What do Small Business need to do to survive in this current economic atmosphere?

First things first – we ought to be aware that the economic situation is dicey but then your mind should be positive and you should not let the prevalent economic factors affect your business in a negative way. The first battle starts from the mind because from the fountains of your heart flows passion, courage, determination, commitment, values etc.

You must have heard the popular saying about people starting businesses – that 95% of startups fail after the first year. Though there are no concrete statistics to back that up but considering that there are factors that affect small businesses on the downturn in Nigeria, it might be very true to our face. A handful of young people are setting up their business every day, but how many will survive to the coming year? Small Business owners need to be innovative and committed to certain rules of business success in order to ride through the storm and if they apply some of the following methods presented, then they can be able to fight another day and keep on building on blocks upon blocks of successes.

Many small businesses in Nigeria are faced with many challenges and among the prevalent ones are:

• Inadequate online presence – Many have no website, and a handful of those who have websites do not function properly.
• They lack sales tools they can use to boost their business.
• They have no cogent experience in digital marketing and they are virtually invisible in the digital marketing sphere
• They keep on fighting with larger business competitors due to lack of innovation and broad area of operation.
• Poor branding of their business, services and products.
• They waste huge sums of money on wrong advertising medium.
• Poor customer service and customer follow-up

These are just the notable challenges among a plethora of many. But today we share with you time tested ways you can use to revive your business or use as a foundation for your small business to have a solid footing while going into the wild.

Deciding Your Market and Your Target Audience

Decide what services you are offering. Ensure you classify your services properly because this will be your unique identifier throughout the life of your business. For example our area is in the SME Support Services so everything we do is geared towards support small and medium scale business to grow and achieve more profits in their business. If you have not found a unique identifier for your business you have to do it now before you define your target market. For us our target market are small business owners and startups because our services are tailored to that particular market. While defining your unique identifier, also know what you have to offer to your target market. What makes you unique to your target market? Are your services the solution to the needs of your target market? Those are essential questions you need to ask yourself before rolling out the bandwagon.

Arrange Your Portfolio

It is basically a hard experience to acquire a handful of clients when you have no proof of experience to back it up. Though you can achieve initial success with your branding but without arranging an ongoing portfolio of your past work you will not be able to pull in clients on a continuous basis. Showcase your portfolio on your website. One sure way to get work samples as portfolio is to do free work for new clients. This is highly instrumental for new businesses that are seeking for clients. When you do free work for a certain number of new clients you will be able to use your completed work as part of your portfolio. Therefore new clients can be able to see your previous work and be able to deal with you. While displaying your previous work, endeavor to show how you have been able to get results for other businesses and organizations like them.

Get Testimonials from Clients and Showcase them on Your Website

Testimonials are very powerful tool that can help skyrocket your business. Testimonials are just like the ever effective traditional word of mouth advertising. Genuine testimonial from a happy client achieves the aim of telling your potential clients on a personal level about your services and what they achieved in their business by your work. When showcasing testimonials on your website, show the photo of the person providing the testimonial. This will help it to make the testimonial feel more personal and relatable to potential clients.

Brand Your Business and Show Your Specialty

There is a lot that goes into branding of your business but don’t let it scare you. Branding is an evolving process but the basic ways you can get started is creating an identity and projecting your area of specialty. How do you create your business identity? You can start from having a Logo that appeals to your company ideal and projects the meaning of what you do, and stick with it. Design your business cards, your letter head templates, and other branded designs for your business that projects your identity. How do you create your brand by showcasing your specialty? You have to brand yourself as an expert in your business, and one way of doing that is managing a blog on your website. For example if you are a wordpress developer, clients will want to hire you when they identify you as an expert. To brand yourself as the expert, you could write blog posts about wordpress, write guest posts at other blogs that focus on wordpress, write a book or an e-book on the subject, speak at wordcamps or anything else that will help you demonstrate your knowledge and experience.

Be Proactive at Getting Clients and Customer Service

If you want to be pro-active in getting clients then you need to start cold calling. Cold calling is an art on its own but it is not hard to learn. You only need to demonstrate a high level of calmness while displaying a moderate level of persuasion. The aim of cold calling is to reach out to your target market for a follow up. Cold calling does not aim to start and close a deal. Having this in mind will make you not to be hesitant when you start cold-calling. Look for clients in your local area that needs your services and give them a call. Also email potential clients. If you reach out to the right people, you may be able to find some new clients this way.

If you want to maintain ongoing positive relationships with your clients, offer an on-going service and offer additional service (to your past and current clients). For example if you are a web designer, you could add a package that would provide clients with custom designed business card, stationery, letterhead, invoices, banners etc. You can offer on-going services like general website maintenance, social media management, web hosting, email marketing and anything else your client will need on a regular basis.

Follow up with past clients. If you want to stay busy with client work then follow up with past clients and identify ways to help them if they have any issues. It also does not hurt to offer them free consultations on how they can improve on their current business.
If you want to make quick sales due to market gluts at certain occasions you will need to run a limited time discount. Use this method when you don’t have enough work and you need some income quickly. You could also consider promoting discounts to past clients.

Help clients to identify and overcome objections. Some clients can be slow to take action in order to make your work bump free. Therefore you have to make an effort to identify the objections that are holding up the work and work out ways to overcome them. If the cost of the service is the objection, show the client how the service will benefit his business and make more sales for him to offset the cost. Another great idea is to offer a smaller package which will be cost effective for the client.

Engage continual Social Media Management

In today’s world, social media is an important factor that can determine your business growth and financial success. Looking for your target audience? You can find them on social media. Seeking for clients quickly? Turn to social media. The problem here is that social media can be a distraction for many business owners because we cannot be too careful to spend too much time justifying the results of our social media activities as it is easy to lose track on social media. This is why smart business owners turn to social media managers to take up the work of promoting their business on social media. Effectively engaging your audience on social media requires strategic approach and a methodological process.

To basically get started, you have to set up profiles at major social networks. Find one or two that are the best fit with your target audience and dedicate most of your resources and time there. For proper branding on social media, you have to design custom graphics for your profiles and also showcase your work through your profiles for example you can use pinterest to create boards for different types of projects that you do. Another effective way to create engagement is by running a contest. People flock to contest in their numbers hoping to win something at the end. Using that influx to promote your business by the side can be a great way to bring more people to your business. You can also promote your blog posts through social media by using automation and post scheduling services.

Run effective Email Marketing Campaigns

“Money is in the List”. No matter what your target audience is all about and no matter your niche and industry, this saying is always true, that the money is in the list. You should be able to set up an email collection tool on your website in the mold of an opt in form. Do you have a free giveaway, useful newsletters etc to give out to your website visitors and potential clients? Then put an opt in form on your website where they will sign up on to receive what you are offering. Doing this will enable you to collect email addresses while offering incentives for people to subscribe.

You will have to set-up an autoresponder sequence that will have to send emails regularly to people in your list. Send at least 1 or 2 emails per month to stay in touch with your list. You can also send updates about completed work, screenshots of projects you are working on and links to testimonials and case studies of work already done. Mention new services and options to your list.

Always ask for Referrals

Do not be shy to ask your current and past clients for referrals. Ensure you have contact name and information of potential clients from referrals. You can ask for a referral from your client at the beginning of your work for him and also ask at the end of your project. You can also ask for referrals from friends and family. In order to get ongoing referrals you have to stay in touch with your clients, because it will make it much easier to ask for referrals when your client feels you always have them in mind. Another way you can get referrals is by exchanging with businesses that are offering complementary services for example someone who does SEO may be able to refer clients to you for your web design services, and then you could refer clients to them for SEO services.

This list is no doubt exhaustive as there are many other tips that can help your business survive the long haul but I’m confident that the above golden nuggets will bring more desired success for your business if you follow it judiciously and innovate on the ideas.

Written by Jerry Asemota, @http://brilliantlightsmedia.com/small-businesses-need-survive-grow/

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