Give Your Business A Head Start & Navigate The Cobbled Streets
Running your business can sometimes feel like trying to tackle an incredibly uneven road surface in incredibly inappropriate footwear. No matter where you go, or which part of the road looks smooth there are inevitable hiccups, trips, bumps and set-backs. This is why, truly understanding your business and how other people perceive your business is vital. Do you have everything you need? Have you taken advantage of the free stuff out there?
Small Business Tips to Improve Your Strategy:
Know Your Customer - Data Doesn’t Lie
Important foundations to a business are paramount to success. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, start-up or already established, there will undoubtedly be areas you could improve, refine or introduce (if you haven’t already). Knowing your customer for example, do you truly know your audience? This is not necessarily who you ‘want’ to be your customer, or asking others who they ‘think’ your customers are. Use the data available to you! Remember that Google Analytics account you’ve never looked at? As well as Google Search Console & Social Channel Analytics - they can all tell you exactly who is on your site, where they’re coming from and what they’re doing when they get there. Take some time and dive into your traffic analytics, you will likely be pleasantly surprised what you can find out.
Understand The Basics & Better Equip Yourself
The murky world of Digital Marketing, SEO, PPC etc. can all be quite overwhelming if you’re exploring it for the first time. However, if you take some time to understand the basics in these areas, you will be able to better understand what your business needs, be better equipped to explain to others what you need and you’ll also end up saving yourself money! So eventually, what, 6 months ago you would’ve paid an agency to do for your SEO, you can now jump on and fix yourself.
Have a look at how fast your website is running with Pingdom. If your results say you’re below 2.5 seconds, give yourself a high five. If not, then you are provided with the information you could give to your developer to help improve this. You just became better equipped!
Competitors - Online & Offline
Stella and Jimmela have a flower shop where they take lots of online orders. Just because Olivia has a flower shop across the street does not necessarily make Olivia their competitor - Especially as she doesn’t even have an online website. So understanding your online competitors is extremely important as they are likely not who you think they are.
Jump on Google, type a few variations of your service or product into the search box and see what the results say! Do maps appear? Do some competitors appear for multiple searches? Now you can try and work out why they may be ranking higher than you (or lower) and employ some tactics that they’re using to better compete!
Still itching to learn more about how you can supercharge your own business? Check out our two day digital marketing course that will give you all the tools you need to propel yourself past your competitors.