Small business owners must focus more on profit every day. You want your business to bring money in reliably and where customers are inconsistent. At the same time, you need tactics that will get more of them through the door too. More sales mean more profits. If you fail to ensure higher sales and higher profits, soon you will find yourself searching for the best online small business loans.
Here are the top five ways on how to get more customers, while cutting back costs on your end so that you are running a profitable business.
1. Encourage Reviews and Recommendations
It is time that you started focusing on your current customers. They love your business and they might be the most loyal customers to your small business. However, you need to start encouraging them to write reviews and recommend your business to other people. If they truly feel the way they say they will do it.
A good idea would be to either ask them to leave reviews on your online social media page or website, somewhere everyone can see them. You can even ask them to send the email newsletters of your business forward to any family or friends who are looking for a similar product.
It is equally important that you too are using these positive reviews and testimonials in your marketing strategy. Give the reviews a small space in your adverts.
2. Transform Your Website
A lot of small businesses make the mistake of treating their website like it is simply an eCommerce portal where your products are listed. This is where they are making a huge mistake. Your eCommerce site needs a little more love. You don’t just want to list your product or service, you want to sell an experience. There are several things that go into creating the perfect buying experience. When it comes to websites, the first one is to navigate your way easily through the site.
Before you get overwhelmed, relax, working on a website is not a huge undertaking. It can actually be fun and be the one way you get to incorporate your personality and your brand image into your site. In no time you will have an online presence that has the power to convert the audiences into buyers, rather than just being an online cart for people who have already decided.
3. Build a Fantastic Social Media Presence
So you have a great product and now your website is converting leads into buyers too. The next thing you need is to ensure that your social media presence is on point. Social media is one way you can engage with your current and your potential customers while addressing questions they might have about how to use your product or why you use the ingredients or processes that you do.
The best part about having a strong social media front is that you get immediate responses and for that, you need to engage just as quickly as well.
Right now there seem to be a ton of social media platforms online. Do not feel that you need to be active on all of them. Pick and choose what works for your brand, and then create focused and quality content for each.
Make sure that your platform strategy is defined, you don’t want to advertise the same message on your mediums. An easy way to figure out which platform works for you is to assess where your target audience ventures the most.
4. Streamline Your Management Costs
How efficient are your employees and how many customer leads do they get? It is important that you are tracking these numbers. The best way to go about it is to learn to automate your business. It is not impossible for small businesses to do this.
You must create a system for your employees where they can access all the business data so that they may be able to update it then and there. Real-time updates can then help you stay in the know about what is really happening to your business.
Make sure that you are building office administrative time into the system, project fees, hourly rates, and ongoing charges. Automation is what allows a business to run smoothly via a scaled-down workforce who are doing more with the back office work.
5. Maximize CashFlow
In order to get a stable cash flow, you require tactics like providing pre-paid one time retainers and ongoing payment plans for clients. You would essentially be billing for a lesser hourly rate, but the total amount would be much greater and close to an accurate value for your work. It establishes a good relationship with your client with full transparency. It will also help you get additional work.
Conclusion
You will never be able to truly find out if all your efforts are making a difference in the absence of a performance tracking system. Dig for the numbers behind your marketing. Some of the important metrics include open rates and click-through, social media engagement, and website traffic. You will also find that what you are doing may be working perfectly, or you may discover that you only need to focus on one thing that is getting you an excellent ROI.
