If your small, family-owned business is struggling to keep up with the market, it might be time for an update. Balancing all sides of your business, from social media to invoicing, can be difficult. If you’re struggling with specific aspects, like say accounting or marketing, you might be burying yourself even deeper in a hole that’s difficult to escape from.
With the right funding–like a small business loan–you’ll be able to invest in these aspects and help boost your traffic flow and revenue. Funding can provide you with the tools or employees you need in order to revamp your business and bring it into the modern world.
Here are four ways to invest in modernizing your family business.
A good way to modernize your business is to rebrand. Your logo, website, social media pages and brick-and-mortar all tell your customers how to think and feel about your business. Your design should tell a story. To start, you need to know what audience you’re trying to reach and design from there.
Dexterous” created a beautiful logo redesign for them.
Your brand’s colors and logo can evoke emotions and action from consumers. Look at competitors who are doing well and see what type of aesthetic they’re using. With the right funding, you can hire a graphic designer for your online store, social media pages your brick-and-mortar.
Another way to modernize your business is through marketing. Marketing is how you reach the world beyond your small town. Through it, you can see what your competitors are doing, if/how they’re outranking you on search engines and what steps you can take to outrank them.
Your family business might not have a presence on social media pages (yet), which causes you to miss out on a wider range of consumers, especially for your online store. Hiring a marketing manager—either full-time or for contract work—will help ease this burden. Marketers can look at current trends of posts and videos that go viral can help boost your chances of going viral. People will want to share your posts, which means your reach can get even larger.
Your small business might be struggling because your finances aren’t being managed as well as they could be. Investing in the right accounting software can help you better balance your books as well as pinpointing areas that might be hurting your cash flow. Tools like Xero provide help with day-to-day financial tasks, from invoices to payroll to purchasing inventory. Most software can connect to third-party accounts–like your financial advisor, accountant, or business’s bank account–making it easier for you to understand and run the software. Prices vary for each software, but most offer free trials so you can try before you buy. It’s always wise to invest in the right tool for your business, but if you don’t have the funding yet, consider taking out a line of credit to help pay for the tool until you’re able to do so with your cash flow.
One great way to showcase your products/services and how they affect others is through high-quality photos and videos. Low-quality, grainy images are less likely to have engagement. So, if you offer physical products–like clothes, coffee, soaps, food, etc.–you want your photos to be the highest quality and formatted to fit the current trends on social media (flat lays are hot right now, for instance).
You can use photos to tell consumers how your products will improve their lives through slideshows. Videos are also a great way to show how your products or services benefit your consumers. Let’s say you’re a tax accountant. You can use video to highlight how your clients feel stress- and worry-free about their taxes since you’re the one filing them. Or you can highlight customer testimonials. You might not be a master photographer or videographer, so consider investing some of your funding into hiring one either full-time or freelance. 99designs can help you hire a photographer or match with a video production specialist who will come to you.
Your small business doesn’t have to struggle and fall behind the times. With the right funding, you’ll be able to hire the right employees and buy the right tools that will help bring your family business into the modern trends. Investing in accounting tools, redesign, photography, and marketing can help better establish and expand your brand and reach, which can possibly increase your revenue.
This article was written by Constantina. Constantina is an SEO Specialist at Kabbage, a small business loans provider. She holds a Master’s degree from Northwestern University, where she learned how to create content that could best be organically shared. When not in the marketing world, Constantina enjoys strategy games and singing along to the Law & Order: SVU theme song.