Business owners are always looking to increase their profits and cut down on expenses. One of the best ways to do this is through your operations. By improving your operations, you can leverage your efficiency to be even more productive and gain a competitive advantage. Here are some key tips to help you do this in your company:
Security Online
Whether you are running a membership site or an ecommerce website security is essential to your operations. Security is no longer something that companies can take for granted. After so many high profile hacks of credit agencies, government agencies, and major corporations, no company is immune to the threats that exist digitally.
Take, for instance, a device that connects to your office network. If your password is weak, it only takes a hacker with a laptop a few hours to gain access to it. From there, they can move around in your system, looking at information, destroying it, and saving it offline to their own devices.
Be sure to have some encryption in place for passwords that are protecting anything important in your business. Furthermore, data visualization tools can be applied to your network to see if something fishy shows up. This allows you to respond quickly to threats rather than be on your heels.
Marketing
Great marketing depends on giving people what they want. In theory, this is easy. However, your company needs to be using modern tools like keyword research and A/B testing if your strategy is going to work effectively.
Google’s Keyword Planner is a free web app that lets you search for key terms. You can see the search volume for these terms and even get updates if they change. This lets you deploy certain strategies or products according to how the market will react.
Once you have a new idea, you need to create great copy to turn interested prospects into buyers. The most powerful way to do this is via AIDA. Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action are the four components of powerful marketing. They provide a nice way to conceptualize what you are doing with your copy every step of the way so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Attention refers to having an ad or top end of your funnel that can really stop people in their tracks. From here, you give them some interesting information to think about regarding your products and services. After that, you start to lead them through a series of future scenarios in which you help them imagine that they already own your product. Finally, you must ask for action in a clear way. If you do all these things, your framework for online selling will become much more consistent.
SEO
It might be tempting to rely solely on paid ads. However, with this course of action you are missing out on a lot of free traffic. Imagine how much your profit margin would increase if you had free traffic coming to your site every day. This is the promise of SEO, which allows you to rank higher in the search engines like Google and Bing.
The essence of how it works is that when you have relevant keywords sprinkled throughout your page and provide quality content, your pages naturally rank higher over time. Make sure that you come up with a list of words that you want to rank for and begin building out content for them. It doesn’t work overnight, however. Expect a lead time of several months before your ranking starts shifting in most cases.
Improving your business operations is something that takes daily action. You can’t simply improve one aspect of your company and hope that the rest will magically fall into place. So be sure to use the tools available to you at every step. Use the tips above and make sure that your operations are efficient and effective for the long run.