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By Regina Thomas

As small businesses reopen after a long period of lockdowns, revitalizing your sales will become especially important. You may be unsure of how to begin in the face of a changing society, but the basics of marketing will still apply. Here are a few recommendations for giving your sales a needed boost as you look for ways to breathe new life into your business.

Reduce customer churn

Customer churn is the rate at which former customers abandon your business, either by canceling subscriptions or memberships or by declining to buy from your business again. Analytics collected by a credit card processing service and another point of sale terminals can help you identify customers and their buying trends. This helps you identify customers, so you can reach out to them with newsletters, special offers, or other communications.

Often, simply asking a customer about their most recent purchase will be enough to show that you care about their satisfaction. The occasional email or SMS message will also keep your business brand fresh in their minds, so they’ll be more likely to visit your store again.

Keep creating new content

You should be continuously increasing the visibility of your business, even when it’s closed, whether that’s for the evening or for a longer period. You can do this by making blog posts on your website and posting links to those blogs on your social media pages. If you don’t feel capable to write your own posts, you can outsource that task to freelancers, but every post should be informative and entertaining.

Creating posts that offer something of value, such as how to use a product you sell, will engage those who visit your site. When you share the links to those posts on social media, you’ll be drawing your followers and their followers to your site. Simply, you want to use social media to increase traffic to your website, and you want to use engaging posts to keep your visitors on your site.

Host giveaways

You can increase interest in your business and boost sales by offering something of your value to your followers on social media. There are many different types of contests and giveaways that you can host, but you should always find a way to tie it to your brand and products. For example, ask followers to submit pictures of themselves using your products. Give a T-shirt with your brand logo away to the person with the funniest or most interesting photo.

You can also do a raffle and donate a portion of the proceeds to a local charity. The winner can receive free training for any product you sell or a gift basket filled with your business’ products. Another tactic to try is to offer a gift card to each follower who retweets or shares a specific post. You can create any type of content that interests you, but remember that you have to give away something of value to entice your followers to enter.

Never stop advertising

The great thing about social media is that you can continue advertising your business as often as possible with little to no cost to your business. In most cases, repetition is the key to an effective marketing campaign, so taking advantage of free and low-cost advertising options can literally build your business.

It’s important to remember that there are countless other businesses out there that are marketing similar products to the ones you sell, so the brand with the loudest buzz will attract the most customers. You can use print ads in addition to online marketing to increase your reach and attract local consumers in your community. This will be especially helpful if your business relies on physical foot traffic to your brick and mortar business. For example, grocery stores, dentist’s offices, and hairdressers should still use the internet to increase their reach, but they also rely more on consumers living in their local communities.

As this guide suggests, establishing a web presence and building a positive online brand image is more important than ever. People will be unsure about leaving their homes for good reason, so the internet will provide the first interaction consumers have with your business in most cases. You can use this to your advantage by focusing on creating marketing campaigns that target more online consumers. In this way, you’ll be able to increase your average sales organically.

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Regina Thomas is a Southern California native who spends her time as a freelance writer and loves cooking at home when she can find the time. Regina loves reading, music, hanging with her friends and family along with her Golden Retriever, Sadie. She loves adventure and living every day to the fullest.