In business, you need to constantly learn and improve, but the most important thing is to be active in order to successfully reap the benefits of your work. By identifying and solving problems that arise inside and outside your organization, you are taking an important step towards increasing business productivity.
If you intend to increase your return on investment, you need to implement new strategies and update them often to meet customer expectations and keep pace with changing market conditions. Outdated and ineffective strategies will not grow your business, they will only degrade it. So, you need to implement various effective strategies to improve your productivity.
Build a sales funnel
A sales funnel is the path that a person goes from the first contact with your product to the moment they pay for your product. First, a person learns about a service or a product, then begins to be interested in it, somehow expresses a desire to purchase, and, finally, buys. Your task is to break down all sales into conditional stages and track how many people have switched from one to another.
Let’s say you have a travel agency. You run contextual advertising. Your funnel might look like this: 100 people watched the ad, 30 clicked on it and went to the site, 20 called and one bought a tour. By analyzing the funnel, you can understand which stages need to be improved. For example, here you need to work with the ad text and the sales department.
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Find out the secrets of competitors
To ensure sales growth, you need to carefully study your competitors and do not hesitate to borrow from successful practices. An easy way to scout is to become a competitor’s client.
Go through all possible paths of their potential buyers. Become a mystery shopper. When talking to a manager, come up with excuses not to buy, and study their work with customer objections.
Try contextual advertising
When you use outdoor advertising, you kind of “hit” a large audience with your message. For example, when you open a hair salon, it might be worth putting up a banner in the same area. But if you sell a conventional brick, then promoting it through banners is illogical – most of those who see the message will never need it.
If your product requires targeted advertising, try promoting through Google Ads. They will help show ads to those who are monitoring something specific in the search bar.
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Run social media ads
Over the years, social networks have accumulated a lot of data about their users – their interests, gender, age, marital status. Use this data to launch targeted ads.
For example, let’s say you decide to promote the delivery of ready-to-eat meals. Find groups of competitors on the social network, show your ads to their audience. Try broadcasting your ad to subscribers of restaurants and cafés in your area. Expand your search – add people who use local store deliveries.
You can filter the audience for display by hundreds of parameters. The price depends on the competition. You can save your advertising budget by selecting people in a way that another advertiser might not have guessed.
Work with those who are already your clients
In his book Customers for Life, Carl Sewell recommends that more attention should be paid not to attracting new customers, but to increasing the loyalty of those who already use your products. This is logical – if people are happy with your business, word of mouth will work and new customers will come by themselves.
Start a newsletter: collect email addresses when buying, send customers useful materials and exclusive discounts. Just don’t be intrusive, otherwise, your emails will go to spam.
Introduce loyalty programs that drive sales and differentiate you from your competitors. For example, coupons “buy five cups, get six as a gift” are often practiced in coffee shops.
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Run native ads
Banner blindness was first discussed back in 1998, and in 2014, Business Insider confirmed that people really practically do not react to banner ads on the Internet. To convey your proposal to people, you need to use other, more subtle methods.
Try native media advertising. In the language of marketing, these are materials that are integrated into the context of the site and the interests of the recipient. If it is simpler, then this is the useful content in which the brand is promoted neatly and naturally.
For example, an ordinary advertisement would be a call to buy an apartment in a particular residential complex. The article “How to choose an apartment near the metro and not miscalculate” will become a native advertisement.
Implement a convenient paying
If your target audience is people who are willing to put up with anything for the sake of a low price, then this advice is irrelevant. For the rest, it is always worth working on customer service and convenience of purchase.
Give customers the ability to pay the way they like. If you work offline, implement card payment systems. Buyers of online stores are interested in playing with electronic money.
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Start scent marketing and audio marketing
Note that when you enter the bakery, there is always the aroma of freshly baked bread. Even if it’s already evening, and baked goods hit the shelves in the morning. The secret is in special equipment that diffuses odors.
These scents increase our appetite, which means they stimulate us to make a purchase. This is the essence of scent marketing. This type of promotion is worth using in any business that sells food.
Another way to motivate people to spend money is through audio marketing. Psychologists discovered back in the 1980s that music helps us relax and make purchasing decisions easier.
Most often, this promotion is used in retail stores and in the service industry. For example, slow music is played in stores in the morning to set customers up for a relaxing stroll. In rush hour, on the contrary, the melody becomes more dynamic, so that even a relaxed person is imbued with and begins to buy faster.
Recommend a competitor
If you do not have a product, look for it at competitors and advise the person to go to them. Clarify when the product will appear in your salon and invite the person to wait. If not, just look on the Internet for the right product and tell it to the buyer.
This advice seems absurd at first glance. But, this is a way to increase loyalty to the company: a wow effect is created, the client remembers unusual behavior and feels that he was treated kindly, without greed. Such friendly relationships turn one-time buyers into regular customers. Plus, people share stories like this, which provides free advertising.
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Motivate your employees
For employees to be productive, you need to motivate them. Technologies will help you to automate work and its control. At the same time, you must create the necessary conditions for the personnel, to properly organize the work process. Getting the right motivation can help make employees want to be productive.
Material incentives
Whatever one may say, people go to work in order to make money. Good remuneration for work is a great motivator. Introduce a system of awards for excellence and performance, and employees will be motivated to work harder and be more productive.
An extra day off or vacation
You always need to work, but time for rest is also necessary. Remember to give your well-performing employees an extra day off or vacation. Firstly, it will help them to gain strength and energy, to renew the reserve for productive work. Second, it motivates employees to be productive.
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Organization of a corporate party
A close-knit team can achieve much more than a scattered one. Organize corporate events from time to time. This will help make your team truly effective.
Use technology, it never fails
In the modern world, there are many applications and programs that greatly simplify the workflow. With their help, you can save a lot of time and ensure the productive work of your staff. Intranet systems are a must-have. They will help you to connect and engage your employees.
Goals and strategy
Where is your business heading? Do you have a development plan for the future? “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable,” wrote Seneca. The same goes for your employees. Explain to them what goal the team should move towards, why they work. Otherwise, you can only dream of high productivity. Build clear goals and a strategy for achieving them.
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Load distribution
It often happens that some employees are overloaded with tasks, work all day and even stay at work in the evening. Others, in addition to their tasks, also have time to relax during the working day, read the news, and solve some personal affairs. Distribute the workload correctly among workers. Only then can you achieve maximum collective productivity.
Conclusion
There are probably thousands of ways to increase productivity of your business and the incoming flow of potential customers. The problem is that there are no completely universal solutions – an idea that has worked for a hundred businessmen may be useless for a hundred and first. Therefore, try, test, and make sure to improve your business, and you will definitely succeed. Good luck.
Morgan Rose Elliott graduated marketing from The University of Sydney. Hobbies include yoga, reading, home renovation. A rookie blogger who loves writing about business and lifestyle equally. She is happily married, stay at home mother of three.
