Building a business is tough. Regardless of your industry, niche or specialism, creating a strong, successful and long-lasting one will simply not happen overnight. It takes great effort, hard work and a little luck. To maximise your success and ensure you can sprinkle that little bit of stardust on your company, you mustn’t stand still. Instead, always looking forward, at ways to improve and innovate, is essential. With that in mind, here are 7 IDEAL ways to make your business stronger.
SECURE ACCREDITATION
Just like that little blue tick on Twitter which instantly grants a sense of gravitas, accreditation can provide your business with credibility, which in turn can increase trust in your company and ultimately send your profit margin in the same direction.
You could, for example, apply for a membership with an agency or a notable industry association, which will signal to consumers that they can have confidence in your goods and services. With so many options out there these days, and so many ways to compare those options, it’s all about being trustworthy and giving consumer’s confidence. Accreditation is one way to do this.
LOWER OVERHEADS
Operational costs can destroy your company’s profitability. So if you want to create a stronger business in 2018, you must look at the different ways you can lower your overheads. The most efficient and effective way to reduce expenditure is by streamlining processes like manufacturing, warehousing, or packaging. You could also find a cheaper supplier, or even contemplate downsizing the scale of your business to help focus on growing your brand. Little changes, it seems, so often go a long way.
BOOST YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
Lurking in the lower reaches of Google, wondering why there’s scant traffic to your site? Struggling to rank highly in the search engines can be seriously detrimental to your business. To go from strength to strength this year and beyond, you may need to boost your online presence.
If you want to continually drive traffic to your site, increase your website rank, and boost your conversion rate, you’d do worse than considering investment in a link building service. Websites like clickintelligence.co.uk, for instance, are dedicated to building strong relationships with high authority websites and can help you secure powerful backlinks, helping you to rank higher on Google and beyond (Ask Jeeves anyone?).
RETAIN YOUR TALENTED TEAM
High employee turnover will not only slow your business down, but will also eat up serious amounts of time and money finding new employees and training them up. What’s more, your top talent might leave for a competitor, who will flourish thanks to their hard work, experience and ideas. It’s simple; your business is only as strong as its team, which is why you must strive to encourage, develop, nurture and support your HR to prevent them from jumping ship.
REFINE YOUR COMPANY MESSAGE
It’s imperative you refine and recalibrate your company message over time. A company’s mission statement should be a fluid, ever-evolving piece in order to ensure continued connection with consumers. To get specific for a moment, the slogan “a company that cares about all families” is great and all that, but a more meaningful relationship may be formed with customers if you were to be “a company that cares for the health of young families.”
This narrowing of focus helps you to engage more directly with a target audience and differentiate yourself from the bland and generic competition. Making your business stronger should always be one of the most important things on your mind.
INVEST IN NEW TECHNOLOGY
Customers want to buy products or services from forward-thinking companies. Indeed, a failure to invest in technology will ultimately lead to you being left behind in your industry, as your target audience will turn to more modern competitors, who will have the tools and services to accommodate their needs.
The company still bashing the keys of a type writer and frowning over the fax machine isn’t exactly going to instill loyalty in customers now is it? In fact, if you did need to use fax, there are now innovative technologies available for seemingly antiquated tasks, such as using an app to scan documents on your tablet, or even platforms that allow you to fax from iPhone or Android devices.
There are many different agencies out there that can help your business when it comes to technology, check out the guys over from soniza for an example of a great agency that offer IT and communications support.
UPSELL YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
One of the easiest ways to increase your company’s profitability is through upselling. Once a lead has decided to make a purchase, an attempt to sell additional products or services that they might also need can – and should – be framed as beneficial to both parties. While not every customer will buy an extra item, many might be more than happy to add a product or service to their shopping cart, which could significantly improve your bottom-line.