Why Should Small Businesses Protect Their Intellectual Property?

Why Should Small Businesses Protect Their Intellectual Property?

There has been a tremendous rise in small businesses with the pandemic, whether it’s on Etsy on their own websites or running their business from home. A lot of merchants have come into their own. But, what happens when Intellectual Property gets involved? Your business may have intellectual property (IP) – copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets.  Basically, a lot of things that make your small business what it is! So, you have Intellectual Property Rights! These intellectual property rights give it the exclusive rights to use your invention or creation commercially, sell, and license it. Your ideas are your currency. So, it must be protected.

What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property (IP) is defined as any type of idea, information, design, invention, logo, symbol, image, or name issued in commerce. If it has value, someone is likely to copy it. If your IP is infringed on  (stolen), there are rules and regulations in place that can be used to help you take your case to court and to protect property rights, but here are some tips on other protections you can use to take care of your business. 

Automatic protections – this means no one can use a piece of work without the owner’s permission. There are two types:

Copyright: All pieces of writing, literary works, art, films, photography, TV, music, and more are instantly protected under the law. This includes all work that is created by employees for the business. For the best protection against infringement, you should register your copyright with the copyright office. 

Design right – the shapes and configurations of all objects are automatically protected under law for 15 years after it is first created or 10 years after it was first sold. 

What Protections are available for Small Businesses?

Intellectual Property Lawyer

Using an intellectual property lawyer, you can implement intellectual property laws. They assist clients with asserting ownership of their assets, using patents, copyrights, trademarks, licensing agreements, and more. They also represent clients upon whose intellectual property other parties have infringed. Having someone with experience fighting on your side for your livelihood is the most essential protection a small business could have. 

 Trademarks

It is good to register company names, brand names, product names, and logos as trademarked. It takes four months for an application to be registered. 

Digital Trademarks

It is essential to secure your domain name, Twitter handles, and Instagram handles for your company or brand’s websites.   There may be opportunities to monitor the Intellectual Property Office, which may try to sit on URLs and social media accounts and demand a lot of money to release it to you. 

Patents

Patents are designed to protect inventions and products, for example, machines, tools, or medicine. It takes about five years to decide to be made by the intellectual property office, which has to investigate the evidence submitted and ensure that the patent does not already exist.

The bottom line is, it is always better to protect your business to lower the possibility of theft, your business is your livelihood, and your ideas are your currency. They must be kept safe and protected from infringement. 

How to Create a Website Your Customers Love

Your business’s website plays a vital role in helping you attract new customers and retain your existing ones. Building a loyal customer base is an excellent way to enjoy sustainable long-term success for your business and help it thrive. But, to achieve this level of success and sustain it, you will need to ensure your customers engage with your brand and feel motivated to return to your business time and again. Retaining customers is no easy task, but it is less expensive than continually trying to attract new ones. It is incredibly rewarding to see the same customers return to you for repeat purchases. 

One crucial way you can keep customers coming back to you and engaging with your brand is to build a website they love using. Here are some of the ways you can ensure your customers have a great experience each time they use your website:

Informative, Engaging Content

When you create website content that is engaging and useful, you are sure to see visitors to your website increase. Creating high-quality content will ensure your website visitors stay on your site longer, are more likely to return, and increase your likelihood of making a sale. If your content is really great, you may even find it becomes link bait and brings even more visitors to your site, offering more opportunities to gain loyal customers.

High-quality content should be well-written, reflect your brand’s personality, be relevant to your company or its ethos, and informative. To achieve the best results from your content, it is crucial to focus on quality over quantity.

Easy to Navigate

No matter how much customers love your products, they can be put off shopping with you if your website is challenging to use. Offering a positive user experience for your website visitors is a crucial tool to encourage them to stay on the site for longer and encourage visitors to become customers. If your website does not offer a positive user experience, your customers have little incentive to keep shopping with you and may choose to look at competing sites instead.

To make sure your website offers an excellent experience for your customers, you should ensure pages load fast, there are no broken links, it is easy for customers to find what they are looking for, and essential information is in an easy-to-find place. Focusing on these factors will ensure every customer has a great experience and will be more likely to return in future.

Fast Checkout

Poor conversion rates and abandoned baskets are something no business owner wants to see in their website statistics. If you have an issue with these, your checkout process may be deterring customers from completing their purchases. To keep your customer returning to buy more from you and complete their transactions, you need to have a simple checkout process that takes payment quickly and efficiently. With a fast checkout in place, you should find customers who love to shop on your website and will return to buy again.

Add Proximity To Your Customer Journey

In the marketing world, proximity is synonymous with interactions and meaningful connections. Putting interactions at the heart of the customer journey is no novelty. Yet, using these interactions to build a proximity relationship in a world where digital marketing is taking over is an unexpected strategy. How can a company erase the distance between their process and their customers? If there is one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, it is to keep our distances. So bringing everyone together is a daunting but necessary move to rebuild the economic stability of the community. 

Get to understand your customers

The first rule of getting close to people is to get to know them better. When it comes to your customers, the better you understand them, the easier it is to market them effectively. Market research solutions can help make sense of your customer database, identifying who they are in terms of meaningful demographic data. Gender, age, family status, and work status can highlight different personas and needs. Understand what your customers care about also gives you the key to build a relationship. You need to know what they stand behind before you can make your brand memorable to them. The first rule of relationships is to know the other, so you can mould your presence to fit around their interests and personality. 

Make it easy to purchase from anywhere

What convinces a customer to make a purchase? Great products or services contribute to the decision to buy. Yet, the transaction process can be off-putting. Too many users put an item in the basket and walk about from the website without committing to purchase. Proximity, on the other hand, can encourage them to go through the last step. Whether you use virtual merchant solutions to enable purchases in situ or tailor your website to simplify the transaction process, there is no mystery. Complex transaction processes add distance between customers and businesses. 

Build relationship goals

Social media platforms showcase your relationship with your customers as conversations become public knowledge. The majority of your customers will rely on interactions on social media to decide whether they want to trust a brand. Therefore, it makes sense to dedicate time and attention to delivering social media content. Engaging with your audience in the right tone of voice, on the right platform, and at the right time can be a challenging strategy. Content specialists recommend running customer interview to uncover patterns and build social media personas. Then you can create engaging and relevant content that brings your audience closer. 

Where are you? 

It’s impossible to talk about proximity strategy without considering your location. Geographic locations do matter, but digital proximity is much more relevant in a post-pandemic environment. It is in the interest of the business to identify the best digital areas for their customers. As a rule of thumb, companies should consider running both a mobile-friendly website and an app. The mobile site also needs to provide access to the same content as the desktop site, as customers don’t want to be left out. 

In conclusion, remove the distance between the customers and the brand is a priority strategy to recover pandemic losses. It’s all about being there where your customers are. Proximity brings relevance, convenience, and depth to the relationship that buyers have with a business.