Businesses can be a lot of hard work and take time and effort to grow. Unfortunately, not everyone can go viral overnight and have a booming business straight away. For the most, it is working hard everyday, committed, going above and beyond and putting in the time to make your business succeed. A lot of businesses have suffered over the past few years with the COVID crisis and the cost of living crisis even making some businesses close. Shopping is more and more being moved to an online option and a lot of places are having to fight harder and harder to stay open. Here are a few things to try to help your business stay afloat and succeed in the next year.
Use Influencers To Help You Grow
Influencers are a relatively new aspect of marketing. Although they are new they are certainly hitting the marketing world with a bang, with some influencers being able to recommend a product and having it sell out from their word, they are becoming sought after for all campaigns and promotions to promote businesses and products. Not all influencers can do this but they can still be very beneficial to your business. One of the things you will need to do first is find the right type of influencers that suit your business, ones that you feel can deliver the message of your business to their audience to gain traction and can end up with more of them following and buying from you. There are different campaigns which require different influencers, if you have a huge budget and want to reach as many people as possible you can look at someone who has followers in the millions to help you spread the message. If however, you are opening a new restaurant or franchise in a city or town then you will want to reach a more local audience and can do so by using local and micro influencers in that area.
Network With Others
Something so important in business is networking, it is where you can meet like-minded people and people who are professionals in your industry or in the area you are in and connect. You can network online with platforms like Linkedin or you can attend business networking meetings, these are normally held locally, so just have a search and see what comes up. Make sure you do some business card printing before attending so you can have something to give others who you want to connect with or who are interested in your business. You also can find businesses who you can collaborate with for mutual growth from the partnership. It is always better to have the mindset of working together, growing and helping others than being in competition and trying to ruin your competitors.
Focus On Customer Retention
Something that a lot of businesses do right is having amazing discounts for new customers to entice them into working with you or buying from you. However, sometimes those very same businesses never put much effort into customer retention so once you are a customer you are forgotten about and your loyalty isn’t rewarded. This can massively hurt businesses as word of mouth and reviews from people can be very powerful and can sway someone from doing business with you. Customer retention is all about rewarding the loyal customers you already have and showing you appreciate them. There are a few ways you can do this. You could try with a birthday treat, by allowing someone to sign up to your emails and input their birthday, you could send them an email in the month of their birthday offering them a treat, a freebie or a discount. You could also look at offering a loyalty card, if you owned a coffee shop for example you could have a stamp card so that after so many purchases with you they get something for free. This is another great way to show that loyalty to your business rewards them with something.
Be More Present On Social Media
Social media is your best friend. With so much of the world on social media and constantly consuming content, being online is a great way to get your business out there. Posting a couple of times a week or every day can make such a difference. Try to post engaging content, getting your audience involved and sharing things only on that platform so it entices them to follow you like sneak peeks at new products coming.