Scaling your business can be difficult. It takes a sizable effort in the beginning. From Sales and marketing to taxes and corporate compliance; it involves interaction with customers on a daily basis and much more. At the end of the day, it takes its toll on you.
But like everything else in life, you have to put in the grind if you're looking to succeed. Building a brand sincerely and genuinely caring for customers should be a priority when you first launch your business. Unfortunately, even then growth doesn't happen overnight.
Rather it’s an ongoing procedure that requires steadfast dedication. While there’s no cheats guide or secret way to garner growth there exists however some proven ways to accelerate growth milestones and catapult a business on the road to success.
Building a sales funnel
Quickly growing your business initially depends on a working sales funnel. Sales funnels can help in automating your business. Helping you to scale and grow efficiently. Every sales funnel has to be carefully conceptualized before it's created.
Whether it's a free-plus-shipping offer or a high-ticket coaching funnel, building an automated selling machine is a surefire way of business growth. Using tools like gonzo can help in creating an Omni-channel sales funnel.
Implementing a customer management system
Manually tracking transactions is hard. As the business grows, scaling quickly depends on a well-maintained customer management system. Software like markopolo.ai can help in automating the existing CRM systems to a cloud-based system. Small businesses need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to streamline contact management. A solid CRM houses loads of data about your customers, allowing you to maintain insight into their interests, needs, personal information, and so on. It’s difficult to compete in today’s highly competitive business landscape without a CRM in place.
Create a customer loyalty program
Loyalty programs are great ways to increase sales. It reduces customer acquisition costs and creates recurring sales from existing customers. Building an attractive loyalty and referral program causes sales to skyrocket over time as existing customers create new customers and endorse your product to their peer groups. Loyalty clubs mean more purchases. Name the club, define the threshold for membership, and create some offers to show the value of joining.
Building a database
Building and adding to an existing database helps in targeting and retargeting the existing customers and identifying their trends of usage and spending patterns to create a tailor-made sales strategy that will provide better revenue and growth.
Form strategic partnerships
Strategic relationships with the right partners can truly make a world of difference. It could allow you to collaborate and reach a wide number of vendors and customers quickly through existing channels of partner organizations. Scoping out partnerships that are mutually beneficial can work together for superior value creation and revenue growth.
Leverage global platforms
Global platforms that can automate certain aspects of your business can not only save your employee salary expense but also provide you with a greater value. Companies like Markopolo.ai can easily automate branding and digital marketing while companies like Amazon can help you in terms of procurement. Leveraging global platforms to get higher profit can put you ahead of your rivals in terms of growth.
Licensing and franchising deals
Licensing or franchising is a great way to grow your business without added effort. Having a product you can license to others and take royalty for is an ideal way to scale quickly. Taking a popular or successful product and bringing it to a company with a large footprint ensures market penetration quicker. Also taking franchising can be an easy way to bypass the R&D process and direct you to existing models of business that sell.
Diversify your offer lineup
Look into diversifying your offers. What complementary products or services or information can you offer in your business? In order to grow, you need to think about expansion. Identify new opportunities within your niche. Uncover the pain points. What else can you sell to your clients? Where else can you add value to the exchange?
Build passive income streams
Growing a business takes significant effort. In between the struggle, to not have to worry about keeping the lights on a passive income stream can be created. Considering B2B channels or a set of vendors that provide you a steady revenue flow will keep you in business and provide a basis to grow and scale securely. Hire the right people.
Before thinking about a company's growth strategy, hiring a solid staff has to be considered to achieve the goals set. With dedicated and hardworking employees your business will be better equipped for sustainable growth. In addition, delegating staff to focus on important work will free up your time and energy, allowing you to perform at your best and cultivate a collaborative work culture. Be adaptable.
One trait that many successful startups have in common is the ability to switch directions quickly in response to changes in the market. An agile approach to development, both in your product and your company, will help you grow more quickly. You'll be able to test different approaches to business and find out what works best. This helps a company to keep itself relevant to the trends of the market.
Focus on your customer experience
Customers' perceptions can make or break your business. Deliver quality experiences and products, and they'll quickly sing your praises on social media; mess it up, and they'll tell the world even faster. Fast growth depends on making your current and potential customers happy with their experience. Diversify your offerings so you can best cater to the customers' changing tastes. Engaging your audience and personalizing the experience is crucial for boosting and strengthening business relationships.
Invest in yourself
While you may be tempted to keep your profits to yourself, it's better to reinvest in your business's growth so you can reap bigger benefits later. Determine which parts of your business need more attention: For example, hiring more workers, expanding marketing efforts, or securing additional funding.
Focus on social media
The modern business world is defined by tech. Growing your business thus is dependent on tech too. Engaging major social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) will provide healthy growth to your business. This allows you to better market your business and interacts with far more potential customers.
Softwares like Markopolo.ai or Hub spot can help in automating this CRM process so consumers can find your business easily and are more likely to share your service or product with their peers. A more engaging experience will help your audience feel more connected to your brand and cultivate trust.
Attend networking events
Networking events allow you to connect with like-minded individuals, many of whom have unique perspectives and insights that can help you grow your business. The connections and relationships that come from attending networking events can be beneficial for years to come.
Know your competitors
While this might not provide immediate growth, researching your competitors and their strategy is a crucial first step in launching your business. Knowing who your competitors are, what they're doing (that you're not doing) that works for them, and how you can differentiate your business from theirs. The answers to these questions will help you form a more productive business strategy, defining the areas of your business that can be utilized to provide unique selling features.
Be Consistent
Consistency is key for sustainable revenue generation in your business. You have to keep doing what is necessary to be successful day in and day out. Most businesses as they scale can’t maintain their quality and products due to procurement and sourcing problems and service differentiation. This makes them lose potential and existing customers who face a negative experience from the service or product of your company. So being consistent help.
Implement winning Marketing Strategy
Retail merchandising: If you have your own retail location, arrange the store to show high-margin products near the front and staples near the back so customers see the high-margin items as they move in both directions.
The special combination: combine services others cannot provide in a single offer. This sets you apart from competitors, cements customer loyalty, and brings them back again and again. The lower unit price for a higher-volume package: Sell a larger package for a lower unit price while maintaining good margins.Temporary promotion: Create an offer that generates more revenue than the additional variable cost. The resulting sales margin boots profit.
Leverage marketing automation
Marketing automation is another piece of technology you should invest in if you want to accelerate growth. It allows you to send marketing emails, build landing pages for lead generation, score leads as they move towards conversion, and much more. And if you use an all-in-one CRM, you’ll have marketing automation already built into your system.
Automate processes
Small businesses need to be as efficient as possible with limited resources. You can automate tons of processes that would otherwise be done manually with the right technology—such as CRM and marketing automation. Companies like Gonzo and markopolo.ai can automate your business and branding operations to the point they are integrated into your organization effortlessly.
Focus on what USP
Create a value proposition that highlights the unique value that your product brings to the market. Research your competitors and identify areas that you excel in, which they don’t. Then focus on those areas in your lead generation outreach, email marketing, social media posts, and any other customer interactions.
Offer omni channel communication
Customers need to be able to reach you on the channel that they prefer. Offer customer support via email, telephone, social media, and online live chat. Your customers vary, and so do their preferences. Offering multiple support channels ensures you are catering to the unique needs of every customer.
Engage with industry influencers, nurture your brand advocates
Industry influencers are people with a high profile in your industry that others look to for advice. They normally have huge followings on social media. Try to engage with them so they will share your content or mention you in their posts. It will put your brand name in front of loads of new potential customers.
Brand advocates are customers, employees, or anyone else who advocates for your brand. This normally takes place on social media. Your customer may post about how great your product is. That’s a brand advocate, and when you find them, you need to nurture them. You can be alerted when someone mentions you on social media by using social listening tools.
Speak Value rather than features
This is a great small business idea that many fail to recognize. People want to hear how your product will benefit them or add value to them and make their lives easier. Growing a small business is easy if you follow the right tips. There are loads of small business ideas that you can implement for under $100.
Final Thoughts
The list of small business ideas above will help drive your growth. Get creative when thinking of ideas to grow your small business. The most successful small business ideas are those that allow you to work faster, smarter, and maintain satisfied customers. Meeting those objectives will certainly drive growth.
Want to know how to create a complete marketing funnel with ease? Check out this post.