Why Isn’t Your Business Profitable?
Running a successful, and profitable business takes time, hard work, and a lot of dedication. If your accountant has looked over your books, and you aren’t making a profit, you may be on the verge of giving up. Before you start thinking this way, consider these four important areas that most business owners neglect or do not implement properly.
Marketing
Printing business cards and mailing out postcards is one form of marketing, but it is not enough to spread the word about your business. The real power of marketing is found online. You need to invest in a quality website that clearly answers the customer’s questions immediately. It is important to then decide how you want to market the site. Are you planning to use social media, content marketing, and pay-per-click advertising? Create a local online presence to build your website and your online following. Claim your listing with Google +, Yelp, and other websites. These sites will allow you to list information about your company, and they include a map feature. This makes it easier for your mobile customers to find your business quickly and easily.
Set up Google analytics to find out what people are saying about your business, and which webpages they are viewing. This will help you to find the keywords that people are using to find your business. A website needs to be properly branded and include well-written content. Include calls to action, e-books, newsletters, and white papers to brand your website correctly. It is important to have a mobile-friendly website as a large majority of consumers are accessing websites from their smartphones.
Create marketing strategies around these keywords to establish your company as the source of information in the industry for those keywords. Use Google Alerts to track when people are mentioning your business as this will help you with social media marketing. Include share buttons on your website for customers to share recent content with their followers.
Your website is the key element of your complete marketing program. If you are not providing the customers with information they want, and you are not adding new content on a regular basis, you can easily lose your ranking.
Public Relations
One of the best SEO strategies is to create a compelling press release. When you have a well-written press release, it can result in word-of-mouth and quality backlinking. Reputation management is one of the largest aspects of public relations. A press release needs to provide your readers with something interesting that will get them to write an article about your company, or create a story about your business. Write multiple press releases that you target toward different industries. A press release for newspapers is different from the press release you send out to announce an event or gain links from other authority websites.
Creating relationships with journalists is a great way to help you clear up a PR problem if there is information about your company that is incorrect. Knowing the right journalists to talk to can help you clear up any problems with your company if you have misinformation that needs to be cleared up.
Use Google Alerts to find out when your company is mentioned, and to monitor what is said about your company. If you do not get the right information to your audience, you can have a difficult time convincing your customers to continue shopping from your organization. If there is a lot of poor information, it can sway new customers away from the company. This is why it is imperative to send out press releases when you have something to say. Pick the right strategy to target journalists, and schedule your announcements. Sending out new press releases is a great way to keep the public aware of your organization, and to make sure public opinion is positive. However, you do not want to send out too many press releases frequently as it can hurt your ability to make an impact when you do have a big announcement to talk about.
Social Media
Using social media is one of the best ways to grow your business, but you need to remain active with your social media accounts. Failure to post frequently, or respond to customer questions and comments can leave your followers with a sour opinion of your company as you have a profile that doesn’t interact with people. You need to give people a reason to follow your social media account. It is important to determine your goals with social media to receive the right response. What do you want to get out of social media?
When you create social media profiles, you need to make sure you can manage them. You need to evaluate your resources to know what you can handle, and where you will need help. If you do not have the right technical ability to stay in touch with your social media followers, hire someone who does have this experience.
To become successful with social media, post interesting information, and post often. Create profiles on several different social media accounts to generate interest from a large variety of customers. The people that spend the majority of their time on LinkedIn will expect something different from your customers that are on Twitter and Facebook. You are not just marketing to the audience with social media, you need to find out what your audience is looking for so you can provide them with content that is useful and personable. The goal is to get the customers to interact with you, and to get them to share the information you are posting.
A great way to get people to share your message with social media is by creating infographics and videos that are easy to share. You can generate a lot of buzz by creating a series of how-to videos that target customer questions. Post frequently, and give the readers a reason to click back to your website.
Content Strategy Management
Are you generating enough content to build credibility? Generating fresh content is one of the best ways to increase your website ranking, and build the traffic you need to stay in business. Far too many people spend time worrying about the next Google Penguin update that they forget to focus on promoting their website. It is important to look at the sites that are linking into your website. Are they quality links? Are they helping to build traffic? While this is important to SEO, the major element of marketing is in what you have to say.
Create a blog and educate your customers. Update your blog weekly or monthly if possible. It is important to blog when you have something informative to share with your customers. Give them a reason to come back to your blog to learn more. What attracts attention to your blog? What compels readers to share your content? Companies are finding success with content marketing by answering customer questions with in-depth articles. Take the time to share secrets with your customers that will benefit their life in some way. Content marketing not only comes down to the blog posts you upload, it includes the following:
PDFs
Whitepapers
Infographics
Video Marketing
Case Studies
Slide Presentations
Content Guides
Putting the right information out there to your customers will help to build your credibility and cement your name as the authority leader in the industry. Create relationships with other blog owners to ask them if they will share your blog content. These relationships can go a long way in building credible traffic for your blog.
Focusing on these four key areas can help to turn the tables and make your business successful. In just a few months, you will start to see a boost in your website rankings, and you will generate new leads that can improve your bottom line.
