7 Ways To Grow Your Small Business
When you are a new entrepreneur, you have visions of grandeur for your business and the future you hope to have. You start off with these big ideas, and not everyone is going to support them. The good news is that you don’t need everyone to support them, as long as you have a business plan detailing exactly how you will hit your goals and grow your small business. Having a realistic plan is always step one.
There are hundreds – and we do mean hundreds – of ways that you can grow your small business from something that starts in your basement into something that makes millions. And below, we’ve put the top seven strategies that you can use to encourage growth.
Start With Excellent Customer Service
The foundation of any good business is good customer service. And you can easily gain insight into how much a business is affected by the interaction that its support team has with its customer. And while customer support isn’t the only thing you will need for success, we can pretty much guarantee you that without offering good customer service – you likely won’t find success.
Drive Web Traffic
If you’re not driving traffic to your website to create sales or generate leads, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reach a broader audience and create growth. Consider speaking to digital marketing experts like Vine Digital about your digital presence. From your current SEO strategy to the design and functionality of your website, your digital footprint should be working for your business and actively bringing in new customers or clients.
Network!
For most businesses, it’s not about what you know, but who. You need to build strong networks so that you can find opportunities for growth among them. The network you create will be the helping hand reaching down to pull you up to the next level. Don’t discount how much they can help you!
Diversify
Your small business is successful because it answers a question for customers. The only way that a company can achieve real growth is to change and evolve, and with diversification, you can accomplish that.
Recognize the possible opportunities and challenges ahead of you and start to work on your business and how it will tackle those milestones. Take Blockbuster, for example, if Blockbuster had tried to disrupt its own business model, it would have been at the right place at the right time to have the market share for the largest/first streaming platform. Instead, Netflix swooped in and disrupted their industry. Blockbuster later tried to offer its own service to compete with Netflix. However, it was too little, too late.
Disrupt your own business model and plan for those changes and how you will evolve. If you don’t, another company will do it for you.
For instance, you may want to consider expanding your own home or creating an office to grow your business and make it feel more like work. You may have taken on more employees to help meet your business demands, which you will need to cater for. You can easily work with Commerical Construction companies to build the space your business needs and desires.
Grow Your Email List
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is still very much alive and well. Yes, even despite emails landing in the dreaded promotional box on Gmail.
Email Marketing is one of the most effective ways to get people talking about your business – on an ongoing basis. The best way to grow your contact list? Make it simple for people to sign up. Offer a signup form on your website, promote it on your social media accounts, and offer incentives for people to join. Perhaps you could consider giving away a free service or product each month to members of your email list? That way your subscribers actually look for your email each month (This is our favorite tactic for getting a subscriber to tell Gmail you don’t belong in the promotions inbox). With a little incentive, you’ll see numbers start to increase.
Nurture Your Existing Customers
Gaining new customers is a priority, but you need to think about your existing customers and what they mean for you. You need to do more than just acquire them; you have to keep them loyal to you. Existing customers are the ones who put your business on the map and have sent you referrals – which means that you need to make sure that this is a relationship that is nurtured as well
You need to think about the buyer persona of each customer and how they respond to what you are offering. And you need to consider how your content resonates with your existing customers as much as it hooks your new ones.
Buy A New Business
Lastly, you might also want to consider acquiring a new business if you want to grow your current one. Maybe it’s a competitor that you want to buy out, or maybe it’s just a company that has a product offering that compliments your own offering.
Buying an existing business is the quickest way that you can grow your business and add a new offering without having to start again from scratch. It’s worth considering if your funds allow.
Growing your small business will take some time, but it’s also important to note that it should take time if you want to get it right! Your whole motivation and strategy for growth should be established before you start your business – that way you’re creating a strong foundation to build and ultimately grow your business on.
Alyson Pittman is a contributing writer for WBD and a JR marketing associate for Excite Creative Studios, an Atlanta-based creative agency.
Alyson graduated from Kennesaw State University with a Bachelors of Business Administration and a concentration in Marketing. She was in multiple organizations at KSU where she held leadership positions. As a part of the Delta Phi Epsilon Sorority, Alyson held the Social Coordinator position and planned/promoted large events.
Responses