No-body sets up a business for it to fail. But if the correct procedures and actions aren’t put into place early enough or along the line, the future for your business may not be as bright as you think. Luckily for you, we’ve put together 4 basic steps for you to create a successful business.
Business Development
Not to be confused with sales, business development is the process of identifying potential good-fit customers and building a relationship between yourself and a company. Your aim? To reach and surpass your companies revenue and growth goals.
Email campaigns are a fantastic tool when looking to find and get in contact with relevant companies. Create a list of businesses you want to approach and look at retrieving the emails of the contacts relative to the field you want to get in touch with. E.g. an advertising agency would want to speak with the marketing department of a company and a food wholesalers would want to speak to the sales department. Once you have cultivated enough email addresses, it’s time to create an email. The hard bit? Making a sales email that doesn’t sound like a sales email. When you take into account that 14.5 billion spam emails are sent every day, a lot of people are very quick to turn a blind eye at an email from an unknown contact. Therefore, the way in which your email is written needs to come across in a friendly and approachable way. Include statistics! The brain digests numbers better than it does words as they are easy and straightforward to read, plus, statistics add value and reliability to your brand.
Get your reading glasses on as this is the most important part: the subject line. 47% of email recipients open an email purely based on the subject line so be sure to nail this. Make sure it best represents what your email is about and doesn’t faff around. Questions often provoke intrigue leading people to click through and open. A humorous subject line can stand out amongst the hundreds of either dry and boring ones. There are plenty of different techniques, choose the one that best fits your email and your business.
Lastly, don’t forget to follow up your first email a couple days later. Whilst giving your targeted business the nudge they might need to contact you back, they also no longer feel like a number in a list but as someone potentially valuable to you.
Eye For An Eye
Humans are a selfish breed. Generally, we won’t give something up unless we get something in return and that goes for businesses as well. When starting up, you may be in need of phone numbers for your data base or a number of questions answered to help go forward with your business. People are unlikely to give data up for free. So, to get around this, make sure you have something to give. Whether it be regular newsletters with content valuable to them or a free e-book, your audience are more likely to help you if you help them first.
The Customer Is Always Right
At the end of the day, you want to please your customers because happy customers means more business. So learn from them! Ask for reviews – good or bad, you can grow from them. There’s no point in wallowing in the dumps because “toughcookie123” said your business had a slow response rate and would never work with you again. Instead, take the criticism and improve the problem so issues like that don’t arise in the future.
Look at what reviews your competitors are getting. There may be specific points of their products that customers dislike. Take notes from this and see where yours can be improved to thus become the better product – beating your competition.
Keeping Costs Low
Time and time again, businesses get swept up into buying software or tools that simply will not benefit them. You become prey to the thousands of salesman wanting to unload their “life changing” software onto your lives the moment you make any kind of online footprint. That’s not to say that they’re aren’t tools available that will be beneficial to your business – just make sure you do your research first.
Once you have done your research, always sign up on a monthly service first. Although, you may be able to save a considerable amount of money by signing up to annual package, unless you are confident you are going to be using the software in 12 months, this isn’t advisable. Paying monthly, although a little bit more expensive, frees up cash flow and allows you to easily switch as and when you see fit.
Giving away large sums of money in one go is never an easy thing to do. Alas, sometimes for the sake of your business, it must be done. Very selectively, invest your money where you see fit. You may have a weak online or social presence. Maybe you deem online advertisements to be your next venture for the company. This all comes at a price. Of course, you have the option to do your marketing yourself, however, unless this was your background before starting your business, it isn’t advisable. Platforms are constantly changing and it will take you a lot of time to learn everything you need to know to make a success of it.
The other approach is to choose a Marketing Agency in London like The Good Marketer, though it may seem like a lot of money to spend, your return on investment once your campaigns have been set up and your adverts are running will be quite significant.
Conclusion
So there it is. Our four tips to help you create a successful business. Of course, there are countless other methods to to help stabilise the future of your business but these are definitely a good starting point. If you have any questions on any of the points mentioned above, please get in contact with a member of our team.
The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generates conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
Keeping costs low has two dimensions for instance if you invest less on your resources than in long term companies generally lose because they lack stability and passion. Spending less on tools is best for startups and small businesses as they are restraint by costs.