A new breed of entrepreneurs is on the rise after the advent of the World Wide Web. The small business entrepreneur. Similar to brick and mortar stores, this business also needs to be nurtured from its roots to give it the right direction.
Want to see how you can scale up your business from small and still make it a thriving venture. In this article, we will look at some of the pointers that you need to look into to grow your business:-
Sales Funnel Analysis
Every business that wants to remain competitive needs to understand their sales process. Even a small business must have a robust process which includes identifying the business prospects and engaging them. It is the duty of the sales team to adopt these strategies and tactics at every stage of the sales process for a small business.
Customer Relationship Management
Full stack customer relationship management (CRM) solutions like Copper, have made significant inroads among various businesses. Such cloud technology platforms have brought an innovation to the concept of selling. A good CRM not only protects the data but also helps in multi-channel interaction with the customers. It is one of the smartest ways to grow small business revenue and forge a close relationship with the customer.
Competitor Analysis
Now that a business has evaluated its strengths and weakness in form of sales funnel analysis, it’s time to look into the threats faced by the business in form of competitors.
There are various platforms that can provide you a detailed insight of the competitor’s activity like Similar Web, Ad Beat among others. These platforms help you to effectively scale your business growth.
Find out the new opportunities
Another way to give your business a boost is by identifying the wide range of opportunities available in the market. Here are some ways to accomplish this:
Listen to your potential, past and present customer demands. Examine their likes, dislikes about your products, objections raised, their feedback, complaints. This information will help you to offer tailor-made products to your customers.
- Look at the industry trends
Totally absorb yourself into the industry and understand how it operates. Make yourself aware of the latest techniques that are governing the market.
- Customer Loyalty Programs
A customer loyalty program is the best way to forge a lasting relationship with clients. It actually rewards the clients in form of coupons, discounts, free merchandise, and a lot more. In a world full of options, if the customer comes back to your brand often, it indicates that he trusts and loves your brand. So it becomes your duty to offer him a potential benefit in form of a loyalty card.
Associate yourself with partners
Gone are the days when the businessman used to operate solely. Nowadays, he needs to partner himself with like-minded people, industry experts, and other brands, to make a well-informed decision. This level of networking will help scale your small business faster
Tap foreign markets
Now, that you have a good grasp of the local market, you can try exploring foreign markets. But before that, it is important to take a look at your finances, search for the best markets for your business and investigate the regulatory environment.
This will help you find out whether there is a growing demand for the products/services that you wish to sell or not. Based on that you can distill the potential markets where you want to invest. Don’t forget to check the GDPR regulations for doing business in Europe.
Go digital
We all know geography is dead. So, if you want your small-based business to explode fully, try to join the digital bandwagon, as it offers innumerable benefits. Try to sell your products on social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp or on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay.
With this approach, their customers could easily become your customers as well.
Express gratitude to the customers
Once the sale is completed, don’t forget to show the gratitude to the customer. Sign a thank you note and send it with the order. These kinds of messages will help you to stay in touch with the customers and help you to convert them into lifelong customers. You can even offer a small discount coupon along with the note to engage the customers and to keep it business friendly.
Build an e-mail list
Creating an e-mail list is the best way to market your products to the potential customers. Through this list, you can offer your customer pre-sales information, discounts, and new blog alerts. You can also create other engagement avenues like providing a sneak peek at the newly launched products, and feedback for the products sold.
Launch a webinar
The days of traditional exhibitions are over. Nowadays, the best way to promote the business is to launch a webinar to expand your brand outreach far and wide. With this channel, you can make a direct contact with the target customers. The various webinar tools like polls, chats, and call to action help you to make the business interactive. Also, webinars are great SEO accelerants so they help improve your search engine rankings too.
Build a passive income
Growing your small business is not an easy job, especially when you are operating on razor thin margins. Hence there is a need to build a passive income. Freelancing and side gigs will be of help. This kind of income will support you when your business is still in a nascent stage. There are various ways to build a corpus, but investing is arguably the best possible way to generate passive income.
Acquire another business
Sometimes, the best way to scale up your business is to acquire new businesses that can augment your existing customer base. But before that, it is crucial to understand the target audience, about the company that you wish to acquire, the cost liabilities that you need to incur during the acquisition process, legal formalities that you need to abide by, etc.
Franchise
If you have a successful business model and you really wish to expand it, then franchising is an easy option. Though a large investment is at stake and you need to have a thorough marketing knowledge, but it could definitely make a difference in the growth trajectory of your business.
Form licensing agreements
In a typical licensing arrangement, the licensor grants the licensee the right to market the products or apply a brand name or use the technology used by the licensor. This kind of agreements gives the small-based business an opportunity to expand its business presence and to improve the brand identity.
Diversify the products
Don’t get computable by the present offering of your brand. Let the customers experience new products/services launched by you. Diversify or add value as it will give you a chance to enhance the customer base and improve the customer loyalty.
Create a perfect content marketing strategy
Today, small and emerging businesses are gradually understanding the need for a strategic content marketing strategy. Most of the business leaders may have great business insights about their industry, but they are not expert writers. Most do not have know about content publishing platforms.
To overcome this barrier, it makes perfect business sense to hire an experienced content marketing agency. They will:
- Define the business goals and articulate them in the words
- Identify the real audience and write content according to their perspective
- Understand the customer behavior
- Brainstorm the ideas
- Constantly monitor the content to understand its effectiveness.
- Offer suggestions and analytics to help in building the future content marketing tactics.
The hallmarks of a well-executed content marketing strategy are – track the content, target the audience, make the content engaging, flexible that can be changed according to the customer preference, and quantify it in terms of ROI.
Conclusion
Growing a small-based business exponentially is not a cakewalk. A lot of thoughts and efforts need to put into to make it successful. These ideas will go a long way in building a huge customer base and boosting business top-line. A professional marketing agency like Entexture can make a huge difference.
AUTHOR BIO
Norah Abraham has been a freelance writer since 2005. She attended the University of Boston and graduated with a Bachelor in English Literature. Norah is a public speaker and motivates people in her own comic style. She loves writing about business strategies, startups, gadgets, and techie stuff. In her career, she has written dozens of Press Releases, Articles, and Essays