3 Ways to Improve Your Business

So you’ve established your business, but you want to make it even better. To improve your business overall, there are three main areas that you can focus on: your website, your customer experience, and your finances.

1. Improve Your Website 

In the digital age, your website is likely to be the main place customers get access to your business. It’s important to have a quality website in order for you to best connect with potential/existing customers and not fall behind within your industry. Here are some tips to creating the best possible website:

• Optimize your website for search engines: Although most search engines closely guard the exact methods they use to determine rankings, there are some strategies you can utilize in order to get your website to rank higher in searches. While some businesses may choose to pay for higher rankings in search results, search engine optimization (SEO) can help generate traffic to your website for free.
• Improve website navigation: A lot of effort can go into creating a website, so you want to make sure customers actually know exactly what to do once they get there. Keep your menu options clear and obvious in order to optimize the navigation experience.
• Enhance overall design & user experience: Your website should reflect your business, so you want it to look nice! Use high quality visuals, brading colors, and a modern design to keep your website aesthetically pleasing. 
• Add calls to action: After viewing your content, visitors of your site need to know what steps to take next. A call to action (CTA) tells customers how to contact you and take the next steps, whether that’s scheduling a call or ordering a product.
• Track website analytics: Digital tools such as Google Analytics can help you get access to important data about the performance of your website. Utilize this kind of data to monitor your progress and make necessary improvements. 

2. Improve Your Customer Experience 

Having a loyal consumer base is essential to a business’ success. To build up customer loyalty, you need to ensure that customers have a good overall experience. Here are some ways that you can make make sure you’re prioritizing your customers:

• Listen to feedback: The best way to know what your customers want from you is to hear it from them directly! Asking for feedback from customers can inform you of what your business is doing successfully and help you pinpoint aspects of your business that need to be improved.
• Create a seamless experience across channels: Your website, app, ads, social media, etc. should all be consistent in order to ensure a seamless experience for customers. Information about your business should be clear and easily accessible to anyone seeking it out.
• Provide multiple resource options: When customers have issues, it should be easy for them to solve them. The easiest way to do this is by having customer service readily available, but it’s also helpful to have resources that customers can access outside of business hours as well, such as chat bots or other self-guided resources.
• Personalize customers’ experience: Customers want to work with companies who they feel understand their needs. Using customer data to provide tailored product recommendations or content is a great way to personalize the customer experience.
• Anticipate customer needs: Don’t just wait for issues to arise– try to anticipate them. Analyzing data and trends to be proactive in your work is a great way to impress customers and better their experience overall.

3. Improve Your Finances

It’s one thing to be making money, it’s another to know how to maintain it. By bettering your financial knowledge and utilizing the best financial tools, you can set up your business to grow and succeed. Here are some ways you can better manage your finances:

• Open a small business checking account: The first step to getting any financial success in your business is to create a separate business checking account. Separating your personal and business finances makes other financial processes like bookkeeping or budgeting much easier.
• Create a budgeting plan: Knowing how to create a budget can help you make sure your business is spending money wisely and keep you out of debt. 
• Automate your bookkeeping: Bookkeeping is an integral part of the accounting process and there is a large opportunity for mistakes if you’re still doing your bookkeeping manually. Accounting software can do your bookkeeping for you, taking away the hassle of bookkeeping on your own. With an Innovator Business Checking account, your data can be seamlessly integrated into Quickbooks, one of the most popular accounting softwares, which can automate the process for you.
• Consider lending options: You may find that your business needs an extra boost. In that case, getting a loan may be a good option for your business. Grasshopper’s SBA Lending Team can be a great resource for small business owners looking to take out a loan.

Running a successful business means always looking for new ways to improve. Keeping these kinds of topics in mind can help to guide you on your journey upwards!