There is so much to think about when you start a small business, whether you provide services, create art or sell homemade products. It’s easy to get loss with every possible information out there. The tip is to keep learning and reading about stuff as you never know when each piece of information can help you down the line.
Have a read about 5 tips that might be useful for business owners of all kind.
1. Learn from your current customers
Listening to feedback from your customers is extremely crucial. It can give insight into what you should improve or keep within your business.
Of course, some might be good and some can be bad. It’s best to approach it with the idea of every opinion is constructive criticism. It does not mean every client is right, but their issues might become yours in the future, so it’s best to listen at least to what they have to say.
There is great value in listening and engaging with your customers. A lot of people genuinely want to have their personal brands or businesses make adjustment if needed. That way, they feel they were part of something greater than themselves.
Getting feedback can be as simple as asking your customers in person what they think about the products (especially if you have recurring ones).
By listening to your customers, you get to improve things that might need some attention. Which overall will help with delivery a better product and improving sales in the long term. Not every idea you will have will be good so it’s best to get as much feedback as possible.
Encourage feedback from your customers, whether it’s in the form of free one on one talks (like at a craft show), or setting up a way for them to reach out to you if they have concerns. If you have an online store, offering coupons in exchange of feedback are a great way to go about it.
2. Make sure you have impeccable customer support.
Delivering the best experience for a customer is crucial, especially when the clients needs to have support.
If someone tries to reach you by phone or email, answering within the 24 hour mark should be a key goal. Customers waiting to get answers about the products you sell can drastically drop your possible sales revenues.
Making sure you are on point with this can turn unhappy customers into the best loyal ones you can have. They will gladly provide you key information that will help you get better at this. In the days where you can get instant answer online, people are actually expecting quick answers from the people and the brands they love.
This will help with your brand awareness as your customers might give the word of mouth to friends & family.
3. Stay focused on your niche.
When you start with a product or service, it’s easy to try to reach all the markets and niche available. You might want to keep more focus on the core of what you do instead of trying to reach out in many ways, shape or form.
By doing so, you might reach a point where you’ve spread yourself too thin and can’t keep up with the demand for example. You have to slowly analyze and make sure tapping in different markets is achievable for you at the time being.
Here’s 4 things to keep in mind to stay focused on your niche & constantly:
Optimize your products and services that you already have
Focus on organic growth (and SEO if you do it online)
Stay committed to your niche, so you can stand out of everyone els
Reinvest into marketing
4. Don’t fear the bigger & larger competitors
You are brand new or just started, it can feel quite intimidating.
Keep reminding yourself that what you have is different than your competition. That you have a few things that distinguishes you from them and therefore, makes you an equal competitor (even if the other ones are far down ahead of the game).
Because they have a set customer base and a regular flow of business, means those who are established aren’t willing to change or tap into different branch of the market. What it means for you is that you have more power into those things and trying thing they might be afraid to go ahead with as you have less to loose.
One way you can go ahead is by excelling in technology like e-commerce. It’s still relatively a new market for a lot of businesses so take the challenge while you can. It can become a rely profitable competitive advantage over your competition.
5. Have the best time-efficient tools on hand
Since you are a small business owner, you will have different roles at first within your business. You are the CEO, the next day you might be a marketing manager, then you might be a sales advisor. The point is, you wear a lot of hats.
As you grow your business along the way, using tools to help you save time is the best thing you can do for yourself. Remember that times equals money.
By using technology to automate things like your taxes or emailing customers, scheduling posting on social media in advance… there are many things you can do to be more time-efficient.
Start by looking where you spend the most time and look if there are tools out there that could help you.
Conclusion
There are many things you can do to improve your business. The best advice is to take one thing at a time and as they arrive. You don’t want to be rushed into making any decision, so if you can avoid it, do so.
We hope these tips will help you grow your business into where you want to be! Like always, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions you’d like to have some input.