As the title says, should your company exist? It’s a question not many business owners take the time to ask themselves, but it’s important. There are reasons why businesses exist; what are yours?
If you’re not sure what your answer is, or don’t like the one you’ve come to, don’t worry. Today we’re going to discuss how marketing and SEO can help get things back on track and start justifying why your company should stick around.
Your Company Needs a Purpose
If you are concerned that your company isn’t “relevant”, we need to talk about its purpose before we move on.
On a philosophical level, why does your company exist? Why haven’t you chosen to do something else?
You need to be able to answer that question, or there isn’t much point in being a business owner. There are plenty of valid responses, with a few common ones being:
- I want to make money while staying independent
- I want to change the world as I work
- I want to leave behind a legacy
- I want my work to help my business grow rather than someone else’s
Even “I want to make money” is a fine, if simple, response. It’s also possible to have multiple purposes or to change your purpose as your company evolves. The point is that the question should be easy; you should have an answer ready.
There are a number of ways to find a purpose if you have trouble knowing what yours is. The trick is to identify what will make you happy or at least fulfilled as you run your business.
Time to Justify Yourself to the World
Once you’ve identified why you want to be in business, it then becomes easy to justify its existence to everyone else. After all, a company isn’t much good if only you care about it.
This is where things can get a bit complicated. Debating with yourself is mostly an internal struggle, as you puzzle out what matters to you. Debating with the wider world requires you to get a message out in a world already crowded with messages.
Your company message also has to be nuanced, designed to appeal to your target demographic in such a way that it will encourage them to do business with you. This is where marketing comes in.
You need people to know why they should buy from you. What do they get? Why are you better than the competition?
Your business model needs to account for that. Figure out how you’ll compete. Some go-to ways to compete and differentiate your business include:
- Delivering better prices
- Fast shipping
- Robust services
- Fun events
- A great atmosphere
- Friendly, well-trained staff
The good news is, unless your base business model is a disaster, it’s possible to correct the course. It’s all about adjusting things so your business model works and then marketing yourself as best as possible given your resources.
Your Model Needs to Make Sense
This is worthy of its own article so we won’t dwell too much on it here, but your business model needs to have reasonable potential for profit. If it doesn’t, it often won’t matter how much attention your business gets.
Put very simply, a business needs to make more money than it spends. Moreover, a business should not spend more than it has to in order to achieve the same result.
If your company receives a dozen calls a day, you could have two people manning phones, but shouldn’t. In fact, you may not need anyone manning the phones, instead having someone walk over from a different job whenever it rings.
Anything that requires time, money, or materials to do should be looked over to see if there is a better way to do it. The more efficient your company is, the more profitable it tends to be.
It is this goal of efficiency that now brings us to one of the best ways a company can justify itself: digital marketing.
Marketing and SEO
With a good message and model, all that’s left is to market your company. An interesting element to marketing is that there’s almost always a way to be more efficient.
The less you can spend to get a message out to the same number of people, the better. There are a ton of ways to market in this digital age but one of the best is through what is called search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO for business is something of a marketing gold standard because it allows a company to manipulate Google’s search algorithms to raise your company’s website ranking.
This in turn means it will come up higher when people search terms relevant to your company. It is a very cost-effective way to market as, once your website’s ranked high, it can often be relatively easy to keep it there.
The trouble is that this takes expertise not every business has. If you’re worried your company isn’t up to SEO marketing, hire experts like us who can do it for you.
While a marketing service isn’t free, a good one (like ours) is cost-effective. If you spend a small amount of money to attract a lot of traffic to your website, in the end, you’ll profit.
We’d Love to Make Your Company Relevant and More Profitable
Once you’ve found a purpose for your company, you probably will still like to see it grow. Just getting noticed and making a small profit isn’t where most business owners would like to stop. If you’d like help marketing yourself and growing your business, consider Bear Fox Marketing. We are a well-reviewed marketing company with years of experience helping companies like yours flourish. We’d love to hear from you!