Six ways to keep your business relevant
If your business is not able to stay relevant, then it will not be long before even your most loyal customers desert you in favor of companies who have made the effort to move with the times.
As a business owner, it is your job to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and changes in your industry, and to implement them in your business as best you can. If you find it difficult to keep your company relevant, here are some things that will help.
1) Update your content regularly
Many business owners think that once they have written those blog posts, articles, and product descriptions, or had a content writer do so, they can post it and leave it be.
Although it is true that older content tends to have more authority with search engines, any SEO company worth their salt will tell you that content that is inaccurate and not up to date can do more harm than good, both in terms of search engine rankings and consumer trust.
So, an easy way to stay relevant is to periodically audit and update your old content to reflect the current situation more accurately.
2) Adapt to new trends
Another very clear and effective way to keep your business relevant is to ensure that you are adapting to new market and technological trends as soon as they become available to you. Doing so will not only ensure that you are giving the customer what they want, but also that you are doing so in the most efficient and effective way possible.
For example, if more customers want to use chatbots when they have a problem instead of phoning customer services, ensure you deploy a chatbot asap, or if the latest fitness trend is hula-hooping, then ensure that your gym has plenty of hoops and that you post about your new hula-hooping classes on social media asap. Delay and they will go elsewhere.
3) Increase employee engagement
If you’re wondering how increasing employee engagement can help your business stay relevant, it’s really simple; when your employees are engaged, they will bring more new ideas to the table. They are also often the people who are more in touch with your customer base, so they are the best people to identify trends before they explode.
Listen to your employees, foster a culture where they know they can come to you with new ideas and suggestions, and give your company a fighting chance of staying relevant.
4) Provide knowledge
A really good way you can use your content to stay relevant is to ensure that you stay in constant communication with your target audience, so you know what kind of niche-related issues they are having.
By doing this, you can start creating content that accurately answers their questions and shows them how to do various things. This will help you to become a trusted authority within your chosen business niche so that it will be your company that they seek out when they need X product or Y service.
5) Read more
It’s a simple point, but the more you read industry news and journals, the easier it will be for you to identify potential future trends, which means you can act quickly and start developing new products and services long before the competition do. This will put you right at the forefront of your niche, which will help you appeal to far more customers now and in the future.
6) Make products that customers need
Of course, at the end of the day, if you focus on providing products and services that customers are always going to have a need for and you establish yourself s a prominent seller of these items, whether they be medical supplies, tools, or something else entirely, it is always going to be easier to stay relevant because things that are essential to modern life are always going to be in demand
If you implement the 6 solutions above into your business, then you can be sure that your company will be more relevant now and in the future, than it might otherwise be, and that will help you to keep customers (and find new ones) beat the competition, and ultimately thrive.
However, you should always be willing to adapt and where necessary diversify, which means maintaining a lean business structure and a willingness to change to. If you can do those things, and you implement the ideas above, you simply cannot fail to thrive come what may.
Photo by Jenny Ueberber
