Feel like retail giants such as Amazon are stealing opportunities from your small business? In this article I shall tell you how to win over customers and compete with big businesses.
Major retailers definitely have resources that make it difficult for smaller companies to compete, but even if you’re a budding COVIDpreneur, that doesn’t mean that keeping your business competitive is completely impossible.
In fact, by changing up a few of your business practices, you can increase profits for your business and maybe even steal a few customers from Amazon and other retailers. Here’s where to start.
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Boost Productivity by Outsourcing Basic Tasks
How much time do you spend every day with chores like responding to emails, scheduling meetings, paying invoices, and ordering supplies? If you’re looking to stay competitive with major retailers, you can’t get too bogged down in mundane daily tasks. Thankfully, you don’t have to be a billionaire CEO to hire someone who can make delegating and completing those daily to-do’s much easier on your busy schedule.
As Time Doctor points out, it makes sense for many small business owners to look for virtual assistant services through online job boards to find a professional who can handle tasks remotely, like administrative work, data entry, schedule management, and even customer service.
You can easily scan candidates by filtering for pay rate, the date they can start, and reviews, and since you’re fulfilling this need with a freelancer, you only need to pay for the actual work completed.
If you do decide to make customer service a part of your virtual assistant’s job duties, be sure to go over your customer service plan so that your new employee understands how to support questions that come from potential and existing customers, and the importance of keeping loyal customers.
Once you have outsourced the recurring tasks that are primarily a time drain, you can focus on doing the things that only you can do: grow your business and your bottom line.
Drive Traffic and Sales With a Well-Designed Website
One of the reasons people love shopping with Amazon is that the website is super easy to use. So if your website isn’t as user-friendly as it should be, or just needs to be punched up a bit to better engage your target market, you should think about investing in web design and marketing services from Shoutway.com.
With the right expert touch, your website can go from drab and difficult to navigate to fab and fun to click through. As you revamp your company’s website, also look for ways to encourage customers to complete the checkout process.
This could be as simple as allowing shoppers to check out as guests or incorporating additional checkout buttons so that your customers can check out faster and more often.
Finally, you need to make sure your website and checkout function are safe for customers as well, which means linking your small business site’s checkout to a reliable point of sale service to prevent costly data breaches.
Improve Customer Satisfaction With Order Fulfillment
Another reason that Amazon thrives over the competition is that the retail giant has mastered the order fulfilment game.
As if it wasn’t already difficult enough for small businesses to compete, Amazon rolled out a one-day shipping program that could make staying competitive even more difficult. That’s why you need to really think outside of the box when it comes to making your order fulfilment process as fast and efficient as possible.
You may have enough time to keep your fulfilment and shipping services in-house, but outsourcing them can be a valuable way to save time while keeping your turnaround promises to customers.
As you increase your fulfilment speeds, Tallyfy notes you also need to keep operating costs low to protect your profits and budget.
Encourage Customers to Shop With Better Branding
Effective marketing, which takes even the most trivial elements into consideration, is really what helps to drive new customers to shop with your small business.
Those elements include your logo, brand and business name, and these key features are what will help new and existing customers identify with your products, services and overall brand.
Combining these elements and tailoring a marketing plan to really connect customers to your business are both crucial for keeping up with the competition and forming lasting relationships with your customers.
When customers feel understood by a small business, they feel strongly connected to it and decide to keep shopping there instead of larger retailers.
Conclusion
Competing with major retailers can take effort and planning, but it doesn’t have to require a million-dollar budget. Try focusing on the processes and strategies above, and then find other ways to make your business stand out from larger retailers.
Being creative and unique can really help you compete with retail giants like Amazon.
Cheers
Cody
