Prospective customers and clients often take a matter of seconds to make a judgement about a brand. As a business owner, it’s crucial to create a positive impression and ensure your customers have the right perception of your company. If you’re keen to give your business a more professional edge, here are some tips to take on board.
Introducing a dress code
Whether you run a marketing company, a chain of restaurants, salons or hotels, a healthcare business or a law, property or accounting firm, it’s beneficial to introduce a dress code. If you have a uniform, or you have a policy in place, which encourages people to dress in a certain way, ensuring your employees look smart and presentable could make all the difference in those all-important first few seconds. With a dress code, you can eliminate confusion and ensure there are no grey areas for employees, and you can make sure that anyone who represents your brand looks the part.
Creating a professional website
More and more people are using the Internet to buy products, find out more about businesses and locate services. If your website is dated, it looks basic, or it takes an age for pages or images to load, you could lose out. A slick, smart website will create the right first impression and encourage prospective clients to choose your business over others. Think carefully about how you can improve the user experience. Provide useful, informative landing pages, set up a blog to promote products and services and interact with your audience, and use professional photographs to showcase your products and premises and introduce your team. About us pages are a great idea, as they enable web users to see the human side of your brand. Instead of uploading holiday snaps or pictures from a night out, use a headshot photographer to produce high-quality images of your employees that complement your brand and set the right tone. Test your website frequently, make sure it is mobile-friendly and try and provide solutions to problems. People often abandon carts because they have questions, for example. To solve this issue, you could offer a live chat feature or add an FAQ section.
Branding
Branding plays a vital role in influencing the perceptions and opinions of potential clients and customers. Your logo, the look of your website and social media feeds and your branded giveaways and promotional items should all match the ethos of your company and provide the customer with information about what you do. The branding for a toy company or a trendy clothing store should be very different to that of a bank, medical practice or a law firm, for example. Think about the kind of impression you want your business to create.
As a business owner, you want prospective customers to have a positive impression of your firm from the outset. If you’re keen to encourage clients to trust you, and you’re on a mission to build a reputation based on professionalism and reliability, it’s wise to take these pointers into consideration.
