You’ve agonised over choosing a business niche, spent a few weeks or may be months working on it, building up your target audience, packaging up your services, and still your business is slow and you are not where you’d have wanted to be at this point.

(If you have not taken those steps – that is, actually working on your marketing, building  up your target audience & packaging up your services – then this post is not for you. Try these things, and give it some time. It should work! If it doesn’t, then come back, we are here to help :))

What to Do When Business is Slow or is Going Down

If your business is slow or is going down, even after spending time & energy tending to it honestly, here are a few things you could try to tweak your business.

1. Try appealing to a slightly different audience in your business niche

You have chosen your business niche, but say the audience that you are currently targeting are not responding too well to it. The first & the easiest thing to do is to try and tweak your target audience.

Are your prices too high for the audience you are marketing to? If yes, try marketing to an audience which typically spends about how much your services cost for similar goods & services. Instead of slashing your prices, try to simply put your service before the right audience. This might require some branding efforts on your part. You may need to use visuals and graphics which appeal to the new audience. However, this method is likely to bring you good results.

For example, a portrait photographer who charges $1500 per lifestyle session should be targeting families where perhaps there are two working parents who are super busy. Such parents would be looking for say, one everything-taken-care-of session a year and would want guidance on what to wear, where to shoot, etc. and they don’t have too much time to research these things on their own. A portrait photographer who charges say $500 per session, could be targeting families with one working parent and one parent with some more time – who are keen on getting multiple sessions a year (for eg. a holiday say, a birthday session, an anniversary session). The non-working parent could be a creative business owner himself/ herself and could be interested in planning out themes & creative props for her family shoots.

In the above example, it’s easy to see why two working parents couple may not hire the second photographer (who may not be providing as much in depth guidance), and the small business owner parent may not hire the first photographer (because they want more control in the shoot which the first photographer may not be giving).

However, the first family & the first photographer are a perfect fit for each other and it’s the same in the second scenario.

I chose this example to illustrate how marketing to the right audience can make all the difference.

Hence, my first suggestion is to try and tweak your audience. Do this not by copying your competitors or others in the field (in the same example, you see how disastrous the consequences would be if the first photog copied the second’s marketing style & pricing or vice versa?!?!?). But by spending the time & energy in thinking about your target audience who needs your services.

2. Try tweaking your packages – what are you getting asked most often?

Here it’s important to note that I suggest trying to tweak your overall packages, not your pricing band. Do not slash your prices. Do not undercut others. Do not price yourself too low. Likewise, do not suddenly raise your prices either.

Those sudden and desperate measures will not work.

What will work is tweaking your existing packages to shuffle up services or to add or delete some things based on what you get asked the most often.

Do people often ask you for prints and you do not currently include them? Try tweaking your packages to include prints in such a way that it demonstrates great value to your customers.

Do you offer prints in your packages and people often ask you for digital-only packages? May be you should consider offering one digital-only package then!

Tweak your packages to reflect market demand, and price them in such a way that every package has great value, but one package provide maximum value – and spend most of your time marketing that one package.

3. Review your market research, and do some fresh market research to see what is working & tweak your offerings

It’s time to go back to the drawing board.

But I must caution you here. Reviewing “market research” is very different from stalking other business owners or your competitors and trying to copy them.  Admittedly, we’ve all been there. But, the stalking approach does not work.

Reviewing market research involves objectively reviewing buying habits of buyers. It has everything to do with buyers – and very little to do with what is already on offer from other sellers.

Spend time to understand what your target audience is asking for, review your data and tweak your offerings to fit what is most in demand at the time. It is not correct to think that the same thing which was in trend back in 2011 will also be in trend 6 years later. People’s preferences change, so tweak your offerings to adapt to the changing market & cater to your target audience’s most pressing needs.

Again, the last bit – your target audience’s most pressing needs – are different for each of us. There is no point in trying to “emulate” other businesses. What works for one, may not work for another.

Summary

Try these three steps if your business is slow and you’d like to speed up the process of bring in income & profit:

1. Try appealing to a slightly different audience in your business niche

2. Try tweaking your packages – what are you getting asked most often?

3. Review your market research, and do some fresh market research to see what is working & tweak your offerings

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