Inject More Life Into Your Business

When it comes to giving your business the upper-hand over your competition, you need to have the best products and/or services to keep on trudging along.

No matter what product or service you offer, the New Year is a great time to take a look at your business model and how it stands out from competitors, if you are delivering quality customer service to your clients, how much advertising and marketing you are doing, and where you can improve things in 2016.

With that in mind, here are some key areas to focus on this year and beyond, making sure you stay in business for a long time to come.

Customers Come First

For starters, your customer service should always be first and foremost on your mind.

You can have the greatest product or service in the world, but if you have unhappy customers piling up one after the other, is that stellar product or service really going to matter at the end of the day?

Start by reviewing your customer service procedures, how you and your team respond to customer inquiries and even complaints, and what you can do to better improve upon the number of customers who are first-timers and don’t come back due to unhappiness.

Next, remind your team that the customer always is right (even if we all know that is not always the case).

Customers should be given (within reason) room to question and even complain to some degree when they take issue with your brand or how they’ve been treated. Not allowing them to do so will be a quick ticket to more than likely losing them permanently.

When reviewing customer service techniques, look at approximately how often you have customer-employee interactions that go beyond the normal sale of a product or service, what your employees do to answer their questions and/or concerns, and how approximately how many customers you have lost in 2015 as compared to previous years.

The bottom line is that whether you sell real estate, home furnishings and appliances, injection mold components, accounting services or any number of other items, make sure you are trending upwards in customers this year as compared to last, not going backwards.

Spread the Word About Your Brand

You also need to look at your advertising and marketing budgets, seeing where any cuts can be made or where you need to ramp things up moving forward.

On the advertising front, are you getting the most bang for your dollar with your current advertising initiatives? If not, see where you can get better results for your efforts.

Some businesses still find traditional advertising venues such as newspapers, magazines and even radio and TV to be good buys. Others, meantime, crossed over into online advertising a number of years ago, getting their brand out in front of millions of eyes.

On the marketing front, have you been active with mobile marketing in recent years?

More and more businesses have discovered that mobile marketing can be a big-time weapon for them in their efforts

If you have recently or plan to opt for mobility in your marketing plans, make sure that you don’t come across as just trying to cram a sale down someone’s throats.

Show the consumer how your brand can serve them better than any other company’s products or services, along with demonstrating why your customer service is second to none.

Lastly, how socially active are you with your brand?

If you are a company that tends to shy away from social networking, you are missing out on a world of free marketing and advertising.

Having formidable Twitter, Facebook, Instagram pages etc. gives your brand lots of recognition when done correctly.

With social media, you should be a regular, provide consumers with valuable information about your products and/or services (easy on the sales pitches), and come across as authoritative in your respective industry.

When you do this, you will be quite amazed and typically quite pleased at the results that come of this.

With the year still fresh and young, there is plenty of time to see where you need improvements to your brand and how you can go about making such changes, all the time increasing sales numbers and ultimately revenue along the way.