As a small business, you need to do everything you can to get ahead. While it’s not impossible, the odds are stacked against you trying to go up against your more established competition to secure those all important customers. You need to do everything you can to stack the odds in your favour and show that you’re professional, trustworthy and reliable. Here are some of the ways you can go about it.

A Blog

If you’re not already blogging for businessthen you need to jump on board. It’s not just something bigger companies can benefit from, it can do wonders for your smaller venture. A blog makes you look trustworthy and reliable, it shows that you’ve put in time and effort which can set you apart from spammy companies and scams. These are things that people will be worrying about when buying from a company for the first time, so something as simple as seeing a well written blog can put their mind at ease. It shows them you have put time and effort into your business and that you won’t simply take their money and disappear. Blog posts also encourage social shares which is great for free marketing.

Social Media

Social media has been shown to be twice as effective at getting sales than outbound marketing, and plus it’s free to set up. Admittedly you would be best outsourcing the work (or hiring a social media manager) to run things as marketing can be tricky and you don’t want to unwittingly hinder rather than help your business. However done right, social media can be incredibly effective, as well as being useful for getting your marketing materials out to your followers, having a good social following again makes you look reliable and trustworthy. If people are on the fence and unsure whether to make that initial sale with you then seeing that you have a good following with plenty of interaction with your customers then they will know that others have successfully made orders and that things are likely to be ok if they do as well.

Good Business Software

If your business still uses manual methods you could be putting it at serious risk. Manual methods are time consuming and have risk of human error, these days so much can be done quickly and easily with the use of software. In some cases you will be able to automate areas of your business completely with the right programs. Modern businesses will all be utilising these things, so if you want to stand a chance and keep up then you need to get on board. From accounting software to time and attendancemanagement, legal software, cloud based storage and much more- do the research and find out what would most benefit you.

A Live Chat Feature

Live chat can help to boost sales, if a customer has a query they might not necessarily pick up the phone- instead they could just click off your site. If there’s a real person there waiting in chat in the corner of the page, it makes it convenient and they could have any questions cleared up so they can make their order with confidence.