Business Trends: 7 Tips To Grow Your Business

Growing your business is possible, but leveraging the trends that characterize the current market is essential: here’s what they are. Starting from the first quarter of this year, marked by the lockdown for the containment of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italian entrepreneurship had to face radical changes, reorganizing itself based on changes in customer purchasing habits and, in particular, the exponential growth of e-commerce. Many sectors are still in difficulty, primarily Tourism, Entertainment and Events; however, these changes can be essential growth opportunities for other types of business. Let’s see, therefore, which trends an entrepreneur can base his company’s growth on.

Table of Contents

Focus On Digitization

As reported by the report on E-commerce firm, The evolution of customer consumption habits and the increase in the user base have led brands to adapt. These data let us understand how much is the best time to invest in digitalization, following new trends and expanding one’s business beyond physical borders and opening up to a virtually unlimited audience.

Attract Talent With A Strategy.

The company’s strength is given by the people who participate in it, and every entrepreneur knows (or should know) how important it is to have the right person in the right place. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to attract and, above all, retain a talent or a crucial professional figure, not to mention the risk that a competitor will assume it.

Creativity and flexibility, therefore, become indispensable when, especially in the case of a startup, the economic resources to grab the golden professional can represent an obstacle. Incentives, benefits, training opportunities and tools such as the signing bonus or the retention bonus are part of the strategies that an entrepreneur can put into practice to make his company attractive in the eyes of the candidate and create a win-win situation in being able to satisfy both parties.

Implement New Payment Methods.

The lockdown and the cashless plan of 2019 have revolutionized the payment methods in Italy, with a consequent increase in digital payments, which have exceeded a third of the total transactions in our country. Again according to data from the report, world today prefer to pay via:

credit cards (44%)
prepaid cards/vouchers (40%)
digital wallets (34%)
The most used payment processor is PayPal (65% of the shares), followed by Stripe (23%)

There is also an increase in instant payments and mobile payment systems, such as Satispay or apps such as Google Pay and Apple Pay. It is, therefore, necessary for the entrepreneur oriented towards the growth of his business to offer his customers a vast range of payment methods, equipping himself with tools that are often free or, in any case, available at undemanding costs but which can help customers purchase and pay according to the method they prefer.

Invest In Sustainability

Customers are increasingly aware and attentive to the price and issues such as sustainability, understood from both an environmental and social point of view. In recent years, many brands have adopted sustainable policies; think of the big fashion brands that have eliminated animal fur or goose feathers from their collections or industries that have abandoned production sites that exploited child labour.

More and more SMEs are adopting lean strategies to limit CO2 emissions, and attention to the psychophysical well-being of workers is also increasingly widespread in Italian companies. Corporate sustainability is a set of corporate policies that leads a company to pursue a virtuous combination of the three dimensions of sustainable development, defined by the acronym ESG:

E (Environmental): reducing the company’s impact on the environment and the territory.
S (Social): the company’s positive social impact, embodied in attention to working conditions and the refusal of any form of discrimination.
G (Governance): the company’s management policies, which are “sustainable” when there is diversity in the composition of the administration, contrast to all forms of corruption and remuneration ethics.

In the medium/long term, this translates into creating value that makes the company attractive in the eyes of customers, suppliers, lenders and stakeholders.

Adopt Omnichannel Sales Strategies

Today we can no longer afford direct sales to a single channel because the opportunities for diversification are now within everyone’s reach. However, this does not mean you can go “into the fray” without a strategy in mind: first, you must evaluate what it takes to open e-commerce and then which tools to use.

Opening a shop on Amazon or starting a store on eBay means entering virtual sales channels, which involve an investment in time and money but can undoubtedly expand the reach of the customer base. Social Commerce has also recorded a significant increase. Many SMEs have begun to approach online sales on these channels and then decide to consolidate on a proprietary e-commerce site. The free launch of Facebook Shop gave the main impetus for this trend, followed a few months later by Instagram.

Learn To Listen To Customers Better

A business grows because it has customers. And although it is essential always to have new customers, those who ensure the stability of a company are those already acquired and loyal, those who can be counted on. It is, therefore, essential to maintain the closest contact with them, even before and after-sales. Some tools can be helpful for this purpose, including:

A chatbot:

Chatbots are software that simulates human conversations, allowing users to interact as if they were communicating with a natural person. With chatbots, the company makes customer assistance more efficient: in fact, chatbots quickly resolve the most common issues and direct only the most complex problems towards “live” help; on the other hand, the user receives immediate answers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, often with a certain degree of personalization of the conversation (which mitigates the “robotic” element).

If, until recently, chatbots required a sustained cost to be implemented, today, they are also accessible to small businesses. Some chatbots offer a free trial, which costs a few tens of euros a month and can be easily integrated within their website or the Messenger chat associated with one’s Facebook business page.

An FAQ section: published on the website offers customers answers to the most common questions.

A Whatsapp Business account: allows customers to communicate with the company via Whatsapp, an app familiar to millions of Italians who use it daily.

It is essential to follow the customer even after he has made the purchase, obviously discreetly and without nagging him. Obtaining your email address and sending a periodic newsletter asking for a review of the product purchased and the service offered (shipping, timing, product conformity…) are actions that not only make the customer feel “pampered” but become an essential tool always to have the pulse of the situation, understand the wishes of customers and direct their sales and marketing strategies to be able to satisfy them best.

Use Management Software

An entrepreneur should be able to concentrate on growing his business, but he often has to deal with all the fiscal and administrative aspects of the company. These are operations and fulfillments which, especially if you do not have specific qualifications in the matter, can involve a significant expenditure of time and energy, moreover with the possibility of committing errors which, at a tax level, can lead to even severe consequences in terms of sanctions.

For this reason, it would be good to have tools capable of facilitating these procedures, simplifying them and reducing the margin of error. Several solutions on the market can be helpful to an entrepreneur, such as Danea Easyfatt for example. Danea Easyfatt is a complete software which, in addition to electronic invoicing, also includes the management of income, expenses, payments and other tax obligations. Furthermore, Danea is characterized by an e-commerce management system, which allows you to carry out operations such as: