Collaborative post
Using Your Site To Look Like More Than A Small Biz
It may be true that you could be relatively new to the business world, perhaps still trying to balance motherhood with entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t mean that your customers have to know that. Small businesses, especially home businesses, face enough of a stigma that it can legitimately make it tougher for them to win over customers who believe they might not be “big enough” or “established enough” to offer the quality of product and service that they’re looking for. Here, we’re going to look at how you can use your website to position your business a little better. Instead of looking at you as a small business, they can just see you as a business.
Use a professionally designed website
First of all, you should take a look at your website and then look at the websites of some of your other competitors. Does yours look a little amateur by comparison? You might not be able to pay for the bespoke imagery and custom-designed graphics that other websites might use, but you can at least make sure that your site doesn’t look like it was made a decade ago. The single best way to do that is to find the website builder that works best for you and learn how to use it if you aren’t able to put the budget into working with a web designer. There are plenty of builders that are relatively easy to use, thanks to drag-and-drop tools, but that will look much better than what you might be able to cobble yourself, otherwise.
Social media
Small businesses can use social media to appear more professional and larger than they are by maintaining a consistent and polished presence across all platforms. This includes using high-quality images, engaging and well-written content, and a cohesive brand voice. Regularly updating profiles with relevant industry news, customer testimonials, and behind-the-scenes glimpses can also build credibility. Engaging with followers through comments, messages, and interactive content like polls and Q&A sessions can foster a sense of community and professionalism. Utilising features like Instagram Stories, Facebook Lives, and LinkedIn articles can further enhance the brand’s visibility and authority, making the business seem more established and reputable.
Another helpful way to boost your follower count is to purchase followers on various social media platforms. There are plenty of effective ways to buy Instagram followers through Twicsy, with the same going for other platforms, and these methods are worth considering if you’re just starting out. They’re a quick way to grow one’s online presence and can be particularly useful for improving your brand’s visibility in the early days. This will not only help you to sell more of your products but also help you to get the ball rolling and gain even more followers as time goes on, allowing you to build real connections with your audience.
Use quality imagery
As mentioned, you might not have the budget to pay for your own photoshoot and to create images that are wholly unique to your brand. However, there are stock photography websites that you can peruse to find the images that represent what your brand is aiming for. This is especially useful if you don’t have any products that you can photograph, yourself. Do keep in mind that a lot of stock photo websites will require payment if you want to use the photos there for commercial purposes, but it’s a much cheaper investment when compared to how much you would have to spend to create your own photos with the help of a professional photographer.
Get your own logo
One of the key identifiers of any business, you should make sure that you have a logo. After all, your competitors are likely to have their own. Images stand out a lot more than words alone, so having your logo positioned proudly at the top of the site can create some real brand recognition. It doesn’t have to be super expensive to get a logo designed, either. There are plenty of graphic designers available on freelancing boards and, while you don’t want to go for the cheapest of the cheap, you can definitely find the help that you need at a price point that suits you.
Mind your language
When you talk about your business, what it can do for your customers, and how you work, you should be mindful of the choice of words you use to do so, especially when it comes to pronouns. Instead of talking as yourself with “I” and “me,” you should start communicating as your business. “What we do,” “how we can help,” “get in touch with us,” and so on. It’s a little less personal but it gives the idea of the brand talking directly to the customer rather than any one individual.
Be there to help
One of the hallmarks of a professional business is fantastic customer service. You might think that you don’t have the team on hand to man the phones all day and that might be true, but you might not need that to provide prompt and helpful service. With the use of tools like a chatbot integrating into website, you can use a chat window to quickly pop up and offer help automatically to any customers who are using their site. Then, an AI will use customer browsing data as well as the information you provide to offer the best responses to the most common questions. If there are questions that are too tough for the AI to answer, you can hop into the chat yourself to take it from there.
Consider whether the local approach is for you
Now, this isn’t so much a direct piece of advice, so much as it is a question as to who you want to reach with your website. If your business is based locally and you want to build up local customers, whether it’s because you visit people to provide services or they come to you to buy your products, you might want to focus on keeping things like your town/location a focus of your communications. If you’re doing business purely online, however, and want a wider reach, then you should be thinking globally. This can involve making sure that you don’t use your location too much in the text and content of your site, and perhaps even changing your business name if it’s tied to your location.
Consider a dedicated phone number
As a small business owner, you might not want to give out your real business contact details if you’re running it from your own home. However, it can be important for your customers to be able to get in contact or even to see that there are ways to reach you if they would need to. It can build trust in the business showing that you are, in fact, legitimate and available to reach. To that end, you might want to end up paying the fee to get a business number that they can call. You can even set this up so that this number isn’t connected to a real phone, but a virtual phone, so that you can answer it via both smartphone and on your PC or laptop.
A physical address might work, too
As with a virtual phone number to replace your real number, you can also get a physical address to replace your home address. The benefits are the same, highlighting trust in the business without spreading your personal details online. You can get a physical office address that not only means that you can position yourself as a more established business, but also allows you to actually pick up any mail that comes your way, which can be especially vital for businesses that might need to allow for product returns.
Could a virtual assistant help you manage it?
Having those contact details available can be very valuable for your online brand, but what about when people start getting in contact? If it’s just you manning the business, then it might be difficult to keep the phone lines open while also trying to run things. To that end, you might want to look at the possibility of working with a virtual receptionist or a virtual assistant. A virtual receptionist will typically help by answering calls, taking messages, or providing answers that you have already prepared for the more basic questions. Virtual assistants can do all of that but also typically help with admin work such as scheduling and more.
Keep up with the content
Content is one of the key drivers of traffic, nowadays. If you can create content that answers a question, is informative, helpful, newsworthy, or otherwise valuable, and link it to your brand, products or services, then you are helping to maintain a very important part of your marketing funnel. However, with content, it needs to be frequent or your website will start to look out of date relatively soon. You can create a schedule to write and publish your own related content or you might want to look at content writing services that can take care of it for you. Also, make sure you create a video that will be a part of your content. Videos are always appealing and engaging.
Keep in touch
If you’re updating your website with content, adding new products, or otherwise updating your services, then you want to make sure that your repeat customers and those who are most interested are able to keep up with these changes easily. Just as there are tools to create professional-looking websites by dragging and dropping elements, there are tools that make it just as easy to create great-looking email campaigns with roughly the same amount of effort and skill. These emails should be a reflection of your website, incorporating its branding and visual style, adapted for a form that’s designed to be much more easily digestible. You can ask your customers to opt-in for emails, monthly or otherwise, that outline the new content on the site, new products to look at, or anything else that’s newsworthy, increasing the chances that they will click back onto your site and perhaps even increase their lifetime customer value.
You don’t need to lie to your customers about your business, simply use the prestige and convenience of a larger company to let them come to their own conclusions. The quality of your products and services will be the true measure of what you can do.