Looking professional is important in the business world, super important. After all, would you trust a guy to fix your roof if he showed up without a ladder and a tool-belt? Would you trust a dentist who is using a barber chair and plastic, toy drill? There are certain signals we pick up on as consumers of goods and services that mark a product as quality. Basically, we judge things at the surface-level as to whether they are worth investing our valuable time and money in.
“Confidence breeds trust, and trust is the very first step to converting an on-the-fence buyer.”
For your own business, the more professional you look, the more confidence a potential customer will have in you and your products. Confidence breeds trust, and trust is the very first step to converting an on-the-fence buyer. Unfortunately for the old-school business owner, professionalism can no longer be proven simply by having a business card or storefront. Today’s entrepreneurs must be adept at juggling many marketing and business activities — the proverbial “many hats” — in order to take advantage of the landscape. Fortunately for the new-school business owner (ie. you, you clever person you), being a polymath is easier and more-accessible than ever.
Branding
I love Urdu, my parents’ native language, because there are many words in its lexicon that can convey entire concepts, emotions, or philosophies in a single expression. “Brand” is one of those words that exist in English, it resists concrete and empirical definition and yet you can say, without a doubt, that Coca-Cola is an extremely effective world brand.
But don’t let language barriers limit your creative intelligence. A strong brand should illustrate your business’ culture and story in an effective, consistent way. For Coca-Cola, their strong message of happiness and celebration created a colloquial and made their brand synonymous with the experience they created, “Drinking a Coke”. Here are two extremely feasible changes you can make to enhance the quality of your brand.
1. Review your color scheme
Color influences the way we perceive the world and the way we feel about life. Color conveys emotions implicitly before any words are spoken. Use this to your advantage in sending your core message. Choose colors that match the personality of your business and the product you sell. Your goal is to effectively communicate your brand. Not an artist? No worries, try http://coolors.co for countless crowdsourced color palettes. A good rule-of-thumb is to have 1–3 complementing colors that go well with white and black. Consistently use these colors in your marketing and company representation so people clearly identify your brand with your unique color palette.
2. Redesign your logo
Picture someone you love, what is the first thing you see? Chances are it is a mental picture of their face. Faces are what we identify people by. In the same way your logo is the face of your business, probably the first thing people think of when they hear your company name. Like colors, you want to make something evocative. A good starting point would be considering flat design. Flat design is a popular trend that tends toward simple, representational imagery. This is in contrast to skeuomorphism, which tries to emulate real-world textures, often at the cost of readability. Having a professional re-do your logo may be cheaper than you think. Check out freelance and crowdsourced design websites like Designcrowd, Fiverr, and Upwork.
Messaging
Now that you’ve revamped your company image it’s time to work on your brand accessibility and positioning. Today’s world is ripe with marketing channels with which to send your company’s core message to a worldwide audience. Social media has given small businesses the ability to reach out to potential customers on a personal level, as well as access to deep analytics and behavioral pattern data. This is a great boon for your average business, take advantage of this rich online landscape.
3. Go Wide
There are countless platforms on which people work, interact, and entertain themselves. Your job as a company is to position yourself on the platforms your most likely customers will be using. This approach of “going to the customer” on their terms is a fundamental paradigm shift in economics, and the quick adopters will be sure to profit. Show up where your audience is hanging out, in a way that is valuable to them. For example, a florist might post beautiful arrangements to Instagram with notes in the description on the flowers’ background and bouquet design choices. Said social media-savvy florist would hashtag his/her images with tags commonly used in-industry to effectively reach those who would be most interested.
4. Go Deep
The social media-savvy florist in our story made great choices in his/her marketing strategy. Besides platform selection, one of the best decisions was posting native, quality, relevant content. Being native to a platform means utilizing it in a effective way according to its attributes. For instance, Medium is better for long-form posts while Twitter is better for quick, real-time communication due to the way their respective UX’s are built. Do your research on what constitutes good content, and tailor a content strategy based on the unique qualities of your business and the platform you are using.
5. Go Back to Thine Web Admin
While your social media profiles will adapt to each platform, your website is where you get to express yourself on your own terms. Having a professional looking website means paying special attention to UI design, loading speed, mobile responsiveness, and SEO. A good web designer will do more than just pack a bunch of JavaScript animations as “eye catchers”, they will build a great experience with lots of backlinks and strong calls-to-action to convert visitors.
Customer Experience
Your business is nothing without customers who purchase your product. As a business owner, you can minimize churn and maximize the chance that people spread the word about you by building a customer experience. That is, creating a experience of finding, purchasing, and owning/using your product that is as responsive, transparent, and enjoyable as possible. This means finding and focusing on positive experiences and eliminating pain points.
6. Get Feedback, Act on It
In order to know what your customer wants or likes, you have to talk to them. Great companies share a love for customer feedback, they use the feedback constructively to build better experiences. There are many online services that easily let you send out feedback surveys and automatically track results. My personal recommendation is Typeform, although you can use whatever service you like. Once you have results, study and look for similarities and differences in your customer experiences. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: where can you make life easier for them? Instate company-wide procedures to address the good and bad points, and resurvey after a period of time. Consider fully outsourcing your results to a specialists or SaaS to further optimize your purchase funnel. The best companies are constantly learning and evolving, don’t be one of the one’s left behind.
Closing
“I think I see some themes here…”
The tips I’ve presented here stretch across the various layers of your business. There are, however, going to be some motifs common to all of them. The single most important one is considering your customer. For example, when creating a brand and logo, you want to consider what would attract your customers; moreover, when you’re marketing to your customers, you need to consider where your customers are and what kind of content they will respond to. Adhering to these principles will impart your business with an air of professionalism, efficiency, and capability of a company with far greater resources. It’s not lying, it’s just business.
Coming soon…a new gold standard for managing your company: Gold CRM
Yousuf Hussain
Guest Blogger
The Com.unity Co.
