7 Tips for Building Your First Business Website

In this day and age, businesses cannot afford not to have a website in order to operate effectively. Regardless of what products or services you sell, there will be many customers who will only purchase from you after they have checked your website or blog. In many ways, having a website for your business is just as necessary as having a business card, because without either one you may not seem perfectly legitimate.

If you’ve never had to put together a business website before, it’s important that you know the fundamentals of what to do so you don’t walk into it blindly:

Cover the Basics

First and foremost, you’ll want your website to cover all of the basics such as the name and brand logo of your company, your contact information, an ‘about us’ page, directions to your retail location, and so on.

Communicate How You Can Help The Customer

The reason a person is visiting your website in the first place is because they are seeking a product or service they hope will fix a problem of theirs. Therefore, rather than use your website just to inform the customer of what kinds of products you sell, focus your attention on how your products will help or benefit them.

3 Reasons Why You Still Need Print Media for Your Business

If you own a small business you are probably juggling everything from managing your daily operations, to hiring, payroll, marketing, and managing your team. If you have a physical brick and mortar store, a consulting firm, an online business or a service-based business you also know how important social media marketing is to driving business and traffic to your website. As we move into the new year, social media will become even more large scale as studies have shown that it drives consumer buying decisions at ever increasing rates.

While social media is extremely important, remaining an omni-channel business is the way to go in today’s competitive business climate. You don’t want to put all your focus into the digital space and lose your human element. Having an advertisement in printed marketing materials and print media is still something that many customers and clients respond to. From leaflets and flyers, to business cards, and to high quality presentation boxes and more, print media marketing is highly relevant to business today, especially for the reasons below.

Effective for Specific Geographic Areas

If you are a local business owner and you are looking to promote a specific event or promotion for your business, advertising in local magazines and newspapers is the way to go. You will be attracting a highly-targeted group of local returning clients as well as potential new clients that may be able to attend your event or take part in your promotion by coming into your store. This is also cost effective for you as a business owner because you are not wasting time or money reaching people that are out of range from a geographic perspective.

8 Secret Elements to Success in Retail Business

Retail business is in many ways very similar to any other kind of business. You are looking to draw in as many people as possible, keep them there by delivering a top-notch service, and hopefully encourage them to tell their friends and families, in the hope that they will do the same. In many ways, retail has it even easier than some other kinds of business. After all, you are looking at a physical shop, and it is often much easier to get people to walk into your shop than to get them to come to another kind of business. Of course, it is not all rose-tinted – retail also has its own set of unique challenges. In this article, we are going to focus solely on the shopping experience itself. It goes without saying that we want this to be as good as possible for our customers – but how do we actually go about achieving that? Let’s take a look at some of the things we need to do to make the shopping experience more memorable and enjoyable for our customers.

Engage

You might have already heard of the concept of engagement; put simply, it is the process by which the customer services staff interact positively, playfully, with the customers. For retail businesses, engagement begins the moment that the customer steps inside the door. From the word go, you want to be sure that they feel welcomed and as though they are a part of things. You achieve this simply by training your employees to respond positively to the customer the moment they step through the door. Engagement can sound quite cold on the face of it, but it is actually a normal, human process when it is done properly. Engage with your customers, and they will feel happier to be there straight away.
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