Five Tips For When Business Is Slow

What to do when business is slow? Anything except nothing! Here are some tips for you to do, if your thinking cap brings up nothing right now.

 

Turn Despair Into Action

If you don’t have multiple income streams to rely on yet, times of slow business can be exceptionally hard to deal with mentally. Our five suggestions below for things to do are not to be thought of as “stuff to keep you busy”, but rather an investment in both you and your firm.

Once things have brightened up again, let’s discuss for example widening your range of offers and/or adding new products like the digital ones, if those are missing still.

But first things first, our tips for today!

1. Website Updates

Yeees, it may be a bit boring, but website updates are a vital part of doing business online. Some fresh images and copy on both the home page and other pages can put a quick pep in your step.

In addition to introducing something new, you can catch typos and weirdly phrased sentences for increased professionalism.

While you are at it, consider tweaking texts for improved search engine optimisation on pages that are vital to your specific business.

Pro tip: nobody says you have to create all imagery yourself, but be aware of copyright when uploading stuff you haven’t created yourself. Unsplash is a nice place for photos you can use in commercial projects for free.

2. Marketing

If it has been a while since your last appearance in social media, now is a fabulous time to remind current and potential customers of your existence.

It may be the only nudge someone needs to make an investment, so don’t skip this step!

Don’t forget content marketing either. This includes blog posts, subscriber freebies and other lead magnets.

Maybe all you have to do is repurpose old content? Not everything has to be newly made from scratch.

Pro tip: creating a body of scheduled-for-publication work to take you from today to a few weeks into the future (with regularly published content) will free up time for other important tasks. Having some weeks of content just waiting to show up on your website and social-media profiles can be hard to achieve, so a slow phase is perfect for doing batch work of this type.

I might as well have put search-engine marketing (SEM) here, too, but structural edits are slightly more in the realm of website updates earlier.

3. Research

Dig deeper into a topic you have had in mind for a while, but haven’t previously been able to pursue. Or maybe you realise in this very moment that you could spend some days doing research on a topic that will be good for your firm?

This includes learning a whole new skill, if it is the thing between a stagnant business and success. We are all about life-long learning here, by the way, so now could be a good time to jump in at the deep end on learning something more complex.

In my case, honing my skills using Adobe Illustrator and InDesign has been top of mind for months now. It has been exhausting at times, but very rewarding.

Pro tip: If Adobe software are outside of your budget, or irrelevant for another reason, Affinity Designer and Publisher are free now as long as you make do without its AI portions (which require a Canva paid account).

4. Development

Develop new offerings, whether they are services or products.

It can feel tedious to keep marketing stuff you are very familiar with, so being able to share something new with your audience can create a much needed boost of energy.

Maybe there is an idea floating in the back of your mind already of a product someone had requested earlier? It is nice to know that there is demand for it, once ready to launch a marketing campaign.

Pro tip: consider making the offering a digital one for a long-term push of recurring revenue.

5. Vacation

Vacation? Indeed. We all need to think non-work thoughts and do non-work things to keep a healthy balance, so the question is when you did take a day, week or month off work. Is it long ago?

Finances allowing, get thee recharged now! Enrol in that workshop on painting or baking you have been ogling for ages, read that pile of novels, and spend time with loved ones.

Time off means new thoughts and fresh perspectives when you get back to your work tools and materials.

Pro tip: a mini vacation aka a day off exploring a part of your local area where you usually never go can work winders, too.

Start Small And Keep Building

The list is long of what could get done, so the trick is to audition only a few alternatives and then pick just one to start with. Nobody needs to get stuck due to too difficult decisions at this point. In any case, hang in there if things are rough right now.

Where are you at in your business right now? Share in the comments!

 

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