It’s a difficult time for those looking to get their business off the ground.
But there’s no need to write off your business ambitions just yet. With the right vision and a little technical knowhow, you can build up a strong customer base, generate brand awareness and futureproof your enterprise for the long haul.
Here are just three tips to expand your entrepreneurial horizons.
- Sell online
For businesses looking to compete in 2020, online selling is non-negotiable.
Depending on your product, this can be harder for some businesses than others, requiring a large amount of administrative work to launching your online selling platform. But the alternative is seriously limiting to your business’s potential and viability.
This is particularly crucial to businesses operating in niche markets – for instance, if you run a retail store that specialises in special interest items. Under ordinary circumstances, these are the sorts of stores people will often travel a fair distance to visit, but right now, more people are opting to source online. These buyers could easily miss out on your brand without an online sales platform.
- Diversify
You should aim to offer as diverse a range of products and services as you can – If the success of your business rests on one key element, it means that other elements of your business are weak.
For example, when the current crisis forced closure of pubs, bars and cafes in the UK, many breweries and distilleries turned their hand to making hand sanitizer. Amongst these was Silent Pool Distillers, whose sanitizer (and gin) is available for purchase from their website.
While your diversification effort doesn’t have to be quite so drastic, offering products in a range of markets is a healthy strategy to ensure that if demand for one particular product drops, you have a fallback to work with.
- Develop your online presence
Your online presence is a vital tool for brand visibility, but its something that small businesses tend to shy away from, particularly if they are orientated to local demand.
But whether you’re an online trader or not, your online presence will help to gain traction and raise brand awareness.
Social media has modernised the old-fashioned concept of word of mouth, giving it a much wider outreach. Satisfied customers will often share good experience and pictures of their purchases on their social media, providing your brand with free advertising.
Your website is also crucial to your online presence. It should be easy to use and simple to understand – nothing puts off customers quite like a website that is slow, dated and over-complicated. Savvy web designers such as Maratopia Digital Marketing can not only create the perfect website for your brand, but are also skilled when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO is the process of ensuring that your brand ranks in search engines ahead of the competition. Your site and social media presence will help boost this process, but enlisting expert help can really maximise results.
These three tips will futureproof your business in difficult times and keep the success coming!
Have any tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments below.