Being a small business can be both a blessing and a curse in the modern world. While you will benefit from the ability to scale your business, adapt to changes in the market, and avoid expensive office costs, it will be much harder to convince customers that you are a professional. For this reason, many one-person outfits want to make themselves look bigger. This can be a good way to improve your chances of landing customers, but how exactly are you supposed to achieve this goal? Let’s take a look.

Website & Branding

Most small business owners understand the value of a website in the modern world, but very few take full advantage of this side of their business. Alongside this, you also need to think about your brand, as this will help you to build your website and the other marketing materials that go along with it.

Your Website

There are a lot of ways to build a good website nowadays, but small companies that want to look bigger will need to aim for something quite specific. Looking at the websites of your competitors will help with this, giving you an idea of what they’re doing to improve the experience their users have. Design, functionality, and reliability will all play a significant role in this, and you need to make sure that your website is doing well in all of these areas.

Your Branding

Most modern businesses will use the same logo, fonts, and colors for all of their work, building a cohesive brand that customers will find easy to recognize. Building a solid brand by yourself will be a challenge, and it can take a surprising amount of skill to handle something like this. It can make a lot more sense to rely on a professional company to help you with this. There are plenty out there to choose from, but it’s worth going with someone local to make sure that they know the area well.

Tying Them Together

Making your website and brand work together can take some time, and you may need to go back to make changes along the way. Creating a flyer, business card, or other pieces of marketing materials can give you a solid foundation for your design, providing you with something to work from as you build the rest of it. It can be easy to stray from your original ideas as you go through this process.

Customer Communications

Never before have customers wanted to talk to the companies they rely on so much, but there are also more communication options available than ever before, too. Making proper use of your communication tools will shape the way that people look at your business, with those who get it right looking much bigger than those who don’t.

Emails

Pretty much every business under the sun gives its customers an email address to contact them with. This email address should be based on the same domain that you’ve used for your website, and it makes sense to use something short for this. Setting up automatic email responses will also help to make your business look bigger, though the best way to impress your customers with emails will be to reply very quickly.

Phone Calls

While emails are very common, some customers will want to call your business instead. Using a private phone number for this will look bad, and it makes sense to look for an option that people will associate with businesses. A non-fixed VOIP phone number can be a great option to deal with this, providing you with a business landline that can be accessed via mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Customers will think that they’re phoning a call center, even if you are answering the phone from your pocket. Companies like T2k can help you with setting up an easy to manage system.

Live Chat

A lot of people prefer to type over talking on the phone, but waiting for emails can take too long, and this makes live chat a popular option on modern websites. You don’t need a big team to run something like this, with live chat systems being easy to set up on mobile devices so that you can keep up communications on the go. You can even set up chatbots that can talk to your customers on your behalf, and this is something that they would only expect to see from much larger companies.

Mail/Post

While postal services aren’t as popular as they used to be, having an address to give to customers will make your business look a lot bigger. Of course, though, this can’t be your personal address; it needs to be a business one. Many modern offices offer mail forwarding services that enable you to use their address as your own. This will make you look far more professional, while also making people think you have an office to work from. Little do they know that you’re working from your bedroom.

Marketing

Marketing has become a crucial element of business over the last few years. It would be impossible to run a company without proper marketing, and customers have gotten very used to seeing high-quality content coming from the businesses they follow.

Social Media

Social media is a very big part of this puzzle, and making yourself look like a large company is going to take quite a bit of work. Websites like Later enable you to schedule posts on your social media accounts, giving you the chance to prepare all of your posts weeks in advance. Of course, alongside this, you also need to think about interacting with people, as this will also help your company to look larger.

Flyers & Physical Materials

Physical marketing materials may not be as important as they used to be, but many companies still rely on them to get their voices heard. The content and imagery on your flyers need to be consistent with your website and brand, but you also need to think about the quality of the items being produced. It will look bad if you’re giving out poorly printed flyers or low-quality business cards to your customers. That is why you should remember that you need to use good quality printing pages for creating your flyers and other marketing materials. Design it according to your business needs and your personal tastes. Once you are done with the printing process, see whether you need to crease your flyers or fold them. In case you need to do that, take the assistance of slitters cutters creasers (SCC) machines (which can be purchased from at webshops like Duplo International).

Conclusion

Making a small business look larger is a challenge that many entrepreneurs face. No matter how much work you put into something like this, it will always be easy to feel like the little guy. Your customers don’t have to view your business in this light, though, and this gives you the chance to work against it.