How Can Your New Business Build a Professional Image?

When it comes to business, customers expect professionalism. It doesn’t matter if you have many employees or work alone, whether you rent commercial premises or work from home, you need to be meeting your clients and customers’ high expectations. As a new business starting out it can feel difficult keeping your head above water when you’re competing with much bigger businesses, but go about things in the right way and it can be done and the customers will come. Here are some of the ways you can go about building a professional image. 

Branding

Before setting to work on anything else, the first thing you should do is work on your actual branding. This is because it will impact all of the other decisions you make throughout your business, by getting the branding right first you keep everything else cohesive. This ensures that all areas of your business match the brand you’ve created and gives an overall professional image. Work out who your target market is, and what your niche is. This will help to set you apart from your competitors and ensures you’re reaching the right audience. From there you can come up with a company slogan and tagline, you can decide on the right colors, fonts and aesthetics to match the customers you hope to appeal to. This is useful for everything from creating logos to developing adverts. Even your business software tools like CRM software and legal billing software will enable you to customize certain aspects, so you need to have a firm understanding of your brand before you go ahead and make these changes. 

Website and App

The first area to address when it comes to your image and looking professional is your website. It should be aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate, with intuitive controls and easy for customers to find all of the information that they need. It’s crucial that you don’t try and make cutbacks here, while it can be expensive, you’ll need to pay a professional to get the best finish. An app is vital too, and essentially gets your business onto the phones of your customers. More sales are now made through phones and tablets than laptops and desktops meaning this is something you absolutely have to get on board with to future proof your business. This day in age, it’s not enough to just have a website that’s optimized for smart devices, you should invest in a good app too to get the best out of your business. 

Uniforms

Uniforms are a great way to make your business look more professional; if you work with customers directly then uniforms help to distinguish who is an employee. If you have salespeople who go out and canvas or speak with clients then a uniform helps to ensure they’re recognizable and also gives a smart image to your business. Depending on the type of business you run, uniform might be part of an employee’s PPE. Have a think about what kind of styles and types of uniform are best suited to your employees and the kind of work that they do. It’s another reason to have strong branding before making these kinds of decisions as it will of course affect the choices that you make.