Business Tips You Need to Read
Aaron Webb
I Partner with Coaches & Keynote Speakers Helping them Automate their Marketing Systems by Generating 1-3 clients in 7 days without complicated ads, outreach, or messaging | Growth Partner | AI Advisor | Mobile Apps
So, you’ve started a business: check. Hired a team: check. Have a steady workflow up and going: check and check. Stressed because you don’t know what the next step is for your business: check.
Now, pause and throw out that checklist. It turned into a bummer — fast. Every business has room for improvement, whether your company has thousands of workers or just you. Here are the tips you need to take your business to the next stage of growth.
Build a brand
Who are you and what does your business do? Establishing a brand identity is essential to every business and key to framing social content. Because a brand’s social media feeds are meant to attract existing and new customers, creating engaging content catered to them is key. Once you get to know what your target audience is interested in and what they love about your products, incorporate those ideas into your content.
Be willing to learn more
As a business becomes more successful, it’s easy to get stuck in the complacency of success and experience a plateau. Commit to lifelong learning and invigorate your team. Here are a few ideas on how to do that:
Understand your target audience
Defining a target customer helps you find and market to a specific audience. It can be tough to know exactly how to create a persona, but articles like this one can aid in the process. Perhaps you are catering to “Educator Elise” or “Sales Sam.” "What’s unique about them?"
"For example, “Business Owner Bob” is a CEO whose biggest challenges are improving revenue growth and organization. How can your company help his needs?"
Be consistent
Being a business that’s inconsistent with its message, products, and goals can lead to a loss of revenue. In 2018, businesses with consistent branding increased revenue by up to 23%. Staying relevant and holding your business accountable will build customer trust.
Focus on your team
Burnout is real. In fact, 61% of employees feel burnout at work. It doesn’t mean your product isn’t worth it anymore, but with a team tirelessly working towards bettering something they believe in, burnout is almost guaranteed to happen sooner or later. Something as simple as staff bonding days can lighten morale, give your team a chance to get to know each other better, and increase productivity.
Be accessible to your customers
If you’ve ever called a support team, you know how important providing great customer service is. A customer can instantly cut ties with a business over unsatisfactory customer service.
An employee at Zappos once talked on the phone with a customer for 10 hours, upholding his employer’s devotion to the customer. Making sure your customer is satisfied through and through is your number one priority.
Incorporate great customer service into your social strategy. Engaging with customers about their concerns and praise builds brand loyalty.
Stay organized
One challenge most startups run into is disorganization. Don’t fall into the trap of using too many tools — or too few. If you haven’t gone paperless yet, now is the time to try. Consolidate your tools, your strategy, and hit the ground running.
To get started, adopt a tool or two, like a CRM, collaborative project management software, or time-tracking tool. Choose a tool that enables every employee to easily find documents and communicate with their colleagues.
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Be transparent
Not every business secret should be a secret. If a customer wants to know the specs of your product, tell them. Being transparent with customers builds trust (94% of consumers cite transparency as their biggest reason for brand loyalty), could generate organic leads, and makes you stand out among competitors who aren’t as transparent.
Get your customers involved
Customers help shape your business. They should be a part of it — and know that they are. Customer appreciation can be shown by using permission marketing and feedback forms, and soliciting positive feedback for testimonials to gain more leads.
Experiment
How else would you find out what works and what doesn’t? The uncertainty of experimenting with e-commerce, marketing practices, and customer loyalty benefits can seem like too much of a gamble, but by executing a planned “safe” experiment such as, say, a small sale on products to drive purchases, you could find favorable results on sales and brand loyalty.
Track your engagement
This is another instance of “You’ll never know until you do it.” Tracking social engagement gives you an eye into how your target audience responds to marketing campaigns and what performs the best. You’ll also be able to easily track when customers are commenting and replying to social posts. Tools are also out there to assist with this, which saves you time.
For instance, awareness metrics show your current audience as well as a potential one. Consumer metrics show the opinion customers have about your brand and its products.
Some of the top tools for tracking engagement include Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and Later.
Focus on customer experience
Customer experience is just as important as customer service. Are your customers satisfied with your product? Are you measuring that satisfaction? Are you brainstorming and working on improvements to keep their satisfaction high? Running a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is a great way to measure customer satisfaction.To run one, survey your customers and use the question, “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our services to a friend?”
Then, categorize respondents based on their answers into three categories: Promoters (Answers were 9-10), Passives (Answers were 7-8), and Detractors (Answers were 0-6). Your NPS is the percentage of Detractors subtracted from the percentage of Promoters.
Having a CRM for your business can improve customer experience as well. A CRM automates emails and workflows to help you understand your customer better. Here are a few free CRMs to get you started.
Keep going
If you believe in your idea and there’s a market for it, keep going. It can seem discouraging when businesses hit a plateau or a loss in revenue for that quarter. However, maintaining a persistent attitude can be the difference between seeing your business come out on the other side or failing. Not every day will be perfect, and that’s okay.
To illustrate, shoe company Adidas lost their footing (no pun intended) in the late 70’s and 80’s, reporting record losses after Nike’s surge in popularity. The company had to redesign its entire structure and connect to its initial purpose — being the best for the athlete — to come back.
SOURCE: Hubspot