Tag Archives: small business

Business

Why Your Small Business Needs Its Own Phone Number

Did you know that 88% of customers report that they call a business directly after doing an online search for a product or service? No matter how technologically connected your business is, having a business phone number is consistently cited as the best way for customers and suppliers to reach you, for placing outgoing calls with your business caller ID, and for managing multiple phone lines inside your company. A separate business line or virtual number also offers professional calling features that are unavailable to individuals, but those are just a few of the reasons why your small business needs its own phone number.


Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Personal Phone Number for Business

Many start-ups and entrepreneurs only consider adding a separate phone number after the business has grown beyond the initial phase. Often, they will use their personal phone number (or numbers, in the case of co-founders, or start-ups with employees), since it seems like a convenient and affordable option when the business is in early stages. However, this can create a number of problems and limitations down the road when it comes time to expand the business and its brand.

Using your personal number for business exposes you to all kinds of communications on your personal line that you might not be ready for. Customers and suppliers will contact you outside of business hours, telemarketers and robocallers will harass you to no end, and any business materials you publish your personal number on will be useless if you change your number later. Other reasons not to use your personal number include:

  • No professional calling features
  • Lack of control over other lines
  • Compromised personal privacy
  • No distinguishing personal vs. business calls
  • Unable to pass control to a workmate
  • Using your personal number looks unprofessional

The list goes on, but thankfully, getting your business its own phone number can instantly remedy most of those problems.

Advantages of Getting Your Own Small Business Phone Number

There is a long list of benefits to getting a separate business number, but it’s worth focusing on a few key points that provide across-the-board benefits for any entrepreneur:

Improve customer experience

An exclusive business phone number works to enhance the customer experience and improve customer satisfaction. It can be frustrating when you’re trying to get in touch with a company and are unable to for any reason, so having a business number makes it easy for customers and suppliers to reach you when they need to.

Reliability, portability, and scalability

Having a business phone number will provide the kind of reliability and peace of mind that you need to focus on growing your business. A dedicated line means a dedicated service for your business that you can always count on. You can easily move that number to another location if you need to, forward your calls, or take it with you on the go. Using a professional business phone system also lets you scale your business easily, adding departments and extensions as you need them.

Keep business and personal communications separate

If you use your personal number for business, it can be difficult to distinguish between personal and business calls, texts, and voicemails, complicating your efforts to communicate with customers and suppliers, as well as friends and family. What’s more, if you change your personal number, all your promotional materials, including business cards, company letterheads, and marketing communications will be rendered useless.

With a separate business number, you can keep your personal contacts and communications separate, and even change your number without impacting your business.

Choose a business phone number that’s convenient and easy to remember

With a virtual business phone system, you can choose a number that’s easy for customers to remember, from any area code across the U.S. and Canada. You can even choose between local and toll-free numbers, or add extra numbers to your plan to increase the convenience of your callers in different area codes.

Control how your business communicates

Allowing everyone at your company to use their personal number for communicating with clients and suppliers means giving up control over that part of business operations. You need to be able to keep an eye on your company’s activities, whether logistics, sales, or customer service, and know who your employees are speaking to and when. With a business phone system, you will be able to maintain visibility into all your company’s phone communications.

Easier to maintain work-life balance

Giving out your personal number for business activities risks having your personal and professional lives becoming inextricably mixed. You will always be accessible to your customers, even if you’re supposed to be outside of work hours. Personal privacy can be compromised, opening you up to all kinds of unwelcome communications at any hour of the day or night. Maintain a healthy work-life balance by keeping a separate business number with controllable features for when and how your business line rings.

Benefits of Getting A Virtual Business Phone Number

A business phone number improves and simplifies the calling experience for business owners and their customers. Callers will hear a professional pre-recorded greeting and be presented with call options to help them get the service they need quickly. Your business phone or virtual phone number will ring separately from your personal line, making it easy to distinguish between types of calls.

If you opt to use a virtual phone number on your current smartphone or device(s) instead of a traditional business line, you also get a variety of advantages that traditional plans are unable to offer, or limited in their capacity to provide, such as:

  • A separate work phone number on your current phone, no need to purchase or install additional expensive equipment
  • Local or toll-free numbers from any area code in the U.S. or Canada
  • Business caller ID to keep your personal number private
  • Easily distinguish between incoming personal and business calls and messages
  • Keep business communications and contacts separate from personal
  • AI-powered voicemail transcription when you can’t listen to messages
  • Option to set business hours to receive calls only when you choose
  • Add additional lines and extensions for free, or expand your plan when your business scales up
  • Track conversations with clients and suppliers across your company
  • Call menu options, departments, extensions, and voicemail boxes for a professional calling experience

Virtual Numbers Help Teams and Businesses Achieve Success

Being able to work together as a team is critical for any business to achieve its goals. Employees consistently rate teamwork and collaboration as very important when working together at a company, and we all know that working well with our colleagues is essential not just for getting the job done, but for overall happiness and satisfaction in our work lives. But collaboration can be difficult, especially when your company grows, adding branches and diverse teams throughout a larger organization.

Keeping everyone in touch and having one central point of contact for customers and service providers is just one of the reasons why your small business needs its own phone number. Adding a virtual business phone number offers a myriad of other benefits, including professional call options, extensions for every individual and department, and shared contacts that your organization can use to keep everyone on the same page about where your business is at today, and where you are headed in the future.

Social Media, Business

How to make your Small Business more Successful using Social Media?

Social media is a great platform for growing a business in this digital era. It is a place where millions and billions of people spend their time engaging with people, companies, and brands throughout the world. Growing your brand through social media is definitely going to work out if you analyze, strategize, and execute the plan meticulously.

lead generation companies for social media is not as cool and easy as it sounds. You are going to face major challenges in this process and you need to overcome these if you want to grow your business on a good level. Your brand has too much pressure to come up with the unique content to stand out from rest of your competitors. Creating good content can sometimes waste a lot of time, so time management is one of the other difficulties you are going to face. And at last, measuring the resultant metrics needs to be done cautiously.

If you are able to handle all these challenges correctly, then you are surely going to reap the benefits of this platform. You will able to engage with the audience to a whole next level, communicate with the potential customers easily and on a broader prospect, set up an authority, and increase trafficking. All this will ultimately help in increasing sales and your business will expand remarkably.

If you want to drive growth in your business, then you should plan a strategy for it. Here are some ideas laid out for you that can help you a lot.

  •       Select the right platform

There are several social media platforms where marketing can be done. Trying to gain followers and investing in every channel is going to take you off track and end up your business. So, it’s best to follow up with the most popular ones, get to know about their cons, compare them, and then choose one or two amongst all of them and invest in them.

You need to know which part of the audience your brand needs to target. If you have a company that has a target audience that needs to sell directly to the customers, then Facebook is the best option for you. It is one of the largest platforms where you can engage and build a relationship with a wider audience. If your target audience is teenagers or youth, then Snapchat and Instagram will be the perfect fit for you. Both of these are the fastest-growing sites where you can grow tremendously by promoting your products by collaborating with influencers. This will lead to brand recognition which is your ultimate goal. In case your social media marketing companies wants to target other companies, then LinkedIn might perform the best. It can be used for both B2B and B2C businesses.

  • Identifying and setting up your goal

If you are active on social media, then it can offer numerous benefits for your business. There are too much things that you can attain through social media. Some of them are engaging with an audience and expanding it, increasing traffic, gaining feedback, and providing social media marketing strategy.

For achieving all of this successfully, you need to identify what you need to plan and set a goal for it. It doesn’t mean to overboard yourself with expectations. Set a large goal and divide it into small and attainable goals that you need to accomplish in a particular time period.

  • Know who your audience is

When a message is specially created on the basis of a relevant buyer, it will be much more effective. Developing a behavior in which you work on the basis of the target audience is necessary for becoming a successful social media marketer. Some information should be taken to get insights into your audience.

Review your clients and know which products they like the most, hear out the drawbacks of the products they don’t like. Get to know your product from a customer’s view.

  • Engage with your audience actively

Even If you create your content based on your audience, then also you can’t just post it and go offline. It is really necessary to engage and communicate with your audience so that you can build trust and connection with them.

  1. Reply to the comments on the posts and make them feel welcomed.
  2. Talk and communicate online for creating some sort of connection with them.
  3. Share the information which they might relate to.
  4. Solve their queries related to you and your brand.
  5. Appreciate your customers and reward them in some way.
  6. Use hashtags that help you in being more discoverable.
  • Expand your audience

If you want to be successful in social media marketing, target on increasing your audience on the social media channel you want to focus on. The more the audience will be, the more your brand will be recognized and create the possibility of having more sales.

  1. Present customers –Keep an eye on your present customers and check if they still follow you on your social media. Update the customers with all information they need to know. Create content timely, so that you don’t lose your presence among the crowd.
  2. Carry out paid ads-It is very well known that organic reach is amazing but in case if your lead generation companies needs to expand its customer base in a shorter period of time, then you can go for paid promotions. It helps to reach and convey our message to a larger number of people which would not be possible by any other way.
  3. Content Followers– There will be some of your followers who will love your content and work, it is your primary duty to appreciate and be grateful to them. You should encourage those followers to be in contact with your brand through every means so that you can give them timely updates.
  • Be Consistent in delivering content

Social media isn’t about being highly active one day and ghosting on others. It requires time to build a trustful connection with the audience. You can reduce time and take small breaks in between but it’s necessary to maintain your presence in the long run. The frequency of posts that need to be posted depends on the platform. For example, Twitter and Instagram change it’s algorithm frequently, so you need to post more and more on these platforms to make your presence count whereas platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook don’t require this much attention.

  • Collaborate with influencers

Before buying any product, the majority of the buyers seek reviews from influencers. Influencers focus on establishing credibility among social media users, so people trust the recommendations made by them. So, reach out to the influencers with a more public base so they can help in expanding your brand and develop your brand recognition. Offer them a good deal in which both of you are benefited and try to maintain a relationship with them. At the same time, be aware of what they post about your brand and work accordingly.

  • Monitor your progress

We set the goals so that we are able to compare and measure our progress. Otherwise, it will be difficult for us to know which strategies are working right for us and can be followed up in the future for our growth. So watching the right metrics is needed for strategizing further.

  1. Keep a check on all your social platforms and count the total number of followers who are new to your profile. Count the number of new followers in a particular time period and compare it after some time. This will help you in knowing what content is attracting more followers. Maintain statistics of this data and strategize according to that.
  2. Check and measure the posts having maximum engagement. The content which has maximum likes, comments, shares, and retweets is liked the most by the audience. It will elevate your engagement if you create content that gets you bigger responses from them.
  3. The ability to attract more audience into your website or blog post is the primary need for growth through social media. You have to notice and keep an eye on little things that can help you understand where you can be lacking. Keep the check of the click that is made to your blogs and website. Getting to know this much detail will let your company aware and you make an effort in the right direction.
  4. If you are getting good responses from your followers and they are downloading your content from the landing pages, then you are in going in the right direction.
  5. It is all about increasing the leads so that your company can be considered successful and renowned. It takes a lot of effort and time to promote strangers to qualifying leads for your company. This is the most important metric which monitors your progress.

Conclusion

These are some of the strategies that you must follow to make your small business successful. Social media is a great place to interact with the consumer directly. So, leverage social media platforms properly for the exposure of your small business.

Author’s Bio:

Hi, my name is Anuj, and I am a content writer. I have worked with many Email Marketing Companies. I am creating many articles on WordPress, Information technology, Website Designing, Search Engine Optimization, social media, etc.