick would be a terrible idea if it came before smartphones were invented.
18. Check out your competition
Again, market research. Check out the competition. See what they offer and the way they do it. Try to find weaknesses in their business models that you can exploit. If the competition is fierce and you don’t have anything different to offer, then maybe you should revise your plans. Try to find another approach or a different market niche.
19. Create a brand
Don’t blend in. No one will remember you or come back again. You should have something specific about your business that will make customers go to you first when planning to purchase. Don’t go overboard, though, and introduce gimmicks that no one really cares about or even find annoying. Just think about what will make you more visible and memorable.
20. Build partnerships
Partnerships are important in good and bad times. Find partners who have services complementary to your own. That way, you can swap customers and information. The process of finding the right partner can be very difficult, but don’t give up. Once you find it, it will make your job a lot easier.
Conclusion
We can’t all be visionaries like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. But we can rely on human nature. No matter how evolved and technologically advanced we are, some things don’t change. We like to indulge ourselves, and we like to spend money. And it’s your job to enable them to do it comfortably and make them want to come back. There is no recipe for a successful business. Every millionaire’s biography includes many failed business ventures. But if you keep your customers and employees happy, and the money will start flowing in.
