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Local Business Week - Top Tips

Local Business Week, taking place throughout this week, aims to encourage the population to buy more from their local businesses as well as providing advice to owners. So in honour of this, Aisling Brennan, Marketing Manager, eFax and Rory Whelan, Voice Marketing Manager, eReceptionist, are here to begin providing that encouragement and advice, with some general top tips for owners below.

Who says local really means local? With the Internet meaning that those in Sydney can be connected to those who live in London, does such a thing as local really exist? That’s debatable, but if you want to compete with the big corporations of the land, it’s important you present the image that you’re a well established business with more than just local reach. The telephone number is one of the first things a person may notice about a business. There are multiple tools out there that let you acquire a national number. You can even acquire a local phone number, which will let you run your business from any location and expand into new territories without the added cost. If you’re based in Leeds but want to appeal to customers in Middlesbrough, then acquiring a local phone number will easily enable you do this.

Pick up the cost – If you want to encourage more sales, then it’s important you give something back and show that you really care about customers and prospective custom. 0800 numbers instantly give a company a customer friendly appearance as they are free to call from landlines. Our research shows that UK businesses have seen a call volume increase of 163% when they switched to a freephone number. Similarly, if a customer is ordering several items, offer them some kind of incentive, perhaps a discount or introduce a loyalty points scheme.

Go Green – A key part of Local Business Week last year was looking at what businesses can do to use less paper and in turn, save a great deal of money. Many see paper as a key office staple, but they don’t realise the amount it costs. The same goes for ink; it’s an office supply that certainly does not come cheap. With the Internet, there are an abundance of programmes and applications that mean you can transfer and sign important documentation without having to reach for the paper and pen!

Look up to the clouds – The right technology is crucial for keeping costs low and enabling business processes to function smoothly, so here is where the cloud can step in and help. Cloud technology can be deployed easily and with automatic software updates, nothing has to be spent investing in maintenance. It also enables the access to important documents and services wherever you may be, so you won’t have to be carrying around computer servers as you travel to important meetings and your business continues to grow. By digitising documents and putting what might have traditionally lived in a dusty old filing cabinet up in the cloud, you’re also protecting one of your businesses’ biggest assets, its data. Yes, computers crash from time to time, but by backing them up in a remote location, you’re putting the processes in place to save your valuable information.

Don’t rely on bricks and mortar – It’s no secret that property prices are sky high across the country, with rents becoming unaffordable for already established businesses and those looking to start up. Don’t believe that to have a successful business means you need to be working from an office. Consider turning your home into a virtual office – technologies now exist to allow you to have instant phone and fax lines which use your existing handsets but keep your home phone number private. The money you save in office rent will be invaluable for the on-going growth of your company.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rory Whelan .