Business growth

As a small business owner there’s never a time when giving your marketing strategies a revamp isn’t a good idea - after all, marketing is what attracts customers and customers are what make or break a business. Whether you’re a brand new start-up or a veteran business owner, there’s always room for improvement and new tactics and tools available to boost your marketing, so here we’ll share 10 marketing tips for SMEs to set you on the right track.

Customer feedback is one of the most important tools small businesses have at their disposal to stay ahead of the competition. Gathered and acted upon correctly, it can help you understand what your customers want, identify potential problems and build upon that knowledge to improve your offering going forward. However, in order to effectively use customer feedback, small businesses first need to understand what type of feedback is useful and how to go about asking for it.

As a small business, upgrading or expanding your payment options is a no-brainer. Giving your customers more ways to pay not only makes your business more accessible, but offering multiple ways to pay can increase revenue by nearly 30%. We all know what the benefits of card are, so let’s look at another payment method that’s been taking the world by storm: Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).

Sending out a regular email newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and remind them what your business has to offer. However, if you want people to actually open and read your newsletters, you need to put some thought into the structure, content, timing, and a lot more. In this article, we'll outline how small businesses can create email newsletters that people will actually look forward to receiving, discuss the benefits of launching one in the first place, and detail the steps to take to ensure your newsletter is as successful as it can be. So, let's get started. If you're anything like me, half of all email marketing you receive will either head straight to the trash or be 'saved' for a later time that, deep down, you know will never come.

Mother's Day is just around the corner, and, if it's anything like last year, it's set to be a big day for consumer spending. Data taken from takepayments card machines, online payments, and point-of-sale (POS) systems showed that, in 2022, our small business partners recorded nearly 200,000 transactions the week leading up to Mother’s Day. Survey research from Reach Solutions indicates that the average person plans to spend around £72 on their mum for Mother’s Day, meaning that customers could have spent as much as £14 million on Mother’s Day gifts at these businesses alone — and that could jump up even further in 2023.