Make Your Business Bigger On The Outside With This Technology
When you’re running a small business, there’s one concept you should keep in mind. You need to make your company the opposite of a tardis. If you’re not familiar, the tardis is the police box that Doctor Who travels through space and time in. While on the outside it looks like an old-fashioned telephone box, on the inside, it’s massive. It has multiple rooms and at one point there’s the mention of a swimming pool. There are even episodes of the show where people get lost in the many halls of the tardis.
When you’re running a small business you don’t want it to be bigger on the inside and smaller on the outside. You want it to be big on the outside and smaller on the inside. What do we mean by this?
Essentially, we’re thinking about the impression that you create with your company on the market. When you are running a small business, you’re still going to be competing with the major players in an industry or sector. A small e-commerce website that sells garden tools will still be competing with Amazon where customers can get similar tools among other products. How can your business compete on such a massive playing field? You need to ensure that your business makes a big impression even if your budget and your company model as a whole is quite small. Here are some of the ways that you can achieve this goal.
Virtual Office
First, you should make sure that you think about using a virtual office. This is useful if you are running a home company or if you are running your business from a small address that isn’t going to create much of an impression. With a virtual office, you can make it seem as though your business is being run from a major city address. This will mean that it looks as though your business is either more successful or being run with a far larger budget than what you are likely working with.
Virtual offices are scalable solutions which means that they will fit in with virtually any business budget. As such, you won’t have to worry about struggling to cover the cost. It essentially allows you to get the business of both worlds. Your company will be more flexible overall because you’ll be working from home but you’ll have the profile of a major city company.
Do be aware that there are other smaller options here to consider as well such as virtual numbers. These do the same job for a fraction of the cost and are often used by solopreneurs.
Cloud Solutions
Next, you should make sure that you are exploring cloud solutions in your business model. Cloud solutions and services will guarantee that your business operates at a far faster speed. That’s important because it means that customers and clients won’t be left waiting around for the services and solutions that they want or need. Indeed, there are many benefits of using a cloud solution in your business from advanced levels of security to instant updates. You can use a cloud solution to stay on track with every aspect of your company.
It’s worth noting that these days many businesses are not just relying on one cloud solution. Instead, they are focused on using a multi-cloud setup. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that it ensures that a business is more flexible on the market. It can also help ensure that a business is able to recover from downtime. That’s critical because high levels of downtime will always hurt your business and make it seem inferior to key competitors that exist on the market.
With a cloud solution, you can complete a full disaster recovery of a critical workstation in a matter of minutes.
Immediate Engagement
Another way that you can make your business look bigger to clients is by ensuring that you provide immediate levels of engagement for them. Customers don’t want to be left waiting for a response from your business. The general rule of thumb here is that you should be responding to a query from a customer or client in about 24 hours. Any longer than this and you can all but guarantee that the client has disappeared to a competitor and found the answer that they were searching for.
So, how can you ensure that you are providing immediate engagement? Well, you can set up an automated response for options like email queries. You can also consider exploring options like call handling solutions. Most of these are at least partially automated but they still make your customers feel as though they have an avenue to connect with your business.
You might also want to think about using web chat software on your website. With an option like this, you can make sure that you are able to give customers a direct line of communication to your company.
Beautiful Website
When it comes to getting customers you need to have an amazing website that draws them in. It ideally needs to be bright, eye-catching, and easy to use. If users find your website difficult to navigate then they will take their custom elsewhere.
There are lots of points to think about when making your website attractive and appealing. For instance, you should think about the colors as well as the fonts. You can also use videos to make your website more immersive and engaging.
One point that you definitely want to avoid is using a template solution. Template web designers are often popular with small business owners because they are free. So, it’s a great way to keep the costs under control when marketing your company and this is important. However, the problem is that it results in all websites looking more or less the same. This means that it will be difficult if not impossible to ensure that your business stands out. These days there’s no reason to use a template for your website. Particularly, when you can use different tools to design your own awesome website in less than an hour that will feel unique.
Outsourcing
Next, you should think about outsourcing in your business. Through outsourcing, you can get the expertise in your company to help it stand out for a fraction of the cost that you would expect to pay if you were hiring a complete, full-time team in your company.
Technology has made outsourcing easier than ever because it’s possible to find the experts that you need within minutes of searching the market. There are countless platforms that will help put you in touch with the pros in different sectors and fields.
As well as being able to hire professionals who will help propel your business forward, tech these days also allows you to handle every aspect of the connection. You can contact them, pay them and track them, often all through the same app or platform. This means that you have more control over the services that you are using. It also helps you to avoid some of the common issues that can crop up when using outsourcing services in a business.
Specifically, we’re talking about high costs and low-quality work. If you can’t get an outsourcing service for the right price then there’s no point in using it at all. Similarly, a low-quality solution could damage your business in the long term.
Security
Finally, making your business seem bigger isn’t about spending a lot of money. Instead, it’s about spending money in the right areas. You need to focus your budget on the areas that matter to your customers and clients. A key example of this would be security. Today, customers are paranoid and worried about security threats. They’re right to be concerned about this too because research shows that hacks on businesses are more common than ever before.
You might assume that small businesses are going to be ignored when it comes to hacks. However, this isn’t the case. Instead, it’s common for small companies to be targeted because criminals know or at least expect, that they won’t have the right standards of security.
You can’t afford to prove them right because if you do then it will send the wrong message about your business to your customers. It will make your company seem weaker and customers will wonder whether they can trust you. Luckily, tech is providing the answer here too. The right technology will mean that you can fill in the gaps that might exist in your security setup to ensure that your customers are protected.
We hope this helps you understand why you need to ensure that your company is the opposite of a tardis and does look bigger on the outside. In doing so, you can ensure that you are able to gain the attention of a larger audience and increase your sales. This could even help you reach expansion goals overtime when running your company.
