Grow your small business

Uncover secret tips on getting ahead to grow your small business

As a small business owner, you don’t have the time and resources that a big enterprise company would. So how do you grow your small business without the PR, the marketing or a client relations team?

With the internet advancing so rapidly today, you now have access to many tools. These tools are available either for free or for a pretty low price per month. These tools allow the playing field to become somewhat level, giving you the opportunity to compete like never before.

With that said, if you are a small business owner, you should have a tool stack. But what does this include? Your tool stack should incorporate software for sales, marketing and customer success.

Now incase you are wondering about how tedious it would be to have a ton of tools for many different task. We recommend that you find software to complete more than one of these tasks. It should also have the ability to integrate easily with your website and it should also be easy to use for you and your team.

Big companies appear to be doing it all, but they aren’t so why should you. Here is an idea of what tool stacks allow you to do.

Do More through Automation and save time.

Automate & Save Time

Automate task to grow your business rapidly and easily without giving up too much time!

Imagine being in 10 places at the same time, reaching out to your target audience on various platforms, following up with clients and much more without even feeling stretched or stressed. This maybe impossible as a single human but with software you can make this happen.

Not only will software make this happen but it will give your business the appearance of a professional establish business supported by a team!

With software mentioned a little later you can create personalised content to feed your audience and then schedule it to be posted over days, weeks and months to various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and whatever other platforms you are on.

You can even automate welcome emails for new customers, review & referral emails or abandon cart emails and the list goes on!

These simple automations allow you to save so much time and get more done.

Measure and Improve using tools like analytics.

Measure & Improve

What gets measured gets improved!

Often times when having sessions with customers and we are trying to figure out the stats on their business, their web presence or social media presence, however, it is hard to get accurate details because some businesses just don’t measure tasks, marketing strategies and customer success rates. And if they do, they may not be doing it correctly.

Having a tool to execute task and provide accurate metrics is essential. By measuring stats like your website conversion and bounce rates, depending on your results, you can figure out why customers are leaving early or not following through to the checkout.

There are a few tools that can be used including analytics. Analytics tools like Google Analytics allow you to easily gather this information but you will need to set it up right.

We are obsessed with our customers and as a result, our customers customers. Because of this we use user scroll and heat maps, session replays and much more to better understand the behaviour of customers and how to provide them with the greatest experience possible.

Read more about what we think about Customer Experience here.

Get to know your customers better

Know Your Customers Better

Some of the best ways to learn more about your market and customers are through customer analysis and customer calls. Yes, it is that simple! We keep up with all of our customers to see:

  • How they are doing
  • what is the impact our service is having,
  • how they can improve and also
  • how we can improve.

Customer calls give us tremendous amounts of insights into understanding how we are actually doing. They also help us build up more revenue by turning those calls into testimonials. These testimonials then act as social proof to potential customers to showcase our service.

In our web strategy sessions with our customers, we recommend and implement some of the following tools such as:

Of course some tools change depending on the business but we have found these are the most common in helping to grow businesses. We also use these tools in our day to day to help us provide an amazing experience to our customers.

If are you currently using these tools, drop a comment below and let us know how these tools are helping you and your company get to the next level and increase revenue.

Don’t have any any of these tools, no worries! Just get started with one of the them or feel free to reach out to us.

Schedule your free consultation

We can help you create a web strategy to dominate in your market, get ahead and grow your business!

What is Web Customer Experience – Part 1

When you think about the experience your customers are receiving, what do you think about?

When I think about customer experience, I think about how customers interact with a business in a delightful way from the first interaction to building and fostering a strong relationship.

It’s almost like walking into an Apple store in a mall, the atmosphere is right, the lighting is perfect, the product just screams quality plus the service from the team that is ready to assist combines together makes an exceptional experience.

Think, Prepare, Take Action

But this is no accident, way before apple was ever in a mall, Steve Jobs spent so much time perfecting the environment a customer walking in should experience – he actually spent months building different prototypes for the store.

This physical experience is what I help transfer online to businesses especially those who are online only and don’t have a brick N motor setup.

There is fierce competition online and offline, store fronts are decked out strategically to attract the people walking by trying to entice them to come in. Similar to online everyone is trying to attract and get your customers attention and their selling similar to very different products from you.

So your website first impression is very important and it should be optimized to give value by way of helping customers make that decision which that your product is right for them.

Don’t Be Needy – Needy is Creepy

After attracting them inside step 1 is complete and now they are in the engage phase. This part is very crucial because too much at once can cause your potential customers to run away. You want them to know assistance is there whenever they are ready.

Ever been to a website and its flooded with adverts, or there is something popping up constantly trying to get your attention to purchase a product? Comment below let me know how you feel about that.

As they browse around the store all of your products and services are laid out just for them in a manner that makes it super easy for them to digest the content and convert much quicker. This would include customer reviews, how the products adds value to a client so benefits and features, perhaps even a chat feature or FAQ so the potential client can ask questions.

Now as we can see a lot of situations that occur offline also occur online. But as we get further you’ll discover the areas that most businesses fall down in even though it is super simple with today’s technology.

From a Manufacturing Brick & Mortar to Online with 24/7 Exposure

To advance their brand and get ahead of their current competition. MIS teamed up with Luova Labs to create an online experience that would allow its customers to better connect with its brand and to also increase its brand presence online.

BECOMING THE LEADER ONLINE

MIS realized that their online presence could be improved as they were relying solely on Facebook and Instagram to connect with customers and get their brand out there. They set out to make their presence more known and efficient, by creating a web experience which would be inclusive of new content and features to capture its audience.

The company worked with Luova Labs to bring its vision of an full scale online brand experience to life through an e-commerce solution that would meet the demands of the customers – to discover more about MIS and their full range of products. The solution was released in 3 months with close to 200 products, featuring 20 recipes and growing by the week.

With this online solution MIS has spread its reach to 10 countries outside of where it manufactures and has been also able to bring an engaging experience to over 2100 unique visitors so far with the ability to continually grow through marketing campaigns.

After teaming up, Luova Labs has been able to help MIS Products build a stronger online brand presence with its customer base. This first successful solution will now allow MIS to grow and continue to advance in their connections with its customers by providing greater transformations in the near future.

“Before the project started, we could clearly see the value we would have received from having this online solution because Luova provided a prototype. Then after the website was launched, it definitely impacted the business, we have for sure received more attention in regards to our products and more people are reaching out to us asking about them.”

– Kesi Pilgrim, MIS Products Limited Manager

Introducing Systemisation and Automation to improve daily business processes

Ad Agency advances the norm of customer interaction.

A one-of-a-kind ad platform tailored for highway advertising.

Challenge

Being an Ad Agency company can be difficult, especially in terms of how you manage and interact with your clients. We helped our client to revolutionize the way customers viewed their advertisements.

The advertisement platform has allowed our client to save on client call time by 30% and easily manage their ad locations without physically going out to them.

The ad agency teamed up with Luova Labs to solve issues in their customer experience and management processes. Customers would call almost everyday to find out where their advertisements were located, as a result this took up a lot of valuable management time. Their management of the entire system was also done via excel which made it difficult to data out of this type of system.

Approach & Solution

After we understood the complete process, we envision a smart and systematic experience that would integrate with the company and their customers simply. A custom platform featuring a mobile application and a web application which would cut down on customer call time providing a more automated and interactive experience for the customer.

Using the web application, customer could not only see where their current advertisements were placed but they also got a visual of how it looked in its environment. The customer could now also keep track of how many advertisements they had with the company and make request for new placements.

Transformation

Being the leader in outdoor advertisements, the company was able to offer this unique platform to current and potential customers as a feature when working with the company, this allowed them to secure an edge ahead of other advertisement agencies. The system also allowed the management team to get a wholistic view of what was going on with there ad placements – in regards to payments, open placements, recurring clients etc.

One of the great parts of the system that their customers loved was the ability to view there advertisement in its physical location along with the environment around it. From here clients could also request the  physical location and get directions to the particular placement.

Results

With the implementation of this custom platform into the company, it allowed the ad agency to be on the cutting-edge. It has also made the relationships with their customers much stronger.

“The application from Luova Labs took our company to the next level, no other company had a similar system, they were all still using paper and there wasn’t any feedback going to the customer, this application brought total transformation to the way we handled our client relationships. The customers got regular interactive feedback, we also used it to stay in touch with our clients and to keep a strong relationship going with them.” – Andrew Clarke, Manager of Adopt-A-KM

Improving your customer & team relationships through data?

Data is everywhere today, our businesses are surrounded by it and it comes in many forms as well. Every transaction made, web site visit, ad click, ebook download, customer call provides us with insight that can be used and manipulated to help us better understand our audience. However, most businesses don’t tap in and capitalise on the wealth that can be found from this data.

I have helped many companies build stronger relationships with their clients and their internal team by reusing data just sitting in storage on the computer doing nothing.

How much do you really know about your customer?

Taking the simplest data perhaps in an excel spreadsheet and visualizing it for your clients allows you to get better insights not only about how your business helps your clients, but WHY your clients truly seek out your services. Understanding your clients pain points or understanding how your team communicates can show you ways to improve those relationships which lead to improved sales and team work.

So … How are you using your data to improve your business?

Why you shouldn’t sell products / services?

You are probably saying what the heck is this guy talking about. Everyone sells products, all of the big brands like Nike, Apple, Microsoft and the list goes on. However, I’ll counter you with no, none of these big brands sell products. What do you mean? These companies have figured out that their clients will spend more money and also get their friends to spend money when they sell the best thing that comes before selling products. Take a few seconds to think about what this could be ….

BOOOMM!!

If you said EXPERIENCE, you are 100% correct, lets think about this for a second, why would thousands of people line up for hours to purchase phones, why does Nike invest so much in advertising using popular celebrities, why do high end company advertisements appear to be about so much things other than what they physically offer or provide. If it is a really good experience, you can bet it will appeal to all 5 of your clients senses.

Photo by Crew on Unsplash

These big mega brands are selling the experience, that feeling of “I have one of the first”, the feeling of identifying with their favorite celebrity etc. The bottom line is, clients are humans like you and me and as humans we all have 6 needs that we live by that have to be fulfilled. But lets drill down into the one need that can propel your business today perhaps the most which is “significance”, according to Tony Robbins, “people will pay disproportionately to feel significant than for any other need.”

Golden Tip – It doesn’t always take money to create an experience but rather some creativity.

Of course, this won’t work if you are selling a shitty product, but if your product is good, let us see how we can create an experience and charge more money. How can you provide more value to your clients than anyone else is doing right now. Its simple, I can give you an answer but there are so many industries and markets out there that one answer just won’t fit them all. Sooo …, how do you figure it out, you ask the person you want to add value to, your client. Listen, when some clients have the opportunity to give you feedback and tell you directly what they think about your product and how you can improve, they will give you the ideas and even tons of marketing solutions to appeal more to people like them, their friends and even their competitors.

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Golden Tip – How can you increase the level of experience within your company? Answer this and you are guaranteed to have the ability to increase you price.

The feedback you are seeking can be in the form of a personal call or a survey form online – I prefer personal calls however, it builds a better connection, better response, brings more information and you can dig deeper with even more questions you may not have anticipated because the client is opening up to you. Even doing this simple action alone, adds value and creates an experience itself.

Ask yourself, when is the last time someone called you and asked about a product you purchased and how they could improve their experience with you?