You could be a startup or simply a small business running on a compact budget. It is imperative that your investments and business processes should empower you to sell the goods that you produce. If you can’t sell, you won’t survive. It is as clear as black & white!
While your business decisions pave the way for your company’s future, you should concentrate on the basic things that push your business towards your target audience.
Since you are a small business with a meager marketing budget, you need to find cost-effective ways of doing business successfully without losing the quality and efficiency of your work.
Here are the 6 ways that could boost your small business sales:
- Begin with creating a user-friendly website
- Use social media to spread brand awareness
- Be approachable to build customer relationships
- Useful content for visitors, enhanced by a knowledge base
- Take feedback and work on it
- Be willing to adapt while leveraging available technology
1.Begin With a User-Friendly Website
Having a website has become a paramount requirement today for creating brand visibility, even if you’re mostly operating in the offline space. It is like taking the first step towards growth. It is also the first indicator that you’re tech-oriented, which is good!
Start with the basics and build a website that looks good. Regardless of your business type, a visually-pleasing website creates the first good impression. It’s simple, nobody enjoys staying on a website that is unaesthetic. And once a visitor has left for this reason, they probably may not come back.
Make sure it is easy to navigate, with various sections of a page clearly distinguishable. You need to have clear internal and external links (if any), as well as the direct link to go back to the home page. From the customer perspective, think of it like experiencing the first day of your job in a new office. You don’t want things to appear complicated.
A badly designed website may lead viewers to think that you’re either incompetent in designing a good website or maybe having one is just a formality
2.Use Social Media to Spread Brand Awareness
Some things in life are tough to avoid. Social media is one of those things for any business executive in the 21st Century. According to a recent research, 58% of global population is using internet.
So, when you’ve built a good website, social media becomes the next logical step to spread brand awareness. Using all the prominent social media websites to spread promotional content also helps in connecting with the target audience. For example:
- LinkedIn is most suited for B2B marketing given its professional intent
- Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are more suitable for B2C marketing
This can eventually help you to find leads that could turn into your potential customers and finally customers. It is clearly an effective communication channel, especially with the younger generation.
3.Be Approachable to Build Customer Relationships
Every interaction between you and your customers is an opportunity for you to know them better. There is no rocket science involved here; mostly, be empathetic when they talk to you. Be patient, listen and respond accordingly. It makes you capable of understanding not only their current requirements better, but which way the communication could go in the future. This further makes way for personalized customer experiences.
Furthermore, building long-term loyal customers is the ultimate way to succeed in a competitive industry and get returning customers.
4.Provide Useful Content in Your Knowledge Base
Information is key. The more enlightened your customers are about your business and its offerings, the more likely they are to do business with you. Providing your customers with the information they require, also inculcates a feeling of transparency. It is one of the most effective means to show that you care about their experience when they are:
- Visiting your website
- Exploring to research about your products & services
- Checking out purchase plans
However, the information shouldn’t be a clutter of data spread randomly across various web pages. It should be organized, well-formatted and managed to make sense. Opting for a knowledge base is the best way to do so. However, self-help begins from within the company before it is provided to the outside world. Having an internal knowledge base helps employees, especially the ones facing customers, in:
- Becoming well-versed with the company’s business
- Its ethics
- Work culture
- Products and services
It creates a perfect foundation for good customer service and experiences.
Content in the form of articles, product manuals, user guides and FAQs are essential for both internal and external purposes. Customers can use this content for researching on products & services, to find answers to their questions while employees can use it to answer customer queries and provide them with links to helpful pages. According to a report by Microsoft, 77% of consumers have been using self-service portals.
Knowledge base is a fantastic element of sales enablement content whose benefits extend to the overall sales process as well as customer service. It helps in creating situations to increase sales. One of the highlights of having an online knowledge base is that it is accessible anytime, anywhere. Most of all, it is about making your customers self-sufficient with finding the information they want. This way, you can prevent them from contacting your customer support every time they have a question; let it be for only critical issues.
5.Take Feedback And Work On It
Why do you need to put efforts to understand your customers as individuals and personalize experiences for them? It is because each one of them are different even if they might be looking for the same solution. You take their feedback seriously and work on it, so that you can improve their future interactions and provide them with suitable solutions they are looking for. It is one more important factor in making customers realize that you understand them.
There are a number of ways to take customer feedback, but business owners should try to not make them look like a boring exercise. On that note, tool like a survey maker is a very effective source for gathering feedback. For example, customers can rate your articles in terms of usefulness which tells you about the improvements you may have to do in your knowledge base. It also helps you customize customer experiences and in the long run, can boost your sales.
6.Be Willing to Adapt While Leveraging Available Technology
It is only smart to fully utilize the resources and technology available with you. The internet has made connectivity much easier and quicker. It has opened new possibilities for businesses and given way for intense competition like never before.
Automation, in the form chatbots, is already being adopted to enhance live chat services to customers across various businesses. A number of other technologies are similarly accessible for small businesses and don’t necessarily require huge investments to begin with. Being connected is the way to start. Among all the distractions that come with the worldwide web, it is one of the most impactful tools for communication and marketing that helps flourish your small business.
About the author
Brayn Wills currently holds the position of knowledge management expert at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.
