When you have worked hard to build up a business with products and services you are proud of, it can be distressing to see that nobody wants to buy them. When no one is buying and you don’t know why that is, it can make you feel like you should throw in the towel and do something else instead, but you might not need to be so hasty!
Check out these common reasons why people may choose not to buy from a business and see if any of them could be true for your company, then you can make the relevant changes and start to see your business boom.
You’ve neglected your USP
A unique selling proposition is the reason why customers should buy your products and not the next person’s. It is the one thing you can offer that no one else can. It answers a question or solves a problem for your customers and ensures that your products are desirable. If you have not developed your own USP as a business, then you are not giving your customers an incentive to buy, and so they probably won’t.
The good news is, it is not as difficult as you might think to come up with a USP for your products and services. Fron offering a wider color selection to beating your competitors on price or innovation, there are a number of avenues you can go down.
You do not appear legitimate enough
A big reason that startups and small businesses fail to attract customers is because their companies do not seem legitimate enough, which means that people are wary about handing their money over to them.
The good news is, there are lots of things you can do to make your business seem more established, from using a limited company formation to make your business official to renting a virtual office space that gives you a fancy address. The more things you can do to make your company seem legit, the more likely it is the customer will start to be convinced and you can start making sales.
Your product is not effective
You might think that you have created a truly amazing product or service, but is that really the case? If it is not flying off the shelves that could indicate that it is not as exciting or innovative as you believe it to be.
It can be difficult to realize that your great idea was not as perfect as you thought, but it is worth taking an honest look at your products and services to see if they really do everything you say they do, do them well, and offer the customers good value. If they do not, then it could be time to go back to the drawing board and make a few improvements.
Not offering good value
If there is one thing that will put customers off making a purchase it is when they consider a product or service to be bad value for them. That does not mean that you have to price your products as cheaply as possible, but you should ensure that they are affordable to your target audience and that they offer enough to justify the price you are charging. If they do neither of these things, then obviously, you are going to end up seriously limiting the number of people who want to buy.
You aren’t marketing to the right people
One of the worst things you can do as a business looking to make sales is to target your marketing materials at completely the wrong audience, but this is way more common than you might think.
It’s so easy to think that you know who your audience are because it is your product and you feel like you know what it does and who might be interested, but unless you know this for a fact, you could well end up pitching your stuff to the wrong people in the wrong way and wasting a lot of time, effort and money along the way. Doing market research to find out exactly who does want your stuff is so sensible that you should do it each and every time you develop a new product or service if you possibly can.
There are too many competitors
This is a tricky one, but customers might be thin on the ground simply because there are already a number of businesses doing pretty much the same things as you are, and those companies may have been established for much longer or be better at marketing themselves than you are.
That doesn’t, of course, mean that you should give up completely, but it does mean you should study the competition, see what they are doing, and identify areas you can better compete, whether it be on price or with your USP. Then go all out to market yourself on that basis.
You push it too hard
If there is one thing that people do not like, it is a pushy salesperson. You might think that going in for the hard sell and pushing and pushing is going to get you more sales, but the reverse is actually true and can make people think that you’re pushing so hard because your product is not actually all that great.
What you should do instead, is ensure you give enough factual information about your products and services, emphasizing how they can help the potential bury, and then take a step back., If they are given the facts and space to make a decision, chances are they will be more likely to react in a positive way and your fortunes could soon turn around. This goes for spam emails too – keep them to a minimum.
If you have now identified one or more of these issues in your business, it’s time to work on turning things around so that you give your customers every reason to make a purchase, instead of ignoring you as they are now.
Image Credits: Andrea Piacquadio, Artem Beliaikin
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