Whether you run a restaurant, catering service, or a food eCommerce, you need an effective marketing strategy online. Word of mouth only goes so far, and nowadays, potential customers will go to the internet first for whatever product or service they’re looking for, including food. If you boost your online presence you’ll, therefore, be able to draw in more business. You’ll also develop more or a name for yourself and boost brand recognition. Here are a few handy tips on how to market your food business online.
Focus on your branding
Whether you have your own restaurant or run a successful business from home, you need to focus on your branding. This is especially important online. You need to create consistent branding that fits in with your image and tone of voice. Think about your target audience and create buyer personas. Focus your branding around the personality of your typical customer, this includes the language and visual content you use. This will help you be able to relate to your niche.
Social media targeting
Social media is a great tool. Choose the platform that is most likely to be used by your niche and advertise your business. This way you’ll be able to target the right people. Keep an eye on your advertising and social media campaigns to see what works best. With social media monitoring, you’ll be able to improve your marketing strategy. It’s very useful in the food and beverage industry.
Work with influencers
If you would like further support on social media you could also work with influencers. These are people your customers will trust that can endorse your product. It’s important to choose the right influencer to suit your business, however. Here are some more tips on how to work with influencers. The more important links and connections you create, the more legitimate your business will appear online.
Network with other businesses
You can also network with other businesses in the Food Services industry. Reach out to other small or local businesses and share links and promotional material online. This way you’ll create a fair exchange and you help each other to grow your businesses. You can even exchange services or work together in the local community. This is a great way to save money and promote your business at the same time. If your business is just starting, you will definitely benefit from relationships such as these, and you can network on easily on social media.
Write a blog
If you want to market your business online, you could also write engaging food blog posts. These will have two purposes. The first is creating engaging and informative content that will entice your readers and the second is that it will boost your SEO. Include relevant keywords in your blog that potential customers might search for Google when they’re looking for a food business similar to yours. This will help your site get to the top of the search engine results pages and boost your credibility.
Launching a small business is much easier today than it used to be. The internet is a flexible environment where entrepreneurs of all sizes can bring their dreams to life.
However, just because there’s a lower barrier to entry for would-be business owners, doesn’t mean that all companies will be successful.
According to research from the Small Business Administration, only around half of all new businesses will survive their first five years.
Some studies report even bleaker statistics, saying that many businesses fail before reaching the end of their first year.
Figuring out how to avoid problems as a small business owner means learning about the most common reasons that small businesses fail and discovering what you can do to prevent those issues.
Here are a few insights to get you started.
Leadership Failure
Poor management is more of a problem for your business than you’d think. If you don’t have the right management skills to keep your team members motivated and moving in the right direction, you’ll struggle to accomplish much.
To avoid leadership problems, stop and think about how you inspire your team and help them achieve their goals.
Are you supportive when your employees need extra help? Can you provide the guidance that your team members need, or is your door always closed? Do you invest in the tools that your staff need to do their best work?
It might be worth investing in some leadership training to help you and the other supervisors in your team come out on top. There are plenty of courses out there that teach people how to master leadership in a way that boosts employee satisfaction and productivity.
Lack of Sales
Before you do anything in your company, make sure to plan exactly how you’re going to make a profit.
Start by evaluating your marketplace and choosing your target audience. You’ll need a complete buyer persona that describes the person most likely to respond to your business model and strategy.
Once you know who your target customer is, you can start building a strategy that addresses those people’s needs and expectations.
It’s also worth analyzing your competition from time to time too. Knowing who your competitors are will help you figure out where you need to strengthen your strategies to compete on a bigger scale.
There are few things more critical to any business than sales. You need to be constantly generating income if you want your organization to succeed.
Without a solid financial foundation, you won’t be able to sustain your current operations, and neither will you be able to grow over time.
Refusal to pivot
It’s important to have a plan that you can stick with as a business owner. This will prevent you from going on track whenever a new trend emerges in your industry.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should stick to one strategy no matter what.
Sometimes, trends in your landscape will come and go. But knowing how to keep track of what’s happening in your marketplace will make it easier to see what really affects your customers and your chances of sales.
It’s important to avoid getting so deeply entrenched in your plan for success that you fail to recognize when your strategies aren’t working.
Keep checking your marketing and sales methods to ensure that you’re moving in the right direction to suit the needs of your target audience. Reporting tools and marketing software will help you see which of your efforts are yielding the best results.
If you notice something that indicates you need to change track for a while, be ready to pivot.
Remember that the business world is always changing. Knowing how to change with it will improve your professional profile, and help your company to thrive.
Poor planning
There’s a lot more planning involved in running a successful company than most people realize. A business plan forces you to think more carefully about what you want to accomplish as a growing brand, for instance.
With your business plan, you can define your Unique Value Proposition and encourage investors to take notice of your business.
Planning out your marketing campaigns before you invest too heavily in them can help you spot any gaps in your strategy. This means that you don’t over-spend on an idea that may not generate results in the long-term.
Sadly, you can’t plan and prepare for every disaster that might strike your business. You can, however, set your business up for faster recovery and cushion unexpected losses at least a bit.
One of the essential documents you’ll need to create for your company is a disaster recovery plan. No matter what kind of business you run, there’s always a risk that something could go wrong.
Having a disaster recovery plan ensures that you can respond quickly to issues like lost data or damaged tools. This means that you can spring into action faster before losing too many customers.
Marketing Mishaps
Finally, business owners often underestimate just how valuable their marketing campaigns are. Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of other businesses out there. Many of those companies will be competing to attract the same audience as you.
Start by identifying what kind of marketing efforts are going to resonate best with your target audience. You could conduct polls so that you can add more information to your user personas.
Also, track the results of your promotional efforts so you can see which works best.
Remember to have a list of critical metrics in place that you need to keep an eye on too.
For instance, what’s your return on investment for different marketing strategies? Do you know how much budget you have to spend in each area, and how much reach you get from each platform?
Don’t Become Another Failed Business
There are many amazing opportunities available today for ambitious entrepreneurs.
However, the path to success is littered with challenges to overcome.
Making sure that you’re properly prepared can help you avoid some of the mistakes mentioned above.
Contributed post by Ashely Wilson
Ashley Wilson is a content creator, writing about business and tech. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys baking homemade treats for her husband and their two felines, Lady and Gaga. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.
If you’re selling something online, then you probably should be using a sales funnel. That’s because these funnels offer you, your business, and the product or service you’re trying to sell too many advantages to ignore.
Regardless of if you’ve had success in the past without a deliberate sales funnel, or if you haven’t considered making changes to your current marketing setup, you should look at how a sales funnel would benefit your business and improve your sales before brushing off the idea. While you might have a quality product and service, more often than not, prospect customers need a bit of guidance before they’ll convert into actual customers.
Why Your Business Needs a Sales Funnel
Keep in mind that it’s completely impossible to define the exact process of activities that every customer needs to follow through before making a purchase since every business is different. Finding a process that converts prospects into customers is going to be unique for each unique business. There’s no exact pattern or template you can follow since your business and your target market are unique.
This is precisely why you need to put effort into determining an appropriate sales funnel for you and your business.
As prospects move through your sales page, website, or newsletter, they should follow a unique buying process designed specifically for them. They should be guided by branded, skillful persuasions that represent your business appropriately. Think of your sales funnel as your opportunity to create a personalized, unique sales experience for your prospect customers.
How to Create an Effective Sales Funnel
In order to develop a sales funnel that’s functions well and converts, you need to fully understand your own business, product, service, and audience. Without understanding these things clearly, you won’t be able to develop a strategy that works for converting prospects into customers.
Take a moment to get an outside perspective and view your business as it can be seen from the outside. Not everyone understands your passion and vision like you do from the inside. Do your best to translate these things to potential customers in order to create a connection.
Just like it can be hard for someone else to see your passion, it can be difficult for people to understand why they need your product or service… unless you show them. Reveal the value of your products and services by showing what problems they solve and how they’ll make your prospect’s problems go away.
In order to communicate any of these things well, however, you need to understand who your customer is. Define your target market. Who are they? What do they need? What interests them most? What kind of sales funnel process will keep them most interested?
Once you’re able to answer all of these questions, you’ll be that much closer to being able to develop a functional, effective sales funnel that gets more conversions than you’ve ever seen before!
Conclusion
We no longer live in a world where you can launch a product and automatically get sales. There are too many opportunities and options out there to choose from. The great thing about sales funnels is that they are applicable to a wide variety of businesses. Whether you’re a business coach, author, start up, or a well-established company, a sales funnel is the ideal way to boost your sales potential.
If you’re looking for help in building a sales funnel that’s perfect for your business and your target audience, click here and schedule a call with me.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on all of us. In some ways, entrepreneurs have had it easier than many. You might have always worked from home, you might be safe, away from the risks of infection, and if you’ve had to move things around to take care of family or home school your children, it might have been easier than it would have been if you were an employee.
In other ways, life might have been far more difficult. You may have struggled to keep your business going. You might have lost customers, and so money, and you might have had to find new suppliers and providers. Working from home, without being able to see your team might have been tricky, and juggling everything while worrying about your health and wellbeing might have seemed impossible.
If you are feeling burnt out, you aren’t alone. This year has been harder than most, so here’s a look at some ways to cope with pandemic burnout.
Take a Break
If you haven’t had a day off since march, you certainly aren’t alone. Many of us haven’t felt able to step away from our businesses for more than a few hours since all of this started. But, you need a break. Your business will suffer more if you are too tired to give it your best. Take at least one day off, and rest whenever you can.
Get Some Help
If you are struggling to take care of your staff from home, get help with HR and Payroll from hris systems you could also hire freelancers for specific tasks, or a VA to give yourself a break.
If you work alone, even asking a family member to help out around the house can give you a bit more time during the day.
Celebrate Your Successes
After such a stressful time it can be hard to see any positives. But, if your business is still going, you have done fantastically well, and you are sure to have learned an awful lot about your business and yourself in the process.
Take Care of Yourself
The last thing that you want right now is to be ill. Practicing social distancing is a great start, but you should also make sure you get plenty of rest, you eat well and you exercise, to give your immune system all of the support that it needs.
Understand Your Stressors
Often the best way to avoid stress is to understand what it is that is stressing you out. Learn more about your triggers and you’ll have a better chance of avoiding them.
Accept Your Limitations
You can’t do it all. This might not be the best time to push yourself hard. Accept your limitations, and prioritize what you can do.
Unfortunately, the only thing that we know right now, is that we don’t know what is going to happen in the coming weeks and months. We’re still surrounded by uncertainty, and while in many ways, life is carrying on, who knows what restrictions and changes we may yet face? Stop your burnout in its tracks, and you’ll be fine!
2020 has surely been a wild ride for most of us if not all. It probably threw all of us off our game at some point or another. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe we’re approaching the year’s final quarter; on the other, it can’t come soon enough.
No matter what complications, challenges, or struggles you and your business have encountered this year, it’s still possible to wrap up the next few months in a way that will benefit your business and set you up for success. All you need is a proper plan, a clear understanding for how to follow through, and the trust that your business is worth it.
Here are my 5 Tips for Finishing the Final Quarter Strong
1. Learn from the Past
This might be a strange year to look back and try to learn from, but there’s always something you can measure to help you prepare better for the future. For businesses to create success moving forward, business owners must be willing to look back and note things that didn’t work out, could be done better, or those that were a huge success. So, what goals did you have this past quarter? What worked and what didn’t? Are there strategies that could be duplicated, or do they need adjustments?
2. Set Your Goals
Once you have some clarity of what’s worked before and what hasn’t, goal setting is key. Goals drive your business. As 2020 clearly shows, you never really know what life will throw at you and your business, and you never know how your goals might change, but that shouldn’t keep you from setting objectives and pushing after them.
Take some time to really think about your goals for this last quarter. Where do you want your business to be? How do you want it to maintain or grow? What do you want to see more of or less of? Don’t make it too complicated, but feel free to stretch yourself. Once you have some, break the big goals into smaller, bite-sized goals you can work on weekly or even daily. Then focus on accomplishing those smaller pieces.
3. Get Some Accountability and Actually do the Work
It’s way too easy to decide what you want, set some goals, and determine a plan for how you’ll accomplish everything… and then let that organization sit in a drawer somewhere while you distract yourself with other things. Don’t let disorganization and lack of prioritization keep you and your business from having a killer final quarter. Instead, find a buddy who you can talk to who will keep you accountable.
This can be a friend, a business associate, a mentor, or even a coach. Tell them your goals. Let them remind you of the direction you want to go. They might end up being what helps you get unstuck during your most unmotivated, uninspired moments.
4. Give Yourself Grace and Balance
You can’t possibly work or be business motivated all day, every day, for the rest of the year. That’s okay. There are going to be times when your body needs rest, when your business lags, or when you need to take a step away for family, social activities, exercise, or other rejuvenating opportunities. Make room for these respites. Embrace them. By allowing yourself to rest and enjoy other things, you’ll find yourself better able to handle what your business needs you to handle and push through the hard work ahead.
5. Relax and Enjoy!
Seriously. You’ve learned from the past, set your goals, are doing the hard work, and you’re making progress. Don’t forget to enjoy where you are. You’re a business owner who’s making their way through one of the craziest years yet and that’s something to be proud of!
Are you looking for support on your next launch, funnel build or virtual summit? If so, click here and let’s talk!
Many companies have had business disrupted by Covid-19 this year. As a result, they have had to adapt their ways in order to keep making revenue. While some businesses have managed to adapt successfully, others have made costly mistakes. Here are some of the mistakes your business doesn’t want to be making during Covid-19.
Raising your prices
To help cover the costs of covid-19, some businesses have responded by hiking up their prices. It makes sense to try and earn some extra money this way (it’s certainly easier than trying to sell more products), but consider the impact that it may have on you current loyal customers. Those that are already financially struggling due the impact of the virus could see this as an extra kick in the teeth – which could have a negative impact on your customer satisfaction. If your competitors choose not to raise their prices, you could see a lot of your customers abandoning your service to try out that offered by competitors. Try to focus on reducing costs and finding new income streams rather than upping your prices.
Cutting back on marketing
When considering cutbacks, you should avoid cutting back on marketing. In fact, now is the time to spend more money on marketing. With less people mingling, you’ll find it harder to attract customers via old-fashioned word of mouth – which means that you have to advertise and promote your brand yourself. Cut back on marketing, and you could see a dramatic reduction in the amount of new customers you receive. Unless you really don’t want to attract new customers at this moment in time, refrain from cutting back.
Investing in offline marketing
Now is not the time for offline marketing tactics. With social distancing laws in place, marketing events are generally not feasible. Meanwhile, billboards and posters are less likely to get spotted due to less crowds on the street. You’re much better off pouring your time, energy and money into digital marketing during Covid-19. Strategies such as social media marketing, SEO and email marketing are likely to have a much bigger impact given that people are spending more time indoors and more time on digital devices. Allow yourself to get creative when pursuing digital marketing strategies.
Arranging in-person meetings
In-person meetings are also not practical in a pandemic. This could be a team meeting with employees or a meeting with clients. Unless the task can only be carried out as a group in person, you may as well conduct the meeting via video call or phone call – or you could simply have an email exchange. Some clients may be put off if you insist on having an in-person meeting. Some employees may also feel that you are putting them in unnecessary danger and could possibly sue. If you do have to arrange large meetings in person, make sure that everyone has PPE.
Reducing staff, but not reducing the workload
As a way of saving costs, some companies have furloughed or even laid off staff members. This can sometimes be a necessary cut back, however you need to be sure that the workload is also cut back. If you demand the same workload from your remaining employees, they will likely struggle to get it all done. You need to have a team that’s large enough to take on all the day-to-day roles. If employees are having to take on responsibilities on top of their existing responsibilities, they’ll get overly stressed and likely hand in their notice. This is something that you definitely don’t want to happen.
Micromanaging remote employees
Many companies have allowed employees to work from home. While this has helped to keep people socially distanced, it has made team communication a little harder. Less trusting employees may feel that they have to keep communicating with employees to check that they are still on target. This style of remote micromanaging could be stressing out your employees and may be something that you want to limit. So long as employees are meeting targets and deadlines, there’s no need to keep checking up on them. Your employees are likely to be more productive if you’re not constantly trying to have conversations with them.
Not supervising remote employees at all
While you shouldn’t micromanage remote employees, you also don’t want to ignore them completely. Some of your employees may realise that they’re not being monitored and may take advantage of this. This could result in corners being cut and certain work not being done. Using some form of software for tracking employee activity will allow you to see how far projects are coming along without having to constantly chase up employees via phone or email. There are lots of software solutions out there that can do this.
Ignoring the pandemic altogether
The worst thing you can do is ignore the entire pandemic and try to continue on as usual. You’ll likely get into legal trouble and it could negatively affect your reputation. For instance, if you run a restaurant and decide to put absolutely no measures in place, you can expect a lot of customers to not feel safe and some may report you to the police (especially if there’s no attempts to abide by social distancing rules or supply hand soap). Employees may even leave if they feel that you are not taking the virus and their health seriously.
Conclusion
If you want your business to keep making money through the remainder of Covid-19, you need to make the right changes to your business model. Anything that involves or inspires social gatherings cannot go underway. If you choose to take on a remote workforce, you need to understand how to manage them without micromanaging or being too relaxed. You also need to resist increasing your prices, instead finding other ways to recover from the costs.
