5 Tips For Upleveling Your Small Business in 2021

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

There’s no doubt that 2020 has been a strange, tough year for business owners. Due to the pandemic and the ensuing economic problems, tens of thousands of small businesses have failed.

Sadly, many of them did nothing wrong. Running a small business is hard enough anyway; add to that stress the crippling mandates and quarantines of this year and you’re left with an almost impossible situation.

However, many businesses will be able to reopen and there’s no reason to think that 2021 won’t offer fresh opportunities. If you’re launching a company, or expect to be in the coming year, take heed of these tips and what you will need to uplevel your business:

Provide new tools for your sales team

Let’s be real clear: revenue generation is the single most important part of your business. Without it, your days are numbered. No matter how many investors you line up, no matter how many business plans you draw up….if you’re not bringing in cash money, you can only sugarcoat it for so long.

Which is why your sales team is your primary asset. You need to devote yourself to understanding what your sales team needs. From employees to management, what is missing? What do they need to break through and help your company excel?

Invest in performance development and diagnostics for the purpose of training or retraining your sales force. Methodologies are changing and you may need sales coaching and training seminars to evolve and adapt to new technologies and industry trends.

Invest in your website

In 2010, you had to have a solid website (even though homepages from that time are hilarious to look back at now) to flourish as a business. In 2020, if you don’t have a responsive user-friendly website optimized for the web, you’re not even in the game. A solid website will have carefully tailored call-to-action pages, SEO-rich content, a blog, and a story about your brand.

And that’s just the content. You must also invest in a development and graphic arts team that can make your website pop visually.

Triple-down on social media

Having a good website is just the first step in making sure you have a robust online presence. These days, it’s not enough to just have a website; you need a strong presence on social media, too. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc. There are dozens. Find at least three platforms and use them to connect your brand to consumers.

Some of these platforms offer virtual interactions. Given what we’ve been through in 2020, it makes sense to try utilizing FaceTime, Zoom, and Skype in addition to social media.

Outsource your SEO

As mentioned above, having a website is important. Fundamental, actually. But without search engine optimization (SEO), your website will not rank on Google and your pages will likely not be seen. Why put in all that work and money on a website only to be invisible to the search algorithms that govern the Internet?

The letters SEO are thrown out a bunch in business discussion but the reality is very few people really know what they’re talking about. There’s a reason for this: SEO is complicated and contains multiple sub-categories of specialization. For this reason, you need to outsource your SEO to a reliable 3rd-party company that understands link building, back-end architecture, and keyword analysis.

Diversify your revenue streams

Many small business owners make the mistake of consolidating all their revenue streams in just a few areas. For example, getting all your business from Facebook sales can backfire pretty horribly if suddenly ad revenue from Facebook gets chopped in half or you get deplatformed for some reason.

While you don’t want to stretch yourself thin by investing in too many revenue streams, you need to make sure that if a certain distributor, manufacturer, or customer base gets tapped out, you won’t be left scrambling. This means diversifying your revenue stream.

2020 has been a tragic year in many ways. For small business owners, it has been an epic struggle. Restaurants, bars, exercise studios - pretty much any business that requires in-person customers - are fighting for their lives. But moving forward, you can learn from the tough lessons of the pandemic.

Look for ways to use virtual services to bolster your sales. Tap into artificial intelligence and automation. Business is tough….but you’re tougher.

Small Business Tax Center • Idea Cafe Home • Sign Up • Biz Grant Center • CyberSchmooz •Coffee Talk with Experts • People in Biz Profiles • Starting Your Biz • Biz Planning • Running Your Biz • FREE Trade Publications • Marketing • Financing Your Biz • Human Resources • Legal & Biz Forms • Managing Your Biz • eCommerce • You and Your Biz • Gen X • Work@Home • The Fridge • De-Stress • Send an Award • Send an eGreeting • Yoga @ Your Desk • Web Guide • Idea Cafe in the News • About Idea Cafe • Advertise on Idea Cafe • Contact Us • Privacy Policy • Site Map • Small Biz News

DISCLAIMER: We hope whatever you find on this site is helpful, but be cautioned that it may not apply to your own situation, or be totally current at any given time. Idea Cafe Inc. and all of its current and past experts, sponsors, advertisers, agents, contractors and advisors disclaim all warranties with regard to anything found anywhere on this family of websites, quoted from, or sent from Idea Cafe. and its related sites, publications and companies. We also take no responsibility for comments published by others on these pages.

TRADEMARKS: The following are Registered Trademarks or Servicemarks of DevStart, Inc.: Idea Cafe®, Online Coffee Break®, The Small Business Gathering Place®, Take out Info®, Biz Bar & Grill®, Complaint-O-Meter®, A Fun Approach to Serious Business™, CyberSchmooz™, and BizCafe™.