Is it that time of the year for you when your sales have slowed down or come to a halt? As an entrepreneur, it’s normal that you worry about the health of your business, your employees, your obligations, and bills during challenging times. Don’t panic! Experiencing a business slow down can actually be an excellent opportunity for you, your business, and your staff. It’s time to address the weaknesses and focus on connecting with potential leads.
We’ve compiled a list of 6 things you can do when your business is slow. Stay optimistic and let’s get your business in shape for when you do get busy!
Ways to Grow Your Business During a Slow Down
1. Do a Business Audit
Take the business slow down as an opportunity for refinement and reflection. Check your social media, e-mail, and website statistics to see what’s working or not. Without these components, it’s hard to know what’s going on in your business.
Are you meeting your income goals? How can you improve? Once you have your data, you can revisit your marketing and business plans and make tweaks (if needed).
2. Perform a Competitive Analysis.
A drop in business offers the perfect time to perform sales competitive analysis to get ahead of the industry curve. Nosey around and see what your competitors are up to and identify the gaps in the market, the current market trends, and capitalize on them with your current or new services.
Understanding the strength and weaknesses of your competitors will help you strategize for future growth.
3. Diversify Your Service
Slow periods offer time for innovation. It’s time to start thinking about the next new product, service, upgrade, or enhancement that you can provide your customers with. Spend this time to talk to your team and conduct some research and development into ideas.
Likewise, this may also be a great time to set up an online store. You’ve now got the time to research easy to use e-commerce solutions such as Shopify to get started. Additionally, if your business is service-based, you could even offer virtual consultation through video calls or create e-learning courses.
Try to think of as many possibilities for people to access your business from wherever.
4. Learn New Skills
If you want to set your team and business for long-term success, it’s essential to never stop learning. Some of the professional development options during business slow down include taking a course, getting certifications, attending conferences, reading industry blogs, and retaining product knowledge.
You can implement these new ideas, skills, and expertise in different areas of your business which will prove to be very beneficial. It will be beneficial to not only help your business grow but it will also help your team members be motivated and engaged in their roles.
5. Re-Engage and Grow Your Network
When business is slow, it’s important not to isolate yourself. Networking is vital to rejuvenate your business.
Networking is not about collecting a pocketful of business cards, but it’s about staying in touch with colleagues and connecting with likeminded people to identify sales opportunities. You may meet people who would like to collaborate with you or who are willing to share your ideas and information with their other networks.
Having said that, it’s equally important to reach out to past clients. Get in touch with them and ask them how they’re doing When engaging, don’t make it sound like you’re desperate for leads, instead let them know that you’re there to help – you may be surprised with a new project.
Spend this time to learn about your customers and employees by sending them surveys to receive quality feedback. Find out what they like and not like to find better ways to serve them.
6. Update Your Online Presence
When you’re busy, keeping your online presence up to date can be difficult. Use this spare time during the business slow down to your advantage to update your social media pages, blog posts, website, or digital portfolio.
If blogging is part of your marketing strategy, you can research topics, write articles, and based on your editorial calendar, you could even schedule them months in advance.
You can even start an e-book or white paper about a relevant topic in your industry if your inclined and add it to your website as a free download. This can help position you as a subject matter expert among your peers and use it as a way to build your email marketing list. It’s a win-win!
You can even use this time to revamp your website and printed materials. Is your website fully mobile responsive? Is the content optimized for the correct keywords? Are the images old? Is the check-out process working smoothly? It’s time for some spring marketing cleaning, and they’re always things to edit, change, optimize, and test.
Similarly, your social media profiles may need some revamping. Publish posts and modify your profile pictures every-now-and-then to keep your visitors engaged.
We hope this article was helpful. No matter how you decide to invest your time when your business gets slow, the most important thing is to take small positive actions to help your business flourish and increase revenue even with limited cashflow.
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