Small Business Growth Tips

Small Business Growth Tips

Small business growth tips can help you expand your business by making it more successful. Read on to learn some basic and easy-to-follow instructions to grow your business.

Learn about your customers

Learning about your customers inside out is an important factor in the success of your business. You always start a business with a target market while developing a plan. Once you’ve learned to reach out to your customers and developed a customer base, you will also need to learn how to retain your customers. This necessitates constant customer research to ensure your business’s success.

Trends change and people change with them. You need to adapt to stay alive.

Here is a list of ways to learn about your customers

1. User reviews
2. Customer service
3. Feedback from comments
4. Surveys: You might want to offer prizes or discounts to get customers to answer

What you need to take note of are the consistent grievances your customers have to elevate your business. You need to launch patches, fixes, or new features to ensure those pain points are addressed, or your customers will leave.

Market analysis is also important because you need to see what moves your competitors are doing to stay competitive. You must also pay attention to the economy and how it affects your customers to make the necessary adjustments to stay alive.

Invest in good customer service

When growing your business, taking care of your customers is necessary for success. It’s easy for customer care to fall by the wayside once you’re a success, but you should appreciate the people that got you to the top. Taking care of your customers through great customer service ensures that they will stay with you for years to come. Word of mouth about your product and customer service will reach others and may get others to try your service or product.

Increase Staff

Getting more sales and customers will necessitate more staff to keep up with the demand. You need to pick the right staff members to accomplish your expansion goals for the future.

Here are tips to help you pick staff:

1. Find people who can offer unique perspectives that do the job well.
2. Diversify your hires by getting people from different specialties, backgrounds, and experiences.
3. Don’t forget your current employees. Give them training and opportunity to grow and lead.

Find ways to optimize your business process and keep your employees happy to ensure the success of your business.

Extend Value

The usual strategy for growth is to look outward, which is not a bad strategy. Though an approach you can try is to add value to your product to keep your already established customer base happy. Your current customer base is happy with you and trusts you meaning they are likely to buy new products and services.

Look for new avenues to extend the value of your product. Whether it be a patch or a new feature, anything that improves the quality of life of the users would be welcome. You can also add a new line of products that complements previous products.

Even if you’ve hit the growth limit of your established target market, it does not mean you cannot get more value from it. The improvements you make may even bring you new customers when word of mouth gets around.

Social Media Marketing

Using social media can be difficult when you don’t have experience in using social media applications. You have two options to handle your social media marketing. The first is to hire a social media expert to handle your online marketing efforts. A second option is to handle it yourself. Study how to open a profile and learn how to grow your community.

Don’t be intimidated when you use social media because there isn’t a need to post every day. You still need to establish a consistent posting schedule for your customers and followers. After doing all of the above, you still need to actively engage with your customers and followers by answering messages and reading comments.

Social media is a good medium for you to check trends and get insights about the customers. You can use the insights you’ve seen when creating social media ads.

Show Your Expertise

You need to show your expertise if you want to build clout among customers and other businesses. Expertise can be shown when you run a Q&A session in your social media channels, host webinars, create research studies, and write blogs to share your knowledge. Any opportunity to share your knowledge will be a great way to show others you are an expert in your field.

Be sure to make your presentation accessible by providing links or gathering contact information to spread the word.

Develop More Revenue Sources

You need to develop more revenue streams to help your business expand. You could try selling a new product or service. Offering a separate pricing model via different subscription tiers can also help you earn money. You can also generate passive income by getting ads and sponsorships.

Consider all the operation and startup costs before you embark on getting a new revenue stream. Make a plan and make sure it’s viable before making any moves.

In conclusion, trying some tips to grow your small business can bring you more revenue for your expansion efforts. Growing your business is not always expensive, but it does require a strategic mind.

Be sure to tune in for more business advice.

How To Get More Customers During The Holidays

How To Get More Customers During The Holidays

Get more customers during the holidays by following these tips for the holidays.

Offer Holiday Sales

The holidays are an occasion where your potential customers are looking to spend money because of the sales.  A sale is always a good promotional tool to get your practice customers. Make sure to put a deadline on that sale to give your event a sense of urgency. Urgency can help you close a deal easier. Short-term sales can convert your window shoppers into paying customers.

Here are a few steps to help make your holiday sales a success:

  1. Sales and Promotions require you to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and find out what items do they need or want?
  2. Check your inventory because when you start a sale, you must make sure you have the supplies to give people what they want. You also have to choose what items you can afford to be on sale.
  3. Strategize your promotions based on what you know will work. You need to choose the right channels coupled with the right materials to get people to come.

Decorate Your Social Pages

The holidays are known for decorations, so add some life to your social media accounts by decorating them for the festivities. The decorations can elicit warm feelings in your followers, which may generate sales. Decorating your social media accounts can remind your followers of the holidays. Doing this step in conjunction with holiday sales is sure to boost your sales for the month.

Here are some tips to help you decorate your social media pages:

  1. Do your research and use search engines to find the most popular designs for social media pages.
  2. Get a designer on board to help you conceptualize a design that will help your sales.
  3. Use eye-catching visuals to get more shares in social media. You might want to hire a graphic designer because unique eye-catching visuals get the most attention.
  4. Optimize your images for the different social media platforms. All social media posts and pages with images do better when compared to those without. You need to make sure your images look great on every social media platform to ensure that your promotions go well.
  5. Create valuable content for your social media pages that will help your customers see you as an authority in your field.

Offer Free Shipping

Shipping is one of the major concerns of your shoppers, especially last-minute shoppers. Holiday deadlines are approaching, and your customers want the hassle of shipping out of the way. You have to be clear about how to shop and get free shipping and make sure to notify them of the estimated time of arrival for their orders.

Here is a list of tips to help you make free shipping possible

  1. Offer free shipping with a minimum spend threshold that must be met to qualify for free shipping. This measure should help cover the cost of shipping for your products.
  2. Reduce the weight and dimensions of your packages to lower shipping costs.
  3. Bundle your products because shipping more than one product lowers the cost of shipping. You can bundle certain products that go well together to create a holiday gift basket.
  4. Event-based free shipping on specific seasons or days can yield better sales. Use a flash sale and offer free shipping now and again to keep costs bearable.
  5. Choose locations to offer free shipping to allow free shipping without losing money.

 

Create a holiday shopping guide

Make a list of products you want to promote while creating your holiday gift guide. You can use this guide to promote lesser-known items in your store and give them the spotlight. Another option is to promote your most popular products to boost sales further. You can send this list in emails or texts to your customers.

Here is a list of tips to help you create a shopping guide

Choose a theme for the items on the guide. The items should go well together to boost the chances of group purchases and to make your guide easier to follow.

Highlight specific items from your shop. You can choose items that do not get much attention in an attempt to boost sales for those items. Another tactic you can try is to add items that are popular from your shop to further boost sales for those items.

Include spectacular images in your shopping guide. Images are needed for the customers to see the product and to make them want to buy it. You can hire a good photographer for these images to ensure you have the best pictures possible.

In conclusion, following these tips can help you step up your game and increase your sales during the holidays.

Services of Digital Marketers

Services of Digital Marketers

Enlisting the services of digital marketers is essential for the success of your business. There are plenty of services you can avail of from these digital marketers. Today you will learn about three necessary services that you must get from a digital marketer to be successful.

Strategy

Everything starts with a good strategy, but many businesses use social media without a plan, which produces zero gains. There are many social media platforms on the market, and all of them serve a particular purpose.

Twitter is mainly used to deliver news of new offerings or sales immediately because the platform only allows short but sweet text content.

Instagram and Pinterest are image-based platforms that allow you to showcase your goods and services through beautiful pictures.

Youtube and Vimeo are your video-sharing platforms where you can market your goods and services in video format.

Yelp is a location-based platform that helps you get discovered by your local community while letting you gather customer reviews.

Facebook is a platform that allows you to do a bit of everything. You can post videos, pictures, and text while also building a community.

Your digital agency must be able to choose a social media platform/s that will aid your business goals. They must then create a marketing strategy based on their chosen platform/s. A good agency will take time to research your audience and what they are searching for online. Your digital agency must present a detailed plan with an editorial calendar and milestones.

Content
Your content provides you with internet currency to engage your audience. Reaching new markets, enticing both old and new customers, and providing value can all be done when you post the right content.
Read on to learn the different types of content.

Blogs

This type of content builds awareness for your brand and will establish your authority in your field by helping your audience solve their problems. It uses informal language, which helps humanize your establishment to help you connect with your potential customers. Using the right keywords also helps your establishment rank higher in your potential customer’s search results.

Landing Page

These are the destinations your potential customers are sent to when they click on the links on your site, social media posts, CTA, and the search engine results. They are designed to increase your conversions by turning visitors into leads by helping you get visitor contact information.

Call To Action
The call to action or CTA is a phrase designed to get your visitors to take immediate action, usually in getting them to purchase items or avail of services. You can also include calls to action in different content for marketing, such as blogs and newsletters.
Some common phrases for calls to action include:
1. Book now
2. Contact us
3. Join today
4. Apply today
5. Learn more
6. Order now
7. Register today

CTAs are often links that will bring your visitors to a page where they can make a purchase or avail of your services.

Whatever CTA you choose, make sure that your intent is clear to your audience so they know what they are clicking. No one wants to be deceived, so make sure that your CTA takes your audience to where they want to go.

Testimonials
A great way to build up your credibility is by getting success stories from your potential patient’s peers, which makes this content invaluable. You can also use these testimonials to find out what your business does right and what parts need improvement. It’s best to include testimonials on the different pages of your site to make sure they are seen.

Link Building
Link Building is the process of getting different websites to link to pages from your own site. Your site needs link building for referral traffic and to increase your authority. Getting backlinks to your site is necessary because the more backlinks you have, the higher the Google algorithms will rank you in the search results. A higher ranking in the search results improves your chances of being found by your customers.

Here are a few tips to get started in Link building:

Reach out

Reach out to people you know who have websites relevant to your business and ask them for in-content links to help you get started.

Build Connections

Get on online forums and start talking to the people you find in them. Give helpful advice and link your blogs to them if it will help your situation. Talking to these people can help you build relationships with those in need of your services to help you make a sale. You can also get the latest news on the industry from these forums to help you keep up.

Write A Blog

You need to earn your backlinks, and one way to do that is with great content. Great content that helps the lives of your potential patients will get linked in various channels. Ensure your content is useful, relevant, and well-structured to help you gain authority. You must continuously add new content regularly to ensure you get those backlinks.

Get Listed in Good Directories

Find a directory that caters to your niche that is attached to trusted sites in your industry because being listed by them makes it easier to get indexed in search engines. Directories help you by letting you post a link to your site and provide useful information for your customers.

In conclusion, digital marketers offer a variety of services to promote your business. You need strategy, content, and link building to start your journey to success. Contacting Smart Works Intl will give you access to all these services and more to help your business grow.

Reach out to us today and learn how Smart Works Intl can help get you more customers!

 

What Your Website Needs To Get Clients

What Your Website Needs To Get Clients

Your website needs to get clients, but that can be difficult if you aren’t well-known.

Read on to learn some steps you can take for your website to increase the chances of landing a client.

 

Clear Message

Your website must convey a clear message to your visitors. You must handle your customer’s marketing by providing digital solutions. Your goal is to help your clients hit their marketing and business goals. You need to convey what your digital agency will do for your clients in one sentence because audiences have short attention spans. Dig deep and analyze your mission vision statement by examining your agency’s goal. Come up with a one-liner that will sum up your agency’s goals to convey your message.

You can get the help of a writer if you’re stuck on this step.

 

Design

You must research UI designs and functionality to create a website that is pleasing to the eye. You can start designing your site by considering these elements such as geometric shapes, readability, color contrast and combinations, and typography and how they will meld together. Your business must have an experienced design expert to make the right aesthetic decisions for your site’s design. Your site’s colors must complement and contrast each other to make it visually appealing and make the text readable. The geometric shapes must also be visually appealing without being too distracting.

 

Navigation

Visiting your website must be a pleasant experience, or you will not make that sale. In addition to being visually pleasing, your site must also be easy to navigate to get people to hire your agency.

Follow these tips to make navigation easier:

  1. Label pages clearly
  2. Divide categories clearly
  3. Check your search features work
  4. Make all navigation buttons clickable links

 

Make sure your buttons are properly labeled and that they go to the right pages before the site goes live.

 

Portfolio

Don’t forget to show off your previous works. Your clients would like to see samples of exactly what you can do for them. There are plenty of ways to present your old works on your site. You can try a slideshow reel that shows pictures of your previous works that automatically changes the pics every few seconds. A video that features your best works can also be made to show potential clients what you can offer. Be sure to include the positive effects your works have done for your clients. Including their numbers of new conversions and sales can be a great help in getting you more clients.

 

Fast Loading Times

Slow web pages can cause your potential customers to lose interest. Do not use too many plug-ins or ads because they can slow down your site. The ideal time for loading pages is 2 seconds any second after that will increase your bounce rate. You can use a WordPress speed optimization service to make your pages load faster when using WordPress. You can also build a website from scratch, which is less likely to run loading problems but require extensive knowledge to create.

 

Transparency

While customers are there for your services, they also need to know you to establish trust. Your about us page is the autobiographical page of your website. You need to grab their attention and build trust using this page. Do not use generic descriptions for your business and staff entries. Write a concise but informative history of your company including, who the staff is and what they do.

It must be written in the same tone as your business’s culture. Include a small bio of one paragraph for each of your staff or just the management team. The page is meant to give an air of openness and transparency to foster trust with your possible customer.

 

Multi-Platform Functionality 

Expand your site’s accessibility to reach more people. At least half of your customers will be searching for your practice through their phones. Not all websites you commission are constructed equal. Some of your chosen developers may only build a site that is good for browsers but does not consider mobile devices. A lack of mobile compatibility causes your website to not load properly on mobile devices.

This issue may turn away your potential customers who use their mobile phones for searching. Be sure your programmer builds your site with mobile devices in mind.

 

SEO

You need content to help solve your customer’s problems and establish trust. Content laced with the proper SEO practices can help your visibility. If you are a car dealership, having a blog for car maintenance can be helpful for your customers. Your content should sprinkle the proper keywords and writing principles to get Google to label it as good content. Once Google judges your content to be helpful and relevant, it will put you at the top of the search results to help customers find your business.

Essentially, find out your customer’s problems to get a keyword that you will use as a topic. Next, write good content that helps your customers with the right keywords to help gain trust and visibility to your customers.

 

Contact

Please remember that none of the points above matter if your customers cannot reach your business. Be sure to put your contact info at either the header or footer of every page of your site. A contact page and online chat support can make it easier for your customers to reach your business. The easier you make things for your customers, the more likely you are to make a sale.

In conclusion, the items discussed are only a few items your website needs to be successful. Contact Smartworks today to ensure you get a website that will bring your business success at an affordable price.

Contact Smartworks today and get those customers!

Why Do Doctors Need SEO?

Why Do Doctors Need SEO?

Doctors need SEO because it can help increase their visibility on a local level to give them more patients. SEO can help doctors get more new patients while keeping the old ones for an affordable price. Read on to learn how SEO can help a doctor’s practice generate revenue.

What SEO Can Do?

SEO increases your chances of getting the number one spot in your patient’s search results. You need that number one spot because patients will see you first if you’re at the top of their searches. They are also more likely to visit you because they will see that Google ranks you highest as the best. For example, when a patient searches for a pediatrician in Alabama, SEO can help you appear at the top of the results, increasing your chances of getting that patient.

The true goal of SEO is to get you more new customers and more repeat customers by becoming more visible.

Online Presence
Nearly all of your customers trust Google as the best search engine. Patients will get the impression Google is saying that your practice is the best because it appears over others.

Credibility
One way your website can rank up in the search results of Google is by using the right keywords. Performing keyword research can tell you what patients are concerned about, which allows you an opportunity to help them. The keywords can be made into blog topics that help your patients. For example, people are searching about sore throats, you can then create blogs about treatments for sore throats to help people.
These blogs can help you rank up in the search engine as you use the keywords patients are searching for on the blog. Patients will also see you as an authority on the subject, thanks to your helpful advice.

Spend Less For More
The old ways of advertising, such as commercials, flyers, and billboards, can cost you a lot of money. The spending for traditional ads is in the hundreds of thousands to the millions range. Digital marketing is much cheaper but can also be more effective than your traditional marketing techniques. The range of spending you will see for digital marketing is in the hundreds to thousands of dollars only.
These days your patients’ eyes are glued to their screens. Consequently, barely anyone pays attention to traditional ads as a result. SEO can help you get more patients as you rank high in the search engine for a more affordable price.

Targeted Leads
Normally, searching for doctors will yield your patients millions of results. Your patients will then refine their search to only include doctors in their area with the specialty they need. It will be a lot easier for you to compete for patients locally rather than nationwide. SEO can ensure that local searches can show you as the number one practitioner in the area. This will lead to you receiving more traffic from patients who need your specific services. Targeted audiences can lead to more sales and appointments as these are the people that actually need your help.

In conclusion, SEO can increase your visibility, credibility, and leads for a lesser cost. Smart Works International has a team ready to provide all the necessary services for your marketing needs. They can handle your website development, content, and digital marketing to help your practice take off.
Set up an appointment and get in touch with our many services to help your practice take off.

Benefits Of A Business App Development

Benefits Of A Business App Development

Business app development can make your business even more profitable. At least half of customers search for goods on their phones. 79% of customers shop through apps while at home because of the convenience it offers. You will be missing out on many sales opportunities if you operate without a mobile app.

Here is a list of ways your business can benefit from mobile apps:

Better Communication
Your app can provide a direct line to quickly answer and remedy your customer’s concerns. Being easy to reach while adding quick response times can dramatically decrease the chances of getting bad reviews.

Brand Recognition
An app will have your company logo and branding on your client’s phone. Your brand will always be on display on your client’s phones. Be sure the logo is designed well and make sure the app is user-friendly to attract customers. The steps above can make your clients think of your company fondly every time they check their phones.

It also gives your business a chance to expand your reach using a new platform. The app can get you customers that prefer to use apps for convenience over browsers.

Marketing
Your app can be used to promote your products and services to your customers. Alerting your millions of users can be done in an instant through your app. Since people’s eyes are normally glued to their phones, everyone will see your new promotions to increase your chances of making a sale.

Transactions
The biggest reason you need a mobile app is to offer your customers convenience. Nowadays, your customers want to be able to do everything in the comfort of their rooms. A mobile app can provide convenience by letting them shop on their phones. Your mobile app must allow your customers to view, buy and pay for your products to make your products more accessible.

Tracking their orders is also a necessary function to ensure their delivery arrives promptly and to give them peace of mind. Your mobile apps can make buying from your business easy, and that convenience will convince your customers to make a purchase.

Additional Features
Apps are great for communication, recognition, marketing, and transactions, but they can also accomplish more by adding features. Adding features like a loyalty program and content distribution can help increase your sales, credibility, and recognition.

Here are short explanations for both additional features.

Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are incentives to get your customers to stay and make a purchase. They can also create communities of satisfied customers that can talk to each other through the creation of forums. These forums can give credibility to your business as people talk about their experiences. You can cut down prices and provide free delivery to incentivize sales from your loyal customers. You must make sure your app is user-friendly and works well before you even think of starting a loyalty program.

Content Distribution
Your mobile app can also share content similar to those seen on social media. For example, you’re selling chili flakes, and you need to drive up interest. One way you can use content to accomplish your goal is to record a cooking video. Shoot a video using your chili flakes to make dishes like sandwiches or stews. Giving your customers ideas by showing them what they can do with your product can increase sales.

Content can also be in text format. You can create great blogs that have images showing recipes that can be made with your product. If you’re a doctor, you can educate your patients on diseases to help care for them. The possibilities for content are endless. It’s up to you which content you’ll use to attract and keep your customers.

In conclusion, mobile apps can give your business better communication, brand recognition, marketing, loyalty program, content distribution, and enable transactions to get you more business. Contact us to build your app and get it launched as soon as possible.