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How Your Business Can Create Positive First Impressions

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Positive First Impressions|How Your Business Can Create Positive First ImpressionsIf your business is going to find the success you feel it deserves, you’ll need to create the right first impressions whenever you meet new people or try to win clients. But what does it mean to create positive first impressions and how can your business do it? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, so read on now if you want to learn more about the whole process.

Tidy Up

First of all, it’s a good idea if you tidy up your office interiors before anyone arrives. When people walk into your workplace and see mess, they see chaos and disorganization. Those are not ideas that you want to have associated with your business in any way at all. So be sure to keep the place tidy and organized as much as you possibly can.

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Improve Your Reception Area

The reception area that your business has in place will be one of the most important things of all when it comes to creating good first impressions. You’ll want to make sure that your reception looks the part and that there’s always someone on hand to meet and greet visitors who arrive. It should be a place that’s efficient and helpful, as well as friendly and welcoming.

Try to be Easy to Contact

Trying to be easy to contact and stay in touch with is definitely something you’ll want to do. When clients or business associates want to talk to you, that’s generally a good thing and something that most business owners want to happen. Those connections can open up all kinds of opportunities, so don’t make it hard for people to get in touch with you. Provide your details and respond in a timely fashion.

Present the Exterior of the Workplace Well

It’s a good idea to focus on the exterior of your office or workplace. That’s the part of your business that people are going to see before they actually step inside, so you’ll want those visual impressions to be positive. You can use a large water tank to store water for your lawn, trees and plants if you want to impress people with the greenery on display outside your office. Simply keeping it clean and tidy will help too.

Always be Punctual

Finally, you should try to remember the importance of always being punctual and on time. If you’re not punctual, you’ll create very bad first impressions because that’s the one thing that tends to annoy people, especially busy people who have better things to be doing than waiting around for you to show up. It’s a classic mistake and could really harm your business if you’re not careful about keeping track of time.

As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do if you want to make positive first impressions with your business. It’s always worth trying to convey a positive image of your business because you never know who might be paying attention at any given moment.

4 Ways to Ensure Your Business Remains Up-to-Date

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Up-to-Date Business|4 Ways to Ensure Your Business Remains Up-to-DateYour business needs to stay up-to-date if you want to compete with others in your industry. If you don’t pay attention to whether you’re making the right choices, you could find that your business falls behind. Staying up-to-date means giving customers what they want, using the right technology, equipment, and best practices to deliver. It can be easier than you might think to let your business get behind and allow other businesses to steam ahead. There are several things that you should review frequently and focus on if you want to keep your business forward-thinking and as up-to-date as possible.

Review Your Equipment

Your business equipment keeps your business running. You need it to complete essential operations and ensure your business remains productive. If it’s out-of-date or not as efficient as equipment that your competitors are using, you could be falling behind. Reviewing your equipment each year helps you to determine whether you might need to update it. It could be time to get some new Thompson Rock mixers to use on-site, or maybe you need to replace your office printer. Whatever equipment you use, it could start to be outdated long before it truly stops working. Keep an eye on what your competitors are using to keep up with industry changes.

Continually Update Your Website

Your online marketing and activities also make a difference in how connected your business is to the demands of the modern customer. If your website is outdated, it could be a huge hit to your business reputation. It’s easy to let your website become out-of-date if you don’t maintain and update it. Setting up your site is an important first step, but you can’t just leave it there. You need to maintain your site and might even need to redesign it completely every few years to ensure it looks and functions like a modern website.

Have a Technology Strategy

The technology that your business uses helps you to do a huge range of things, from recording and organizing data to connecting with your customers. Business technology doesn’t necessarily go out of date too quickly, so you don’t have to worry about replacing the tech that you use every year. However, it is important to keep up with the latest trends and practices and to assess whether new technologies will benefit your business. You don’t need to buy every new tech that becomes available, but you should make sure your business isn’t missing out.

Train Your Employees

The people who work for you also make a difference in the modernization of your business. They also need to have the correct knowledge and training to keep your business up to date. They should know the best practices in your industry and refresh their skills regularly too. Of course, as their employer, it’s up to you to help them do this. Providing ongoing training opportunities is important to help your staff stay up-to-date.

Keep your business up-to-date by staying on top of developments in your industry and the changing needs of your customers.

How To Restore A Business Reputation

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Reputation Management|How To Restore A Business ReputationNo business, no matter how large, small or seemingly impenetrable, is free from the benefits or disadvantages of having a good or bad reputation. It can take only one small social media scandal for your profits to dip. Just look how the reason release of the Samsung Galaxy Fold was handled. Sending out test units to online reviewers, many content creators found that the foldable screen could easily break when pulling off a seeming screen protector. This was not told to said creators ahead of time, and so they quite understandably fell into that trap.

From then on, the narrative regarding said phones was that they were a shoddy product, they didn’t work, and that folding phones were a gimmick. Samsung are now on the back foot, are redesigning elements of those models, and will need to re-release them. The business reputation has been somewhat tarnished, and stock value dipped. Even for a company as massive as Samsung, negative perceptions and narrative can stop their expected yearly results dead in their tracks.

But how do you restore a business reputation? Sure, we know it can be difficult to achieve. But is it possible? We would say yes. We’d also like to explore why:

Control The Narrative

It can sometimes be that the narrative gets out of hand when we are the new target among annoyed consumers. This can, unfortunately, lead to things getting blown out of proportion. Any attempt to publicly deflect that narrative, outside of clear statements as we’ll explain below, can seem like an aggressive and overly-defensive stance. This is where it can be important to take a more subtle approach to shift the narrative back in your favor.

Public relations firms continually strive to restore consumer faith in businesses. It happens all the time. Rewarding loyal customers with extra promotions, offering customers that might have left or cancelled their service with ideal return offers, and taking excess pride in the practices your company has gotten write can often let the passage of time heal the issues that were caused in the first place. This can be freeing for every firm.

On top of that, subtle, yet informative marketing could be used to restore your company’s name in the public consciousness. Services such as Fat Joe, which operate as professional SEO firms, can help you wrap your business name within informative content through their excellent blogger outreach. Not only this, but their ability to raise the rankings of search results can help your firm avoid dying out due to a lack of attention, perhaps during a time when a truly aggressive marketing strategy might need to take a breather.

Understand Goodwill Is Valuable

Goodwill is an evasive word and concept. We can’t gift goodwill back to our shareholders. We can’t use it to pay the electric bill, or pay our staff wages. But without goodwill, the glue that ties a business to its audience washes away. It’s very important to consider this as a vital resource. Connect with your customers, listen to them, interact with them, and treat them as more than just people to bat away with a simple defensive statement.

If you can be clear, concise and direct regarding your strategy, honest about what happened and how things were caused, and why this will never happen again, you can get on top of the issue immediately. Some might even respect you more. You can be certain that your goodwill shall not fade as a result. And that’s extremely important to consider and manage.

Fix The Issues

We are living in the age of social media, where slights and issues aren’t swept under the rug. While we are used to political scandals often being forgotten about as the next one comes along, business injuries aren’t as fortunate to enjoy something like that. And that’s a good thing.

Jumping immediately to fix the issues should there be a legitimate concern is essential to helping you restore your name. Otherwise, this can be a black cloud that hangs over you, particularly if you fail to address it. Restoring a business reputation often means just that, restoration. For example, it could be that your product is defunct. Offering a full refund to any proven purchase can help you overcome the damage. However, taking another step forward and offering up to 50% off another purchase at your store can help people see this as less than a waste of time. It can also help you avoid a very costly class action lawsuit by offering the appropriate reparations immediately.

You gain nothing by ignoring the issues, but potentially plenty of goodwill by fixing them.

Rebrand

Sometimes, a negative business reputation can be so bad, you need to rebrand your operations. This might sound like a dark tactic, but it is often used in many industries. Even after fixing the issues and remaining forward-facing about the troubles you face, sometimes it’s not enough.

Starting again with a new business name, a new logo and aesthetic can be important. Of course, you cannot expect to hide your business past – but you might be able to redefine it. Consider how Dominoes once operated in the late 2000s. After many widespread reports that their US Pizza chains were terrible, and that the recipe tasted awful, they embarked on a major rebrand campaign. Of course, they weren’t shy about it and didn’t change their name, but after revolutionizing every recipe on their menu, for all intents and purposes they were a new firm with a new outlook.

You might be able to practice the same idea. Both front-facing marketing promotions such as these or hidden rebrands to help your firm gain some room to breathe, a rebrand might be just the thing you and your business needs to start again with a strong pace.

With this advice, we hope you’re much better able to shake off or restore a bad business reputation. This can be hard to do, but with enough dedication and a cohesive mindset, you can pull it off. Good luck!