As a business owner, you have guts, motivation, and a willingness to try new things. Now, if only that combination of qualities would automatically guarantee success and rapid growth! No, you also know you need some healthy strategies. Read on to learn how to combine your motivation and guts with the right strategies to help your small business grow faster.
Know Your Customers AND Your Competition
One of the first rules of marketing is to know your customers. You need to know their fears, their hopes, their frustrations, and their struggles. And then you need to give them solutions that take all of that into account.
But you also need to know your competition. Why?
Because they’re doing an awful lot right. (And probably a little wrong.) When you take the time to study their successful approaches, you’ll have an even better idea of what your customers respond to. And when you see a mistake your competitors are making, or a hole they aren’t filling, you can step in to do it better.
Do the legwork of surveys and focus groups with your customers. Listen to their feedback, and incorporate it into your offerings. But also, study your competitors too.
The platforms Similar Web and AdBeat can help you study your competition.
Focus on Building an Email List
Email lists are gold for helping your small business grow faster. Why? If someone gives you their email address, that means they have a positive feeling about you. People hate spam, so when they trust you enough to share their email address, it means they’re interested. And when you can market directly to interested people, you’ll have more success in your offerings.
But nobody will part with their email address without something in return. Create a valuable opt-in or deal, and be sure to nurture your email subscribers with helpful content and deals.
Create a Sales Funnel
Sales funnels, when done right, do most of the work for you. They put interested customers into a sales process where they will be led to choose your service or product. This is a great way to help your small business grow faster, because it goes on auto pilot.
It takes time and thought to get the right sales funnel, and you may want to hire this out to an experienced marketer.
Reward Loyalty
Happy customers talk to other potential customers. One way to help your small business grow faster is to keep your current customers happy, while offering them incentive to purchase more. A loyalty rewards program can be effective for this strategy. And when your customers keep coming back for more, they’ll tell their friends why they love you so much.
Plus, a rewards program is sometimes an incentive for a new customer to begin buying from you.
Nurture Your Customers — Don’t Neglect or Spam
Remember that email list? Don’t spam your list with offer after offer after offer.
This is a sure way to lose loyalty and turn people off.
Instead, nurture your customers. Through quality content, give them solutions to their problems, answers to their questions, and hope that they can reach their dreams.
In your content, position your company, products, or services as their solution.
Always remember, though: Provide value to your customers, or they’ll go somewhere else.
Do Social Media Right
Social media is a free marketing tool that every business should be using. That being said, while the platforms are free, you may need to hire a social media manager to do your posting and strategizing. That’s because this aspect of your business is critical and time consuming. A 2018 study showed that 54% of social browsers use social media to research products. You need to have a solid social presence that reflects your company’s values accurately, and most business owners don’t have the time to do this well.
Not only are people looking to social media for their consumer needs, they’re also sharing feedback, frustrations, and hopes. Social media is a great place to listen to your customers and potential customers so that you can make a better offering.
Attend Networking Events
Partnering up with other companies is a great way to help your small business grow. Pooling customers together allows both you and your partners to reach more customers with even better offers and solutions.
When you attend networking events, find companies that complement yours. If you sell toys, it makes sense to form partnerships with parenting companies. If you provide business coaching, you’d do well to form friendships with marketing companies and copywriters since your clients will be the same.
Before approaching potential partners, have general ideas of the types of opportunities you’d like to work on together. Maybe you’d like to combine services into a joint package, or host an event together.
Even though we live in the digital age, business cards are still a must. And you can stand out when you also give away a physical item with your business card. Pens, hand sanitizer, or key chains with your logo, phone number, and website are less likely to get lost — and more likely to be used enough that your potential partner will remember you and get in touch.
Host Events
Put together an event that would be valuable for your customer base. Consider if you could put together a workshop, seminar, trade fair, volunteering event, or other event that could bring your customers and other businesses together.
Be sure to be prepared with the right promotional swag for your attendees.
At Impact, our lifeblood is helping your business succeed. If you need help getting the right promotional items into the right people’s hands in a way that will help your small business grow, give us a call. We can help you find the right way to share your branding. Call us at (888) 441-1233, or contact us online for a free consultation.
