Small Businesses
Here’s a million-dollar question: How do you take a small business to the next level?
How do you take your monthly revenue from four figures to five? Even six?
All the tips shared in this guide are used by successful small businesses that managed to grow their companies to nauseous heights.
If that’s what you’re looking to do, then continue reading.
1. Build a professional-looking website
Whenever transactions are made, a level of trust is given.
Customers trust service providers to do as their products or services promise.
It’s only because the customers can afford to give that level of trust that they take out their wallets and part with their money.
That’s why you need to ensure your business looks trustworthy. If it doesn’t, you’ll be hard-pressed to grow your sales.
And what better way to improve your trustworthiness than having a professional-looking website?
Since your website is your virtual store, it represents your business.
If you have an underwhelming site, your brand will also start looking underwhelming. Of course, you can’t have that since no one entrusts their money to someone less than mediocre.
But your company will look much more premium and trustworthy when you have an exceptional-looking site.
The good news is that small businesses can tap high-quality yet affordable web design services to set up their websites.
You don’t need to spend five figures to have a high-quality site.
Remember, you don’t need an overly complicated website as a small business.
A website with great graphics, clean design, user-friendly, and aligned with your brand can do the trick.
2. Put a premium on SEO
Carefully developed small business SEO campaigns can bring loads of leads and sales to small businesses.
The best part?
The traffic SEO can be highly relevant, free, and has longevity.
Once your pages rank high on the search results for relevant keywords, you don’t need to keep spending money on the search traffic.
This is very much unlike traffic that you get from paid ads.
As soon as you turn off your paid ads, you’ll immediately see a massive traffic drop. There is no longevity at all.
However, traffic from search engines lasts much longer, giving you much more value from your marketing spend.
3. Invest in automated, robust backup software
Marketing consultants who are worth their salt know that a business’s ability to market its service is tied to its service quality.
If they provide quick, quality, and reliable service, marketing becomes so much easier since the customers themselves become brand advocates.
That’s why small businesses need to invest in backup tools.
This advice is more critical for small businesses in the SaaS space.
If the SaaS company doesn’t run automated GitHub backups or whichever platform they want to use, they risk losing critical business data to cybercriminals.
Sometimes, cybercriminals aren’t even the culprit.
Technical issues can occur, which bogs down the system rendering it unusable until the technical problems are fixed.
When that happens, the SaaS company suffers greatly.
Even a single day of downtime for a SaaS company can cause severe reputation and revenue damage.
TL;DR: Run your backups automatically. The level of security and risk prevention can keep you from spending thousands of dollars on firefighting.
4. Be visible on social media platforms
When people want to connect with their loved ones or network, where do they go?
Social media.
When people want to have fun and enjoy leisure time, which online platform do they use?
Social media.
And when people want to learn what others think about a company they’re looking to transact with, where do they go?
To their grandma’s house?
Nope!
Still social media, of course.
Let’s face it: Social media sites are the modern-day drive-in theater of the 1940s—it’s where people hang out.
And if you aren’t investing in social media marketing, and your competitors are, you miss out B-I-G T-I-M-E.
Running successful social media marketing campaigns isn’t rocket science, either. For example, if you’re running Instagram marketing campaigns, you just need to ensure your posts address your audiences’ pain points or help improve their lives.
Aside from posting valuable content, remember to:
- Add compelling, one-word Instagram captions
- Add popular Instagram hashtags
- Post on optimized times
- Study your social analytics
- Reply to comments and inquiries immediately
- Etc.
While not all, most of the best practices on one social media platform heavily overlap with other platforms.
Just by observing social media marketing best practices, you can improve your brand’s visibility on social media platforms and increase your referral traffic.
5. Invest in content
Content helps you:
- Provide value to your audience
- Generate more leads and sales
- Cultivate meaningful relationships
- Build strategic partnerships with influencers
- Etc.
There’s a myriad of benefits to be had in content creation.
If you check out some of the most established companies in any industry, you’ll find that one way or the other, they are publishing meaningful content, the likes of which address their readers’ problems or makes their lives better.
If you don’t invest in producing content, your small business’ growth will be significantly hindered.
Consider following these tips when creating content:
- Create a buyer persona and use it as a guiding compass when creating content. Doing this ensures alignment between your content and what your target readers perceive as valuable and “read-worthy.”
- Don’t use HUGE blocks of text. It ruins the readability of your content because the paragraphs look overwhelming and challenging to read.
- Use subheadings. It makes your content more scannable.
- Talk about your reader’s pain points, then address them. Make your solutions specific, so they become actionable.
- Make your first sentence punchy. A great strategy is to use an open loop to influence your readers to continue reading the entire piece.
Remember to choose a reliable content creation software to streamline and supercharge making and designing content for your marketing efforts.
What’s next?
If you’re just starting and looking for a reliable web design company to create a website for your small business, reach out to us using this form.
We’ve created stunning websites for businesses of many sizes at reasonable rates. Check out our portfolio here.
