Christmas season is upon us and with it, the holiday spirit is rising. Everyone is feeling more motivated and more generous to spend money. In that respect, it’s the perfect timing to boost your online presence and get something in return. Therefore, let’s see what can be done in that area.
Put some makeup on your UI
Bring the jolly spirit to your business. That will not cost you money, rather your time. Whether you are in charge of your own UI or you are using an external service, it is the first step you should take. If you are not web design savvy, make sure to hire experts. This is especially important when you need a very particular business domain, such as oil and gas web design. If someone can do it well, you should use the opportunity. Your UI is the inviting factor to all your customers, old and new. This is why it is key that the design is fetching and enticing. Once you get your audience hooked, you would be halfway there. The rest is just providing the service that you normally provide, and you do it well.
Revise and upgrade the content
This is a completely internal task, it is not costly, but it does require time and effort. This is something that should be done every once in a while with any digital presence of any business. Once you upgraded your UI, it is natural to also work on the content your users will read once they see the great design. So, make sure to comb through all your written and media content and rewrite everything that needs to be changed. Remove all unnecessary text, nobody had time to read pointless lines. Just get to the point as fast as possible. People will absolutely love this. Nobody likes their time wasted, especially in this day and age. If you make your content as concise as possible, your users will be grateful and more likely to recommend it to others. To you, it may seem like your website remained kind of empty, but minimalism is much desired in this context. Use plenty of white space and separate all logically distinct sections into paragraphs. This will make your content much more readable and easier to navigate.
Automate processes
Make life easier for yourself and your employees and try hard to relieve a part of the process. The idea is to automate everything that is repetitive and mechanical, i.e. things you can do in auto-pilot mode. This includes order confirmations, sending special offers and discounts, sending information about delivery status and thank you emails for all orders. Instead of having humans do this, it is quite easy to make this automatic, thus relieving humans from such activities and leaving them more time to focus on more important tasks.
Personalize offers
Not only is it important to reach out to a new audience, but it is even more important to keep your old. Your regulars are the ones providing you with a steady income and they should be valued and appreciated for it. There are several ways you can value your customers’ loyalty. One of them is definitely giving special offers and discounts. You can have a free purchase for every five purchases. Moreover, you could give bigger discounts to loyal customers. If you send personalized offers that match the interest of your users, it will make them feel like you know them well and you care. These are reasons people choose to stay with a certain business. This does not ask for a lot of money, you simply need a good system to keep track and use automation to help you. At first, it can be done manually, but in time, make sure to automate as much as you can. Hopefully, you will have many loyal customers and it will become extremely challenging to keep track of all of them manually.
Explore the competition
Confidence is good, but just a bit of self doubt can’t hurt either. On the contrary, one should always be aware of the competition. Simply, in order to move forward, you need to be aware of your place in the industry. This is why you should choose top five or ten businesses similar size and same domain and see what they are doing well, and what could be better. This requires serious research, so do not take it lightly. You would need both pros and cons. This will help you realize whether you are moving in the right direction or not. It will help you understand what it is that you’re doing well and where some points of improvement are. Once you finish your research, writing everything down in charts and columns, you will havea great guide book or a business plan for the near future. Feel free to get inspired by the good things other businesses do and be proud of the bad things they do and you are handling well.
Advertise
Now that your design is nice and pretty, it’s time to bring in some new audience. This is where your marketing department comes in. In order to increase traffic, you need new people and the way to reach a new audience is through marketing. Whether you are in charge of your own marketing or you have your own department or employees, it is up to them to work on reaching out to your target audience. Social media advertising is probably the most efficient nowadays as it is fast and it easily reaches people when scrolling reels on Instagram or using some other social network.
If the marketing crew does a good job, you are in for a treat. Of course, given that you provided a good UI, quality content, as well as some sweet holiday discounts. Nobody will be able to resist using your services in that case.
In the end, the most important ingredient of success is good will and motivation to act. If you really want it, you will go for it. Stay goal-oriented, but also enjoy the ride. Try to be mindful of others, hire experts to advise you, but trust your instincts, too. Entrepreneurship is not easy, but the ones that truly love it will know how to handle it the right way.