Market research can be a vital way of identifying improvements that need to be made to your business. Here are a few mistakes to avoid when conducting research.

Relying solely on secondary research

Whilst you can learn a lot from the findings of other people, it’s important to also do some of your own personal primary research. There may be pieces of advice specific to your company that you can’t learn through a book or an advice blog. A few sources of primary research include surveys, focus groups and analytics. You can create surveys for free at sites like SurveyPlanet.

Targeting the wrong groups

It’s important that your research is aimed at the right demographic. When conducting surveys, don’t let anyone and everyone answer them. Instead, try to find specific people who are likely to be interested in your product – and therefore likely to give genuine and helpful answers. For instance, if your product is accounting software, you’ll want to focus your research on self-employed professionals and people working accounting roles.  

Ignoring your competitors

You can learn a lot about your target market from your competitors. By keeping an eye on the tactics they’re using and the types of clients they’re taking on, you can help to improve your company in order to attract some of these clients. Alternatively, you may notice a gap in the market than none of these companies are appealing to. Tools like Tussell can offer reports that can allow you to keep an eye on competitor contracts. Tools like SpyFu meanwhile may be able to help you identify competitor keywords.

Not trialling/experimenting

Sometimes the best form of research is to trial and experiment. If you own a restaurant and want to know whether customers are going to like a new dish, giving it a week’s trial could allow you to see whether it sells well and if people enjoy it. Experimenting with different combinations of the same dish meanwhile may allow you to find the best combination. You should still rely off customer feedback and not your own opinion, otherwise you’re simply working off your instincts.

Not doing enough of it

The biggest mistake companies make with market research is not doing enough of it. Surveying a handful of people isn’t enough in most cases – surveying a larger amount of people will give you more reliable data to work from. Market research should be ongoing too so that you’re constantly finding ways to improve your business – the best companies get into a habit of surveying every customer and constantly keeping tabs on competition.

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Throwing an event for your business can be very exciting. It might be the launch of a new product or a chance to meet and network with people who might be beneficial to your business. Whatever the reason, here’s how to get the most out of a business event.

Choose The Venue & Time Wisely

These are two important factors to consider when running an event. The location of the venue and the venue itself has to be a place that’s easily reachable for people that might be traveling from far and wide. The venue needs to cater for the number of guests you have attending and for it to be functional for what you’d like to go into the space. The time is also necessary to think about, especially if those attending have a full-time job. It might be something that they can’t get to unless it happens before 9 am or after 6 pm.

Have A Plan For The Event

What’s the plan for the event itself? You should have a schedule for the whole thing from start to finish so that if it’s bigger than just what you can handle, it’s good to have an order of service that you can hand out to all those involved. That way, everyone knows what’s going on and when. You might need to hire a quality projector screen for your event or catering to keep your guests well fed and watered throughout. These are all things that need thinking about prior to it.

Put Yourself Out There

When the event’s in full swing as a business, you want to be getting out there and mingling with your guests. Don’t necessarily go straight into talking business but instead try to build relationships with your guest first before getting into what collaborations could happen. You could save that for another day but for the event, just make it an opportunity to get to know everyone on a personal level because that can make it more likely that they’ll want to work with you going forward if they know you well enough.

Have Branded Goodies To Take Home

Everyone loves a freebie, so it’s worth considering what you could give as some goodies for your guests to take home. A lot of other companies like to feature their products or services, and they’ll often give free stuff to put into a goodie bag, but you should also pop in some branded products too from your own business. This will encourage them to remember or look back on it at a later date. Pens, notepads, and anything that’s used on a daily basis are worth putting in.

Business events are always a great way of meeting new people and raising your profile. So plan the event, giving yourself plenty of time to find the right venue in the right location. Make a plan for the event’s proceedings and put yourself out there when it comes to networking with others. It’s a chance to show off the business, so by all means, show it off!

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Life is increasingly reliant on perception, rather than reality. If you’re running a business, then it doesn’t matter what’s really going on behind the scenes: what matters is that your potential customers see you as a trustworthy, quality company. It’s all about how you’re perceived. A positive image will lead to success; a negative image will lead to, well, less success. So take a look at your business. When people see your company, are they impressed? Are they inspired by what they see, or do they head to look elsewhere? Below, we take a look at some of the tried and tested methods for leaving a positive imprint on customers and fellow businesses.

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At the Office

It would difficult not to be impressed by a company that has large windows, modern decor, and cool features built into their office. The second you walked through the door, you’d get the sense that this was a business that takes themselves seriously, and that they were going places. On the flip side, an office that is small, cramped, dark, and all-around uninspiring would leave you with doubts. So if you’re trying to impress visitors to your office, make sure it’s in line with the image you’re trying to project through your branding, be it that you’re a traditional company, or modern.

Look the Part

Of course, it’s not just the office that’ll impress others. As the company leader, how you present and conduct yourself will also be important. Just as your office should speak to your company branding, your presentation will speak to your personal branding. As such, it’s imperative that you “look the part.” If you want to be taken seriously in business, you should dress properly and arrive at your meetings professionally — this means being well-groomed, well-dressed, and arriving in a clean, tasteful car. If you need a better vehicle for your business, take a look at https://www.tradecarsandcommercials.co.uk/. You don’t need to have a bespoke suit or business wear, but they should be clean and free of scuffs.

Put on a Show

Making sure that the various aspects of your business are watertight will impress new people you meet, but only to a point. To take things further, you’ll need to do things bigger and better — you need to “wow” them. A good way to do this is to put on an event for your business. It could be a launch event, or a celebration of your success, or anything else. The only rule is that you need to ensure that it’s impressive! And that means music, food and drink, a great location, and so on.

Do Things Differently

People these days are impressed by people and companies who do things differently, so give them a little of what they want! Now, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but if you have the opportunity to do things a little bit different from what everyone else is doing, then take it. It’ll make people take notice, if nothing else.

 

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When you’re a working mama, you often know that your time can be stretched. Especially when you’re self-employed, run your own business, or work from home. You’ve got a lot on your to-do list and not always enough time to tick everything off. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to struggle forever. Sure, at first, you can feel as if you’re struggling with work and life, because not everything can be a priority. But, is there a way for you to change this? The short answer is, always!

Now, to some, the balance is never quite balanced. There are always going to be things that come your way and throw you out. And this then means that you’re struggling. That there’s no real way for you to figure out how you can make these two sides of your life to work. But there is. Yes, it takes work. And yes it also takes practice, but it’s certainly not impossible. You just have to go through a trial and error process, and most importantly of all, learn to say no! But we’ll talk a lot more about that later.

Let’s take a look at some of the challenges you face and the best ways to remedy them.

Decide What You Want

First of all, you’re going to want to make sure that you know what you want. Do you know what matters most to you?  Do you want a thriving home business or something small-fry and passive? Do you want to be a hands-on mom who’s always there, or a bit more distance? The actual ‘what’ you decide on doesn’t overly matter here – as long as it’s right for you and you’re able to get that idea firmly in your mind.

Set Priorities

Now, when you know what you want, it’s time to work on your priorities. Because if you’re going to be able to find that balance, you need to have things that matter to you more. But when you can prioritize one or two or things things in life, it will help you to get that balance.

Cut The Fat

As you’re going that, you then need to cut the things that don’t matter. Say you have parenting, business, home, social, group, health and fitness, and community commitments, you cannot do them all, so what matters most? Can you get a cleaner or reduce the number of groups you’re in to make balance easier?

Say No More

The next thing that you need to do here is make sure that you’re saying no a lot more! If you always say yes to people in life and you feel like you’re letting people down, see it as you’re out of balance. If you start to say no because you’re focusing on those priorities, you’ll feel much calmer.

Set Boundaries

When it comes to your work, you need boundaries. That’s just how this is. You cannot just take on everything and be available to your clients or customers at all times. Setting working hours and making sure that you’re not accessible around the clock is so important for you here.

Manage Your Time Better

If that sounds alien to you, maybe you’re not managing your time as well as you could be? If you give yourself those set hours, such as 7am-12pm, or 8am-4pm, or even 7-9am and then 4-6pm, then you know you only have set a number of hours to get things done. And your clients know when you contact you too.

Prioritize Productivity

To help you do that, you need to make sure that you are as productive as possible in the time that you’ve set for working. The more productive you are when you’re working, the less time you will need to spend working to get it all done. It can help you to get a better balance.

Separate Your Worlds

Something else that may help you here, is the ability to keep your working world or business and your home life separate. And when you work from home, this may seem hard. But you can do it but creating an office in a space that is not openly integrated with your living space. For this, you may want to convert something like your garage, or even build a space using residential precast concrete retaining walls to make that happen. Then, you can physically keep the worlds apart, which makes balance much easier.

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Switch Off

Now, let’s think more about your home or personal life. If you know that you struggle to separate the worlds because you’re always thinking about work when you’re done, it’s time to learn how to switch off more. You will find that those working hours will help you, and separating the worlds will too, but then you’ll have to intentionally make sure that you are in the moment, rather than still lost in work thoughts!

Be More Present

Now, when you’re aiming to do that, something that will help you, is aiming to be more present. If you’re always in your mind and you’re thinking or planning or worrying, you’re missing out on the moment. And not only that, but if you’re not in work mode when you want to enjoy family time, you’re not making the best use of your time. So aim to be as present as you can at all times.

Align Your Actions

Another thing that you may find really helps you here, is making sure that you align your actions with what you want. If you know that you want to spend more time with your kids, bt you’re always working, then you need to rethink this. However, you should find that if you are being more intentional, you have priorities, and you’re present, you should be able to make this happen!

Assess As You Go Along

Finally, you’re going to want to make sure that this is always seen as a work in progress. Because if you work through each point (or the ones that best speak to you) and then stop, you may find that your time slips and you’re struggling again. This is something that you constantly – and consciously, need to be working on. Make sure that you’re assessing how things are going for you along the way. When you do, you’ll find that it’s much easier for you to make this work.

And that’s all there is to it. Sometimes, it’s easy to think that you’re always going to struggle, and that you’re never going to be able to find a balance in life that you’re happy with – but that’s just not true. You don’t have to find this hard. You really don’t! You can make this work and enjoy a healthy work-life balance. Or, business-life balance, should we see.

The whole idea here, is for you to get better at balancing everything out. If you can make sure that you’re able to set your priorities, be tough on yourself and others, and learn to say no, it gets easier. Because you get a lot clearer on what you need to do. Not only that, but when you can focus more, and use your time more wisely, that helps too!

So, ladies, go forth – know what matters the most to you, be sure to pick and choose the right tools to help you work smarter and live more intentionally. And then, you’ll find that your business-life balance is blossoming!

 

Working from home is a major life goal for a lot of people, including both entrepreneurs who like the idea of being independent, and setting their own schedules, and also busy parents, who can’t afford to disappear down to the office every day, but who can spend some of their precious (and rare) free time working at a laptop.

But what if you’re interested in working from home, while also having a broader business reach? What if you want to run a national, or international business, but can’t currently afford to spend your time travelling the world, or spending a big chunk of each day in an office?

Here are a few ideas on how to increase your business reach while working from home.

 

Get some employees and vehicles, and develop a premium “outcall” service

 

Depending on the nature of your business, it’s possible that you could run your main operations from home, but then also hire some employees, get a commercial vehicle from a company like https://www.edencommercialsltd.co.uk/locations/cumbria, and develop a premium “outreach” service.

Sure, this will take a bit of work, but it can be pretty rewarding. Maybe you run a small consulting business, and a customer halfway across the country wants to have an in person meeting before deciding whether to use your services.

In this case, a specially trained staff member could go and do the meeting on your behalf, and you could do the key work from home.

Or, maybe you run a small part-time restaurant from home, but you can only afford to be open for a couple of hours a day, and have a limited number of people in the local area who would be interested in stopping by. Hiring someone with a van or car to do deliveries for you could allow you to advertise on bigger websites, and sell a lot more via takeaway orders.

 

Involve yourself in web-based knowledge work that allows you to work for people across vast distances

 

Web-based work is the gold standard when it comes to working from home, and having a large reach. This is because you typically won’t be limited by basic infrastructure and logistical issues. Instead, you’ll often be able to provide your services to people across the country, or across the world, just as easily as you would to someone living three doors down from you.

You could work as a freelance writer or graphics designer, or as a trainer who does consultations via video call.

In any case, moving your career in this direction can open a lot of doors.

 

Make your professional outings count – become a presence at trade fairs and similar events

 

It may be that occasional professional outings could go a long way in helping to expand your reach, and brand reputation. It’s just a matter of making those outings really count, so that you can still manage to spend most of your time at home.

A good idea here could be to identify the biggest trade fairs and relevant professional gatherings for you, and then book yourself a stall.

Even just going to 3 or 4 of these kinds of events a year might really help to make your business into a presence that people recognise.

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