3 Ways to Improve Your Business

So you’ve established your business, but you want to make it even better. Running a small business is all about constantly evolving alongside your market, so it’s good to always be on the lookout for ways to grow your business. There are plenty of aspects of business you can choose to focus on, but to improve your business overall, there are three main areas that you can focus on: your website, your customer experience, and your finances.

1. Improve Your Website

In the digital age, your website is likely to be the main place customers get access to your business. For businesses in the e-commerce industry, having an effective website is even more vital. It’s important to have a quality website in order for you to best connect with potential/existing customers and not fall behind within your industry. Here are some tips to creating the best possible website:

• Optimize your website for search engines: Getting your website to appear higher up in search results means you can gain access to more customers. Although most search engines closely guard the exact methods they use to determine rankings, there are some strategies you can utilize in order to get your website to rank higher in searches. While some businesses may choose to pay for higher rankings in search results, search engine optimization (SEO) can help generate traffic to your website for free. Creating blog posts, utilizing specific keywords, and getting other sites to link back to your landing pages are only some of the ways to improve your site’s SEO.
• Improve website navigation: A lot of effort can go into creating a website, so you want to make sure customers actually know exactly what to do once they get there. Have your webpages well organized in a sitemap that is easy to access. Keep your menu options clear and obvious in order to optimize the navigation experience. Having a simple site navigation process can increase the number of people that are able to utilize your site and drive up business.
• Polish overall design: Your website is a reflection of your business, so you want it to look nice! Use high quality visuals, branding colors, and a modern design to keep your website aesthetically pleasing. Improving your website visually is an easy way to improve public perception of your business.
• Enhance user experience: In order to optimize the user expeirence of your site, you need to ensure that your website is functioning effectively. One of the most important aspects of user experience on a website is loading times. Research has found that 40% of shoppers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Don’t lose out on business because of a slow website! Make sure that your business’s site is efficient in its loading in order to decrease the number of customers that click away.
• Add calls to action: After viewing your content, visitors of your site need to know what steps to take next. A call to action (CTA) tells customers how to contact you and take the next steps, whether that’s scheduling a call or ordering a product. Make your CTAs bold and straightforward so that potential customers are more likely to act on them.
• Track website analytics: The online space is constantly evolving and trends move can quickly. Digital tools such as Google Analytics can help you get access to important data about the performance of your website. Utilize this kind of data to monitor your progress and make necessary improvements so that your website is always up to date.

2. Improve Your Customer Experience

Having a loyal consumer base is essential to a business’ success. To build up customer loyalty, you need to ensure that customers have a good overall experience. Here are some ways that you can make make sure you’re prioritizing your customers:

• Listen to feedback: The best way to know what your customers want from you is to hear it from them directly! Asking for feedback from customers can inform you of what your business is doing successfully and help you pinpoint aspects of your business that need to be improved.
• Create a seamless experience across channels: Your website, app, ads, social media, etc. should all be consistent in order to ensure a seamless experience for customers. Information about your business should be clear and easily accessible to anyone seeking it out.
• Provide multiple resource options: When customers have issues, it should be easy for them to solve them. The easiest way to do this is by having customer service readily available, but it’s also helpful to have resources that customers can access outside of business hours as well, such as chat bots or other self-guided resources.
• Personalize customers’ experience: Customers want to work with companies who they feel understand their needs. Using customer data to provide tailored product recommendations or content is a great way to personalize the customer experience.
• Anticipate customer needs: Don’t just wait for issues to arise– try to anticipate them. Analyzing data and trends to be proactive in your work is a great way to impress customers and better their experience overall.

3. Improve Your Finances

It’s one thing to be making money, it’s another to know how to maintain it. By bettering your financial knowledge and utilizing the best financial tools, you can set up your business to grow and succeed. Here are some ways you can better manage your finances:

• Open a small business checking account: The first step to getting any financial success in your business is to create a dedicated business checking account. Separating your personal and business finances makes other financial processes like bookkeeping or budgeting much easier. Business checking accounts also come equipped with tools that are specifically developed to make business transactions easier. Some of these tools include online bill pay, ACH transfers, eStatements, and more.
• Create a budgeting plan: Knowing how to create a budget can help you make sure your business is spending money wisely and keep you out of debt. When done properly, a budget can help your business forecast your expected earnings, identify unnecessary expenses that can be cut, and highlight places where funds can be reinvested. For help creating a budget plan of your own, check out our small business budgeting guide.
• Automate your bookkeeping: Bookkeeping is an integral part of the accounting process and there is a large opportunity for mistakes if you’re still doing your bookkeeping manually. Accounting software can do your bookkeeping for you, taking away the hassle of bookkeeping on your own. With an Innovator Business Checking account, your data can be seamlessly integrated into Quickbooks, one of the most popular accounting softwares, which can automate the process for you.
• Consider lending options: You may find that your business needs an extra boost in its finances. In that case, getting a loan may be a good option for your business. Grasshopper’s SBA Lending Team can be a great resource for small business owners looking to take out a loan. Our team is composed of experts that know exactly what small businesses need and are always ready to help.

Running a successful business means always looking for new ways to improve. Keeping these kinds of topics in mind can help to guide you on your journey upwards!

Running a successful business means always looking for new ways to improve. Keeping these kinds of topics in mind can help to guide you on your journey upwards!