Tag Archives: small

Small Business Growth: 5 Technology Trends in 2021

March 8, 2021artificial intelligence, business, marketing, Startups2021, business, growth, small, technology, tips, trendsjtsantalis

2020 was a very difficult year (Pandemic). It pushed people to change their lifestyle and the way of working (Remote work). The world was not prepared for such a viral outbreak. For many people worldwide 2020 was a disaster.

This also affected the world of businesses (Big or Small). Companies had to find a way to keep operating but still respect and follow the new government measures. They have to use collaboration tools such as video call software (Zoom), chat apps (Slack), screen-sharing software (TeamViewer), and so on.

Small Business Growth: 5 Technology Trends

Here are some interesting technology trends you need to know and how to grow your small business in 2021.

New Collaboration Tools

Pandemic has pushed businesses to virtual offices, online video conferences, and many other software solutions that transform a traditional office into an online one.

Communication had to be effective because teams now are working remotely.

So it’s expected that 2021 will bring more and better collaboration tools. No one can say when the pandemic will end, so it’s safe to assume that businesses will need effective and useful collaboration solutions.

Many companies will start using new types of collaborative tools. (there are already many categories available).

Companies that have to hold meetings regularly are using Cisco Telepresence for high-quality video conferencing.

Also, more businesses will turn to entire collaboration systems. These systems are made of workflow applications, databases, and other software solutions that allow companies to run everything remotely.

For example, Microsoft SharePoint is a great collaboration system. It allows employees to access important data from all kinds of devices (PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc.).

AI and ML

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are a top trend for many IT enthusiasts and tech fans. These technologies are already used in many aspects of life, and more and more people are loving these tech trends.

AI and machine learning are implemented more among business owners. Entrepreneurs and marketers will keep incorporating them into new and existing businesses in 2021.

This year will bring more AI tools and apps. Keep in mind that the main goal is to use AI to provide better and more personalized customer experiences.

Also, many people and experts believe that AI will find its use among small business owners. It is expected that small businesses will start adopting AI quickly. AI can help small businesses to improve their marketing strategies.

Also, AI can help small businesses to offer more personalized experiences to their customers.

The 5G or fifth generation of cellular capability is just here. 5G is about faster data transmission speeds.

According to various phone manufacturers, 5G can outrun 4G LTE easily. It’s an important fact that there is little to no latency (the delay experienced in data transfer).

It’s a great step in the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). 5G networks can support the influx of interconnected smart devices.

Automation

Repetitive tasks are a common (boring) thing for most workers. These tasks take up a lot of time and kill the overall productivity.

Many developers have recognized this problem, and it is expected that 2021 will bring many automation tools across many different industries.

Every business that wants to boost its employees’ productivity and performance should think about automating all these tasks. When it comes to small businesses, these tasks include appointment scheduling, data entry, customer support, and so on.

In 2021, automating these tasks will become easier. Once a business has all of these tasks automated, the employees and the owner will have more time to focus on more important matters.

With more time to focus on more complex and value-adding tasks, the team will be more productive.

Analytics – Data Insights

Many small businesses have to deal with huge amounts of data regularly. But, hiring a data scientist or analyst can be expensive. This is the main reason why in 2021, deep analytics tools and data insights will become a necessity.

It’s not only about straightforward and simple reports such as conversion rates, web traffic, etc. A business that leverages this technology will acquire many valuable insights into different business aspects. This will allow the owner to optimize strategies and new techniques.

Deep analytics can help a business owner to identify pricing trends and gain a competitive edge over competitors.

Modern software doesn’t require users to have the technical knowledge to use the power of data-driven insights.

Small Business: 8 Low-Cost Tips to Promote Successfully Your Brand

March 6, 2021blogging, business, marketing, Social Mediabrand, business, free, low-cost, promotion, small, tipsjtsantalis

Small Business: 8 Low-Cost Tips to Promote Successfully Your Brand

There are many low-cost marketing techniques to promote your small business these days. But you need to know the right strategies and effective tips to grow your business.

Small Business: Low-Cost Tips to Promote Your Brand

Here are some interesting and low-cost tips about how to promote successfully your brand.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is a general term. But it’s essential if you want to make your small business success in a very competitive market. Especially in the times, we’re living in.

The experience your small business provides is about how customers can communicate with you and solve their problems. It’s about the effectiveness of your website, contact, the payment process, how long it must take for an answer, etc. An experience free of frustrations and easy will keeps customers coming back for more.

Also, excellent customer experiences is a great marketing strategy because your satisfied customers will talk about it and it will establish trust with new leads. It will help you to convert them into long-term customers.

Use Free PR Opportunities

Most people think that PR opportunities are pretty expensive. But there are many free opportunities to try for your business. You just need to know where to look.

Start with HARO. It allows you to sign up to receive requests from journalists looking for sources in your industry. You’ll have to read newsletters to seek opportunities. But it’s a great way to build credibility and boost your business.

You can also use free press release services to distribute content about new services, products, promotions, and events your company is hosting. Make your research about free, trusted, press release services.

Create High-Quality Content

Offering value to your audience is a great way to attract them to your site. You can build trust that can lead to a lasting and profitable relationship. It does take time to create great content, but if you’re doing it yourself, it’s also free.

Create high-quality blog posts and use long-tail keywords to attract traffic to your site. Use a lead magnet, like a free guide or checklist to build your email list. Submit your quality content to high-authority publications, which will help to increase your domain authority and get more targeted traffic.

You can also have an FAQ section on your site, which is both optimized for SEO and designed to answer customer questions.

Find Partnerships

Partnerships are a super cost-effective way to reach new, interested, customers.

Contact potential partners that have the same customer base as you do. Offer an incentive for their referrals to work with you and you can do the same for them. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

You and your partner will grow your business, and customers will benefit from receiving a trusted referral. They save time and money.

Use Free Trials

Offer free consultations or free trials. Allowing potential clients the opportunity to see why you’re a great fit without charging them upfront can help them feel more comfortable in investing time and money with your business.

Also, you can have boundaries in place to protect yourself. You can have a limit for only a 30-minute consultation where you talk about services or having a two-week limit on a free trial.

Good clients will think this is a fair trade.

Use Reviews and Referrals

Reviews and referrals are very important tips for businesses. People are more likely to purchase if they’ve been referred by a friend, and 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.

Word-of-mouth marketing is powerful, and online reviews can be essential too. Stats show that 90% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they’ll trust a recommendation from a friend.

Ask happy, loyal, customers if they’ll leave a review online. Google and LinkedIn are all popular choices.

You can also set up a referral program, which offers incentives like cash, discounts, or freebies every time a client’s referral signs up to purchase from you. Referral marketing generates higher conversion rates and higher retention rates than most other marketing forms.

Use Social Media

Social media marketing is a great way to establish trust with your target audience. Make sure you’re posting consistently and sharing a lot of visual content (videos and images) to get your audience’s attention.

If you have a budget you can use ads. Facebook ads or YouTube ads are a great way to promote your business.

Use Free Ad Credits

Many advertising platforms provide new businesses and advertisers free ad credits. Sometimes, you can even find vouchers on sites like Fiverr or eBay for ad credits.

Also, if you want to keep your ad spend low, you can always set bid caps to ensure that you’re never spending money over the amount of your choice per click or action.

Your small business needs marketing to grow and generate sales. Even if you have a budget, you can still use these free or low-cost marketing tips to attract your target audience and promote successfully your brand.

Digital Marketing Strategies: 10 Tips on How to Grow Your Small Business

February 26, 2021blogging, business, marketing, seo, Social Media, Startupsbusiness, digital, growth, marketing, small, strategies, success, tipsjtsantalis

These days small business owners need to use modern types of digital marketing. Marketing channels like social media, content creation, and marketing automation are replacing traditional marketing tools.

But many small business owners don’t know how to use digital marketing methods to grow their business. It’s important to sharpen and improve your digital marketing skills.

Digital Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Small Business

Here are some useful tips about how to improve your digital marketing strategies and how to grow your small business.

Create a Successful Social Media Strategy

Digital Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Small Business

It’s impossible to succeed on social media without a successful strategy. You can’t post whatever you want, whenever you want. It’s a big mistake. Successful social media strategy means being consistent, provide value, and engaging with followers.

Also, it means that you know your target audience.

Promote Your Blog Content

You have a business blog. How can you promote it? Use your social media accounts to promote it. Facebook it’s a great platform to market your blog. Twitter is also a great resource for content and you should use it. Also, you can use LinkedIn to promote your blog content.

It’s important to share your blog content on social media platforms where your target audience is active.

Use An SEO Strategy

An important aspect of digital marketing is SEO (search engine optimization). Attention! An SEO strategy can be intimidating and confusing. It’s also not a fix it and forget it process. SEO is a long-term strategy and you cannot achieve higher rankings right away. This is the reason why many small business owners need an SEO expert to help them.

Quality Content and Credibility

Many small business owners are choosing quantity over quality when creating content. They believe that more blog posts mean more visibility. This may be true, but quality content will help you to build credibility.

Also, credibility will help your SEO strategy. But many business owners and marketers ignore this important tip.

Outsourcing

Don’t be afraid to send out tasks to other employees or even outsource your tasks. Delegating tasks to others can save you time and put more focus on your to-do list to improve quality.

You can hire an agency or a virtual assistant to help you.

Know Your Audience

Most brands and businesses aren’t promoting their products to every person on Earth. They have a specific audience in mind. It’s their target audience. Your content and social posts should target this audience. You should publish content that appeals to their specific interests or needs.

Add a Personal Touch

Customers and interested people react well to a business they feel like they know. Share who you are and talk about your business. Also, you can create a behind-the-scenes video, to show how your business works.

Think and Test

There are many social media platforms to use. So before you create a social media strategy you need to think and test. Testing is the best way to know if your strategy works or not. Put in the time upfront and save yourself time in the long run.

Testimonials

The testimonial is a type of content marketing. But many business owners don’t focus on them or they don’t use them.

Consumers like the testimonials. It’s like a guarantee. Also, many people trust the reviews and testimonials from other users. Add your testimonials to your landing page or provide a link to a testimonials page.

Use Metrics and Analytics

Important! don’t forget to look into metrics and analytics. You need to track your efforts and your campaigns. These stats will help you to improve your digital marketing strategy and generate more sales.

Small business owners need to educate themselves and practice their strategies. Don’t forget that you need to work hard, learn from your mistakes, and you need to discover new strategies and tips to grow your small business.

Small Business Tips: 6 Reasons Why Customer Experience is Your Big Advantage

February 10, 2021business, marketing, Startupsadvantage, business, customer, experience, small, tipsjtsantalis

Small businesses are facing many challenges these days. Many small business owners view large brands as big dangerous competitors and they don’t know how to win the big brands and how to get more customers. But there is a pretty effective opportunity to win any big business or brand if you act now.

Small Business Tips: How to Win Big Brands

Here are some reasons why customer experience is your big advantage

Customer Experience: Why Is A Huge Advantage

Small Business Tips: How to Win Big Brands

Many stats show that customers prefer the experience they had with small businesses over those with large brands. This fact should not only give small brands confidence but also small business owners need to rethink how they can engage and satisfy their customers.

Advantages of Small Businesses and Large Brands

As a small business, you have a huge advantage over large brands. 71% of consumers said they have a better experience with a small business over large brands. Also, 80% of those people rated their small business experiences as either “good” or “very good” overall.

Small businesses are better at personalization. Only 30% of consumers saying they haven’t received the responsiveness or personalization they desired.

Small businesses need to improve experiences and satisfaction for their customers.

Customers: Experience is A Big Priority

Many consumers say that customer service is a much bigger priority for them. 86% of those people stated that they are willing to pay more for a better experience. When customers have better experiences you will have long-term benefits for your small business.

Also, 57% of consumers said that they will like to leave a favorable review for a small business after a positive experience. (compared to a larger brand)

Exceptional customer service and buyer experiences are extremely valuable to your customers and your small business. (short and long-term)

Customers Expect Less from Small Businesses

82% of consumers said that they think a personalized experience is important, but personalization was not necessarily expected of the small business as it is with larger brands.

Nearly 60% of consumers say that they don’t expect small businesses to know their purchase history. So customers want technology solutions that are helpful for them when dealing with brands on and offline.

You need to invest in new technologies to help and satisfy your customers. You need to help and impress your customers.

Small Business and Competition

Most small businesses’ real competitors are other local small businesses that are doing a far better job. Knowing who your biggest competitors are enabled you to take action to be more effective or innovative than them.

Consumers prefer the customer experience that comes from the small business over the larger brand. So you are going to have a more difficult time competing with other small businesses.

You need to understand your customers and what means a great experience for them. So you can provide them what they like or need.

Customer Experience and Expectations

These days customers have more expectations. They want to easily find your brand or business online and also they want easy access to information about what you do and why you are better.

This is “messaging within marketing”. But most small businesses do not have the experience to write messaging that conveys what the customer is looking for or how to getting across that clear impression that opens doors to customer opportunities.

Important Tip. Be sure that you are outperforming your small business competitors on customer experience. This way you will easily be outperforming your big brand competitors as well!

Make your research to find more tips and techniques about customer experience and how to improve your marketing strategy.

More Details https://www.engage2connect.com

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Small Business: 3 Tips on How to Improve Your Online Presence

January 27, 2021blogging, business, marketing, seo, Social Media, Startupsbusiness, improve, online, presence, sales, small, tips, trafficjtsantalis

In 2020, many things have changed. We’ve seen business models disrupted, customer habits and behaviors altered, and small businesses transformed. Many of these changes involved adopting new technologies and using new digital strategies.

Now, let’s see how can you improve your online presence, reach more potential customers, build long-term relationships with your existing customer base, and build brand awareness for your small business.

Here are some tips about how to improve your online presence and increase sales.

Small Business Tips: How to Improve Your Online Presence

People will Choose Businesses with Useful Online Service

Stats show that consumers are preferring online shopping channels. 67% of shoppers report they are more likely to choose a provider with quality and useful online service.

Small Business Tips: How to Improve Your Online Presence

When asked about their preferred mix between using online channels and in-person interaction, 37% of shoppers prefer to interact through online channels in a post-COVID-19 world.

94% report the overall experience they’ve had with online interactions with service providers met or exceeded their expectations.

Many reports show that people like to use a buy online and pick up system.

No matter what they’re looking for, consumers are turning to the internet to find it.

How To Improve Your Online Presence

So, if consumers are spending money online, you need to create a robust online presence. Discover how to do that.

Build a professional website

Websites are essential for every business. If you don’t have a website, it’s easy to build yourself or outsource the task to a professional. You’ll need a domain name. Many companies sell domain names, and most are inexpensive.

Your domain name does not necessarily need to match your company name. Instead, you can use keywords describing your business. You can use words that a consumer would search for when looking for a business such as yours.

Reach Your Target Audience on Social Media

Social media usage is growing worldwide. Stats show that there are about 233 million social media users. Also, 75% of consumers follow brands on social media and 97% of these consumers interact on social media with the brands they follow.

You don’t need to be present on every social media site but you need to focus on the ones that are most popular with your target audience.

Build Your Online Store

If you plan to sell products online, you’ll need an e-commerce store or site.

You can build an e-commerce platform on your site by adding e-commerce tools. Many web hosts offer e-commerce packages.

Use a hosted provider, such as Shopify or BigCommerce.

Create a store on the online marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, or Etsy.

Your online store doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does have to be clear and easy to navigate. 95% of consumers say clear images, product descriptions, and stock availability are the primary factors that lead to an online purchase.

Important Tip: Many consumers are browsing and making purchases on their mobile devices, so it’s crucial your site and online store are mobile-friendly.

How to Increase Traffic and Sales

You have to drive traffic to your site and raise awareness for your company. There are various ways to do that.

Use an SEO Strategy

You need to optimize your site so consumers can discover you when they search online. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a component of search engine marketing (SEM). Both can get a little complex, so you may outsource this task.

About 93% of online activity starts at a search engine. That applies to online searches for local businesses as well. To optimize for a search engine, use Google’s Keyword Planner tool (free) to find out which keywords are most popular about your business.

It also helps to use those keywords in your website copy, headlines, subheads, and captions.

Use Online Directories

Many consumers are using online business directories. They are an online listing of businesses (the online version of the Yellow Pages).

Start by claiming your free listing on Google My Business. Your business may already have a listing, but if you haven’t “claimed” it, it’s probably not correct or complete.

Use your Google My Business information to create listings on the other search directories and local maps.

Use Reviews

You can use online ratings and review sites. Many consumers “discover” new businesses when looking up other companies. These sites can help you to build your online presence because consumers are using these sites.

88% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses.

74% of consumers only pay attention to reviews written in the last month.

When writing a review, 22% of consumers expect to receive a response within one day.

It’s crucial to respond to every review across these platforms, good or bad. Because customers will see that you are active with positive and negative feedback and you can provide them with excellent customer service.

Use Retargeting Marketing

A small online advertising budget can get you big results and quickly build your online presence and brand awareness.

Consumers need more than one impression to drive a sale. Retargeting ads and retargeting marketing can help you to increase your sales.

Stats show that 47% of marketers say retargeting is one of the most overlooked online marketing methods.

A great bonus of retargeting marketing is that consumers will see your products, services, and your brand name all over the web as they surf to other sites!

Google AdWords is the most popular platform for advertising. Also, you can use Bing or Yahoo. You’ll pay a small fee every time someone clicks on your ads—this is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Use High-Quality Content

“Content is king” is a well-known phrase and it’s an essential element in building an online presence. The more content you create, the more opportunities consumers and search engines have to discover your business.

You should be adding content to your website and social channels. Also, you can post video content to social media platforms (including YouTube). Even you can use guest posts. Writing for other sites or blogs is a great way to spread brand awareness.

Last Tip

If you want to show up online, and improve your online presence, you need to be present, be active, and engage.

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