As a small business owner, it’s important to think about ways to grow your company. Growth strategies can be as simple as hiring employees or as complex as acquiring another company.
Whether you’re looking for ways to increase revenue or find new customers, here are 10 tips to boost the growth strategies for your small business:
1. Focus on your strengths
In order to grow your business, you need to focus on what makes you different from others in your industry. For example, if you’ve been in the same line of work for years and have a loyal customer base already, there’s no need to expand into new markets. When it comes down to it, there are only so many opportunities for growth within one industry or geographic location.
2. Hire employees who will make the most of their talent
If you can’t afford full-time employees right now, consider hiring part-time contractors instead than rely on freelancers or independent consultants instead of hiring permanent staff members who will eventually become full-time employees over time if they prove themselves worthy of that title. This way, you’re able to save money while increasing productivity by having more hands on deck when necessary (or even just when they feel like it).
3. Focus on improving customer service and satisfaction
Focusing on improving customer service and satisfaction will help you build loyalty among your customers and turn them into repeat buyers. It’s also important because it drives up customer acquisition costs (CAC), which directly impacts your revenue growth potential.
Ideally, there are many ways to improve customer service and satisfaction. You can start by asking your customers for feedback to encourage them to share their experiences. This will allow you to know which aspect of customer service needs improvement.
Another way is to be approachable on various communication channels, such as live chats, emails, phone calls, tweets, and discussion forums. Use personalized messages to show your customers that you care about them. Lastly, make your customers happy and satisfied by giving them rewards like discounts and incentives.
4. Keep up with trends
Keep up with industry trends and technology developments in order to remain competitive in a volatile marketplace. You need to know what’s going on around you so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly if necessary — or at least be aware if something is changing quickly enough that it should be addressed immediately.
5. Focus on customer acquisition
Your business should be focused on acquiring new customers, not just retaining current ones. This means you need to constantly be thinking about how you can acquire more customers and how you can make your product or service better in order to make this happen.
6. Focus on retention
Retaining customers is just as important as acquiring them, but it’s often overlooked due to its time-consuming nature and difficulty in measuring results. You need to focus on ways that will improve customer retention rates so that they don’t churn out of your business after a few months or years of being with you.
This is where customer activation enters the picture. Customer activation is the method of encouraging active, repeat, and/or return customers to perform a desired action to keep them engaged throughout their journey.
According to Product Led, ‘Getting customer activation right is essential, as it determines whether most users see value in your product and keep using it or lose interest and drop off.’ Customer activation is a cost-effective way to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, and lengthen customer lifecycle.
7. Measure your results regularly
You should always be monitoring the performance of your business by tracking key metrics such as revenue, cost per sale and customer satisfaction levels on a regular basis so that you can see if there is anything wrong with your strategy or process, which could lead to a failure in achieving growth goals sooner rather than later.
To measure your results accurately, you will need a data management software. Through data management, you can protect your data and use it in decision-making.
8. Use social media
Don’t be afraid of social media. Social media is a tool for branding and marketing, but it’s also an opportunity for customers to interact with brands in new ways — and share their opinions too. If used correctly, social media can become an important part of your marketing strategy and help grow your business organically as well as through word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers.
Take advantage of the power of hashtags to improve your content’s visibility and reach. By using hashtags, your posts will appear on the hashtag feed, and the users who follow the hashtags will be able to see your posts.
Make sure to diversify your content by posting product videos, promotional videos, testimonies, and other forms of content.
9. Tell your story
Make sure you’re telling your story. Finding the right words for your company can be tricky, especially if you have a unique product or service. But using the right language can make all the difference when it comes to getting noticed by potential customers.
10. Create a growth plan
You need a plan before you can grow successfully. Start by creating a simple one-page document with the following items on it: The Target Market, Backup Software, Your Product/Service Offerings, How To Reach Your Target Market and Your Financial Strategy (if applicable). You can also include machine learning and cloud computing.
