Customers and clients today have the power to find the best service at the click of a button. The internet has made it possible to expand beyond your neighborhood and your business. Due to this, quality and customer service are more crucial than they have ever been before. These new customers won’t be your neighbors, after all. They won’t have known you or your work for years. When it comes to expanding with the power of the internet, you need to ensure your business offers quality at every turn.
Revamping Your Website
While gaining an organic following on the Internet is difficult, it is not impossible. Further, it’s a necessity to doing good business. The quality of your website and your social sites will be judged by potential clients before they contact you. They want to see your work, they want to see how communicative you are, and so on. Just as it’s a big mistake not to be on the Internet as a business, it’s equally as much of a mistake to have a poor or ugly presence on the Internet.
The first step to revamping your presence online is with your website. You should have a custom domain name and a theme that highlights your business and your vision. There are thousands of themes available for sale out there, meaning you can find the perfect template. These templates are useful for those without extensive programming experience. In fact, you can get by and customize your website by yourself with, perhaps, a few inquiries into Google about HTML codes like how to justify text. For the most part, these themes come with built-in functions designed to help you create the perfect website for you.
You will want to compliment this website with real photos of your work. Don’t rely on stock photography – people want to see who they will be hiring. Have a “Meet the Team” page with photos of you and your employees and a blurb about who they are. Have photos in your gallery of your own products and your own projects. The more they see you, the more they can trust you. You will also want to have your friends and family to go through your new website. User experience plays a crucial role for the quality of your website, and you can easily miss out on links and even pages that are necessary if you aren’t careful.
Sprucing Up Your Digital Presence
Once your website is golden, it’s time to move on to other areas on the Internet. Your next stop will be to either revamp or create social media pages. Although social media is becoming increasingly hostile for business aiming to connect with users organically, it will be a necessary stop on becoming legitimate online. Keep these pages updated and keep marketing through them – either using free tactics or paying for targeted ads. You might get lucky and build a community of fans who like your work.
The content you post will matter as well. Posting just your products is fine, but posting interior design, or posting tutorial videos that show you creating your products is better. You want to create a narrative and provide value to your community. Do this, and you will have a group of potential clients as well as more free advertising.
Getting to the Top of Google
Having a great website and social presence is one thing, getting to the top of Google is another. You will have to rely on white-hat SEO techniques in order to increase your ranking on Google’s search results, as anything else will get you banned or even de-listed from Google entirely.
For local artisans like yourself, start with improving local search. You can start this off yourself by adding your business to local directories and even creating a press release for any upcoming news or fundraiser you hold and sending it out to local news agencies. From there, you can either hire an SEO agency to help you from there or try to get your product and business mentioned by magazines or other digital publications in your niche. Visit shows, start your own blog, and try to network with other content creators.
Ensuring Quality in Real Life
You can do everything right online, but if you don’t work hard on offering the same quality in your product and in your customer service you won’t get anywhere. That is because unhappy customers are more likely than any other to review, and those negative reviews will turn off potential customers. That’s why you need to ensure you have the best tools and that you have a high standard of finish on everything that you produce. Researching the best products to ensure quality may seem like a time-consuming exercise, but the results will be beneficial in the long term. If you run a business where craftsmanship and attention to detail are paramount, you would not run the risk of products of poor quality. Care and precision in any business, are needed to ensure the best results for customers. For example, if your ran a bar, ensuring the aesthetics within the establishment were fitting with the brand identity and overall style of the place would be essential. If you ran a carpentry business, ensuring the finest products were at your disposal to thus produce the best quality products for your paying customers, would be fundamental. Read more for a better understanding of what is available if this applies.
You will also want to adopt a stellar customer service policy. This means more than ensuring your clients are happy. It means responding to comments, questions, and private messages in a timely matter. The more helpful and dedicated you are to providing great service to everyone, the better your business will be for it.
Great customer service can be more valuable than the product you produce, but the only way you can truly become a hit is if you offer both. Offer discounts to your clients if they refer you to a new client, ask every happy customer to leave you a review before they leave, and so on. The more people like you, the more they will want to help you be a success, and word-of-mouth marketing and good reviews are two of the best ways to accomplish this.
The Secret is You
You are your business, and if your customers, clients, and even business partners like you, you will go far. Couple this personable customer service with key marketing tactics and professionalism, and you’ll have a strong company that will be sure to have consistent work.
