Five Methods for Making Your Startup Business Look More Professional

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Startup|Five Methods for Making Your Startup Business Look More ProfessionalIn order to lead your startup business to success, it needs to look professional from the very beginning. Professionalism will be the difference between drawing clients in or pushing them away.

Here are five key and simple methods to promote more of a professional image for your business.

1. Create a Business Email Address

If you’re an entrepreneur who is working at home or from a personal location without a team of staff, chances are you’re using a lot of your current personal information to get things moving, which might include your own personal email address.

Even if your personal email address is nondescript, such as just your name, it still reveals what it is: that you’re a startup using personal information.

Instead, form a new business email address as soon as you can, ideally one which includes the business name or something generic such as ‘contact@businessname’. It’s a simple task, but it can make your correspondence seem significantly more professional.

2. Design an Impressive Website

When researching a new business or product, most people turn to an official website first. Your business can be judged within a matter of seconds based on what your website has to offer and how it appears. A professional website could be the difference between a visitor remaining and browsing, or clicking the exit button straight away.

First impressions count, especially for a start up business, so you need the first impression of your website to be an excellent one. If you’re unsure where to start, you can consult with professional web design in Lichfield and have experts help you develop it.  Alternatively, you can outsource your entire website build to a website development company.

3. Get a Separate Business Line

This means either a direct landline for your business, or having your current cell phone number fitted with a second line. This means that you can answer business-related calls professionally with a formal greeting, and keep your personal calls separate with an informal ‘hello’. To answer a business call informally can make you seem unprofessional.

4. Keep on Top of Invoicing and Payments

Correct and prompt invoicing simply screams professionalism. Invoices which are missed or incorrect will make your accounting system seem undependable and shoddy. It can be difficult to keep on top of accounting when you’re a startup, especially if you are doing everything else and finance isn’t your forte, but it’s important to set up a system which works for you. Scheduling and reminders will be a huge help, and you can easily download invoice templates to fill out accordingly.

This can also help you to keep on track with payments owed to you, to ensure that clients don’t try to delay payment or ignore them entirely.

5. Create a Social Media Presence

After checking out your business website, the next port of call for consumers will be your social media profiles. If you don’t have any, this can seem strange within the current online climate.

Even if you create a very basic, professional profile on each social media platform, it still shows that you’re present online and that you care about getting involved with social media. You can always add to and build your profiles later.

How to Kickstart Your SEO Strategy in Eight Easy Steps

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |SEO Strategy|How to Kickstart Your SEO Strategy in Five Easy StepsSearch Engine Optimization offers multiple benefits. The first is within the name – you want your website to appear at the top of certain search engine results. The added benefits, however, include a website that is cleaner, easier to use, and more enjoyable as a whole, as well as content that is more compelling and easy to read.

All of this and more can be enjoyed when you invest in a comprehensive SEO strategy because nowadays SEO is not just for search engine algorithms, it’s for people.

Though each SEO strategy will be unique to your company, it will go through several steps, and you can copy these for your own business and kickstart your strategy today:

Have Your Website Audited

Every website needs to be audited for performance on a regular basis. For high-performing websites, this should be done every three or so months. For others, bi-yearly or annually will do.

Improve the Technical SEO on Your Website

The audit will provide you a guide map on what you need to improve. Before you focus on the content, it is important to improve the technical elements. The site speed, security, page structure – all of these elements are essential to improve beforehand. Making these changes might change the page layout, which is why you will want to wait until after the technical improvements are made before updating the content.

Create Special Pages for Your Business

One of the content changes you will likely have to make (especially if this is your first time improving the SEO of your business) is to create specialized pages.

Location Pages

If your business has multiple locations, or if it serves multiple areas around your business’s location, you will want to create individual location pages. This is great for local SEO.

Service Pages

Alternatively, if you offer multiple services or even product types on your website for sale, then having individual pages with optimized, quality content is key.

FAQ

Voice search is becoming increasingly popular, and a great way to capitalize on voice search is to create an FAQ page in question and answer format.

Optimize your SEO for Local Search

Local SEO is very similar to standard SEO, and up until this point, you will have gone through the same steps as you would regardless of whether you are internet-based (and sell software, for example) or you are location-based.

If you are location-based as many small businesses are, it is now time to focus on local SEO. Have a local SEO agency near you set up your NAP (name, address, phone number) listings, create and optimize your Google My Business, and customize your link building efforts around local media. Local search is far more effective due to the reduction in competition, but you will need specialists to guide you through to success.

Build Your Backlink Profile

Your backlink profile can be built through multiple methods, but all methods must be done using white-hat tactics. Rely on your SEO agency to provide this service for you, and to create the optimized content that will feature your backlink. Doing this the right way will boost organic traffic and your search engine ranking.

Improving The Sales In Your Business And How You Can Do It

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Improving The Sales In Your Business And How You Can Do It

When it comes to your business, one of the most important aspects of it is sales. It doesn’t matter whether you have products to sell, services that you can make money from, or even if you are predominantly trying to help people with your business and what you do, you sell something, and those sales need to be consistent in order for your business to thrive and continue to grow. Having said that, is there anything you can do to improve the sales in your business? Here are some suggestions.

Having a plan and performance management

Many entrepreneurs and business owners won’t go into their business bling. Initially there will be some sort of business plan forged, and an idea and goals you want to achieve. But, it is also important to have some plan in place for your sales and how you move the business forward daily, and not just thinking out into the future. The thing you need to think about is sales management.

Is your website doing its job?

Your website is one of those things that we can often take for granted as business owners, so it may be time to ensure that your website is not killing your business in the online world. You want your website to be responsive, but also informative, with just the right amount of images and content to appeal to your online customers. You will also want to ensure that all background software for data capture and management is up to date, and this is when you may want to have in the background a data recovery system to protect you and your customers. You can read more about how that could help online. Lastly, make sure that your shop is up to date in terms of stock levels and pricing. Disappointing customers does not give you the best platform to begin with.

Exploring all avenues

There will always be avenues that you haven’t explored yet, and more commonly for businesses these days that happens to be your local area. There is a huge shift of focus with the consumer at the moment, and many customers are more aware of their buying choices and are choosing to shop locally and support independent and small businesses. Do people locally know about your business? You could be the only business supplying in your area, and this could be a huge thing for you to boost those all-important sales.

Are you making the most of your social media presence?

Social media is huge for businesses these days, and so you should never underestimate how much you can boost your sales by placing a bit more focus on this area. When it comes to social media, you need to be consistent and engaging, but you also need to be aware of the type of content you are sharing and how that can affect your business. It is things such as the type of images you share versus the quality of the content. It might be worth spending some time to revalue your social media strategy to ensure you are doing all that you can for your business.

Let’s hope these tips help you when it comes to your business and boosting sales.

Don’t Have Your Own Website Yet? These 5 Arguments Will Make You Reconsider

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Don't Have Your Own Website Yet? These 5 Arguments Will Make You Reconsider

The online world has become lucrative for businesses of all sizes and localities. When looking at the sheer number of businesses with websites, it might be shocking to find out that some businesses have yet to go digital.

If your business has not opened a website, the time to do it is now. There are several business-friendly reasons to start your own website. Once you are ready to go, let Decisive Sites help with the entire process.

1. Everyone is Online

Nearly everything is online today. Consider the size of social media platforms and the growing reach of online banks. The immense amount of people are either watching or creating a streaming video on the Internet. If your business isn’t there, you are missing out on opportunities that you might have never considered.

Without a website, your business does not exist online. No one can find you and no one can add to your coffers. Everyone is missing out if your business isn’t available to an online audience.

2. The Internet Never Closes

If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, your business most likely has limited hours. Yes, there are some businesses that are open 24-7, but they require expensive staffing during that time. This isn’t necessarily the case with a website. The Internet never closes, so your online business would be available to anyone at any time. You don’t have to be online if someone wants to buy something from your site. You could wake up in the morning and deal with sales then. But, if you don’t have a website, your sales can only happen when your doors are open.

3. It’s Cheap to Make and Maintain a Site

Websites are not expensive to run. You can get started for much less than you expect. Of course, you can always upgrade to bigger and better things. But, to get started, you don’t need much. It is just as cheap to maintain the site, too. Business owners can do it, or you can hire someone to do that for you. Business owners quickly realize that their website is worth every penny, especially when they start seeing sales add up. As well as being fairly cheap, it’s also very easy to maintain your website as long as you choose the right provider. There are numerous debates surrounding Squarespace vs Wix, but it’s really up to you to see which you prefer. They both offer simplistic, but professional templates that will make your website user friendly and effective.

4. Your Reach Grows

If you have a mom-and-pop shop in your community, your reach is rather small. But, once you open up a website, your reach can grow exponentially. Customers in other states and countries can find you and place orders. This can be an exciting prospect for many business owners.

5. Your Customer Demographics Grow

Along with growing your reach, you can grow your customer demographics. With a website, you make yourself available to people who shop online. Your brick-and-mortar shop might have a customer demographic that is older in age, as older people tend to frequent local shops. But, once you open up a website, your business immediately attracts a younger demographic, simply because young people use the internet. If you can make your website design mobile-phone friendly, then you are certain to grow your demographics to a younger customer base.

How Digital Marketing Can Help You Get Sales

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, How Digital Marketing Can Help You Get SalesIf you boil marketing down to its crux, it is simply the art of finding potential customers and explaining to them why they might find your product or service valuable. There are two components to this: the location of leads and then the skill of convincing explanation. If you consider the first point for any length of time, you will realize that in the modern climate you will find more leads online than at any other location. This means that in order to market effectively in 2019, you need to have an online digital marketing strategy. There are a myriad of things to consider when you plan your strategy, like getting the right automated marketing reporting software and planning campaigns that will grab your target audience’s attention.

Is it Right for You?

The answer is probably yes. If you’re a small business that sells a service or a product, even if you don’t sell this through an online shop, you will likely benefit from digital marketing. More than 81% of all shoppers research a product or service online before they commit to a purchase, and who can blame them? If you have a trustworthy online presence you will find your leads will be more open to hearing your pitch. Digital marketing is also so versatile it can suit many technical ability levels. It ranges from SEO techniques such as PPC to creating content to simply being active on social media. What’s more, according to www.diydigitalstrategy.com it can be done without needing to rely on expensive marketing companies for their pricey help. They can show you how anybody with a computer and a business can market online.

How does it drive sales?

Digital marketing drives sales through many different means.

  • It allows you to reach more people. This should be obvious, as the internet can connect you to almost anybody that can access a computer, but digital marketing has evolved to enable you to reach many more people in your area than traditional marketing.
  • People of all ages and demographics use the internet, but some will be more biased to certain apps or sites. You can take advantage of the heavily localized offerings of Google Adsense or Facebook or even Snapchat (consider working with Snapchat marketing agencies as you can create a filter in the area you’re targeting if you want to get kids talking about your business).
  • Social media marketing also allows you to build relationships with customers that you may never have been able to build before. You can quite literally now send a message directly into the Facebook inbox of a customer (something that’s normally reserved for friends) to check how they enjoyed your product. This is incredibly valuable as it cements your brand as caring and also associates it with the idea of being a friend.
  • Even if you don’t have time to message every customer on Facebook, simply having a social media presence can increase your sales by 5% on average.
  • You can also collect data based on how users of your website act and check how often they make purchases as well as which areas of the website they prefer. Rich data allow you to create a highly personal digital journey for your clients, and simply improving their personal online experience can be greatly beneficial to them.

Digital marketing should be on your mind a lot if you’re the operator of any business, especially as with a little research, you can do a lot yourself. Don’t be put off if you try it and don’t see immediate results – it takes time and consistency for your digital work to pay off, but when it does, you will hopefully see a substantial return on your effort and investment.