5 Things Small Businesses Should Focus More On

Since the global market is so competitive, small businesses must go above and beyond their current practices in order to remain competitive. Have you been working hard to grow your small business but feel like you are getting nowhere? Here are five things you should focus more on to remain competitive this year.

Market Research

Today’s market trends are constantly changing, and if you want to maintain a competitive edge, you should consider conducting market research on a regular basis. Through the collection of data, market research will allow you to can gain valuable information about your competitors, economic shifts, demographics, the current market trends, and the spending traits of your customers.

Market research will also help you to identify real opportunities and avoid unproductive areas. Therefore, it will help you drive communication with your current customer base and prospects, as well.

Providing Customer Service Through Social Media Channels

To maintain a competitive edge this year, small businesses should also focus more on building out social customer care efforts. For example, you can use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to build real relationships by actively listening to and engaging with your customers.

At Commercient, we actively engage with our customers on our Facebook and Twitter pages (especially since every customer nowadays is on social media), because we want to give you the ideal customer experience. We are also on LinkedIn and Google+.

Integrating All Business Applications

Integration is the talk of the town these days, and so if you haven’t integrated your business applications yet, this is definitely something you’ll want to focus more on this year.

Without integration, data such as customer information, invoicing details, bill to and ship to addresses, inventory, and much more, can become fragmented across all of your different applications, such as your ERP and CRM. This makes it harder for you to address the important things going on in your business because work is spread across so many different applications.

However, when you integrate all your business applications, you can easily automate work. If you want to integrate your CRM and ERP system, you can deploy Commercient SYNC, and it will allow you to sync all your customer data in real-time so that you can access that data anywhere you are.

If you want to integrate all your business apps including tools like your ERP, CRM, Asana, MailChimp, etc., you can take advantage of Commercient IoT Pulse, which allows you to automate tasks and increase your productivity. By leveraging all of our apps, you’ll be able to serve more customers and therefore gain a competitive edge.

Blogging

Although there have been some debate over whether blogging is still relevant in today’s social media environment, we’ve found that blogging is an integral part to small business success. Blogging will not only help you drive traffic to your website, but it will also increase your SEO, position your brand as an industry leader, and help you to build better and strong customer relationships. You can check out our blog here.

Face-to-Face Networking

Since the business world is becoming more and more digital, the value of face-to-face network is often overlooked. However, face-to face networking is the one tool that will help you increase your brand’s exposure, create meaningful relationships and providing growth opportunities at a personal and professional level.

Simply put, communicating in person helps you communicate with customers and prospects in a genuine way. One of the most effective ways to meet face-to-face with the members of your online network is to attend annual conferences and networking events.

Every year we attend Dreamforce and Sage Summit, which allows you to network and form meaningful relationships. You’ll also be able to network with the Commercient team and meet our Co-Founders Richard Jenkins and John Angrove. We hope to see you there!

If you’d like more information about how small businesses can integrate their ERP and CRM systems using Commercient SYNC, or connect your ERP to the internet with IoT Pulse, please contact us today.