Developing customer trust is essential to your company’s noticeability and retention. For example, bad marketing and advertising that unintentionally deceive customers may score you some easy purchases, but those customers won’t be coming back. For this reason, you should be aware of better marketing tactics to establish a solid base.

Be Responsive

Reliable communication will make your customers feel in control of their purchases. Hire an employee to respond to customer inquiries. If you receive questions from customers regularly, you should quickly listen and respond. Add an FAQ section to your website so they can find answers to their questions when your business is closed.

Respond frequently to reviews of your business—positive or negative. When you aren’t responsive, it can make your business look shady or secretive. This isn’t a good look. More communication can help resolve customer problems and show that you truly care about people’s experiences with your company.

Earn Reviews

Not only is it important to respond to reviews, but you need to go above and beyond to earn online reviews. More than 80% of people trust online reviews to guide their purchase decisions. If your company has a 4+ star rating, new customers are more likely to give your business a chance.

Encourage customers to review their experience. Offer discounts or other rewards to customers who give your business advice. Not only will this motivate them to come back to your business, but you can also see what your strengths and weaknesses are. A business that strives to improve is a business that people will patronize.

Use Social Media

Getting involved in social media is essential in today’s digital environment. Social media can be a great way to casually update people on business plans, rewards programs, and company standards. Post in a way that is conducive to your target audience. Doing this will solidify your place in their mind.

Posting creative content can also be a great way to find new customers. Social media offers you a platform to share fun content that can help your business seem relatable. Work with your digital advertising team to see what is working for the social media crowd.

Brand trust can be grown in a myriad of different ways. The most important principle that business owners should implement into their company is that communication matters. Frequent messages, updates, and responses are great. Social media and other digital platforms provide you a resource to make this happen.

If you need help growing your business, we can help! Contact us today to schedule some coaching!

Having entrepreneurial goals and aspirations is great, but until your business takes off you may find yourself stuck in a full-time job. That can make it tough to make the transition to owning your own successful business. While difficult, it’s not impossible. With careful prioritization and discipline, you can successfully make that transition.

Continue Your Education

Depending on the business you’re building and the industry you’re operating in, it may be necessary to obtain occupational licensing or certifications. Earning these usually means taking courses to get the necessary knowledge and training to do the job properly and then taking an exam to prove you’ve learned what you need to. Since you already have a full-time job, you may find the flexibility offered by online courses to be a good fit for your lifestyle. Succeeding in an online course will require you to set goals for yourself. Be disciplined in sticking to them.

Start Small

Businesses don’t tend to be successful or able to sustain themselves right from the start. It takes time, work, patience, and diligence. Start small until you feel your business can sustain itself and you, enabling you to step away from your full-time job and more fully into the role of a business owner. As your business picks up, you may need to reduce your full-time hours to part-time hours. If your job offered benefits, those may have been contingent upon your full-time status, so make sure you know what your 401(k) options are and you’ve made arrangements for health insurance.

Keep Your Job Entirely Separate from Your Business

It may be tempting to use whatever downtime your job allows you to work on your business. Sending a quick email about your business using your employer’s computer isn’t hurting anyone, right? Not necessarily true. Using your employer’s property to move your own business forward can lead to legal issues down the road. Plus, you should never assume emails are private when sent using company property. This could lead to being disciplined for not using company time properly, even costing you your job before your own business is ready to support you fully.

Making the transition to owning your own business while still working a full-time job can be a real challenge. Be disciplined in how you use your time and prioritize your education. Be patient with yourself and your business as you work to make it self-sustaining. Remember to keep your full-time job and your business separate. It’s a lot of work upfront, but making this investment in your future now can pay off down the road.

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Even the very best businesses and business models are susceptible to hard times. They can come about due to pandemics, market crashes, bad publicity, political climates, and many other factors. How your business may come to face a hard time may not be clear. However, you will face hard times. Here is how you can prepare yourself.

Build Cash Reserves

The novice business owner will take all their profits as payment. Unfortunately, this leaves their business entirely unable to handle any unexpected expenses. A much wiser approach is to build up reserves of cash. That way, if the business goes through a period of low profits or faces other troubles, they will be more prepared to deal with them. One way that this may happen unexpectedly is through pivots. A business pivot is when a company changes direction in response to the changing industry. Pivots cost money. If a business has cash reserves, it can successfully pivot in a hard time to stay afloat. If a business has no cash reserves, it may be unable to make a pivot and go bankrupt when major industry changes occur.

Creative Customer Incentives

When the general economy is facing a hard time, most consumers will stop spending on their wants and only focus on their needs. This tends to further increase the economic difficulty. Offering creative incentives is a great way to entice your customers back to your stores. For example, rewarding loyalty can improve sales and keep your customers happy. Another option is to offer bulk discounts like, “Buy 1, get 1 half-off”. These bulk discounts will appeal to your customers’ frugal mindset as they try to weather the economic downturn.

Business Insurance

Insuring your business can help compensate your business when things get tough. You can insure your business against potential lawsuits, natural disasters, and in some cases loss of profits. While you can’t insure your business against your poor business management, some insurance companies offer policies that will compensate you if your business loses its ability to make a profit due to circumstances that are deemed outside of your control. You may find yourself thinking that you don’t want to pay insurance costs, but you’ll be glad you paid insurance costs if you ever find yourself needing help from your insurance company.

As mentioned earlier, it’s pretty much guaranteed that your business is going to face challenges and hard times. Now is the time to prepare for these things. Don’t just put it off for another day. Being caught unprepared could cause countless hours of your hard work to be destroyed. On the other hand, by being prepared, you can be in the prime position to turn tough times to your advantage.

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To stay out of the red, a business needs to have a steady stream of clients and customers that bring in enough income to cover costs, and hopefully generate a profit. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Getting clients on board with your services can sometimes take a little convincing, but it is possible.

Show You Care

Clients are looking for businesses that are interested in and capable of solving their problems. If you’re going to get them on board with what you have to offer, you need to prove to them that you care about what their needs are and how their problems get solved. Showing you’re passionate about their goals makes your business more attractive than another who might be more inclined to see their clients as a number on their accounts receivable list. It’s one way to build value in your services and set yourself apart.

Get the Messaging Right

If you’re going to effectively show your clients that you care and can meet their needs, you need to get your message right. The content needs to be clear, concise, and compelling. Explain what you have to offer and how it solves your clients’ problems. It’s also important to note that just sending it out once isn’t likely to be adequate. Messages are most effective when you repeat them 7 to 20 times. For this reason, running multiple marketing campaigns and being repetitive (without being annoying) is an important component to successfully getting your message across.

Be Transparent

Transparency matters in business dealings. You need to be upfront and clear about what your service can do for your clients. As tempting as it can be, don’t over-promise just to land a client. If you aren’t able to deliver, they’ll leave and not come back. In a similar vein, let your clients and prospective clients know exactly how much they can expect to pay for your services. No one likes to get hit with hidden fees. Have answers to all the “why” questions. The more information you can provide your clients when they ask, the easier it will be for them to make informed decisions.

It takes time and effort, but convincing clients to get on board with your services is possible. There are a lot of things that impact a customer’s willingness to do business with you, but if you show you care, take the time to get the message right, and are transparent, you’ll likely see your efforts pay off. Your work will help put your business in a position to not only make ends meet but to generate profits.

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