How to Growing Your Business (A Comprehensive Guide)

Business expansion is a goal that is typically at the back of every business owner’s mind. However, growing your business is more complex than just increasing sales.

There are so many moving parts involved in the running of a business, all of which may be impacted by an expansion.

Since there is no single template for growing a business, it is typically difficult to know what strategy would work best. Not to worry, this is a concern shared by many business owners.

In this article, we will discuss some of the most effective ways to grow your business.

Let’s get into it:

13 Best Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Small Business

These are the top 13 ways to grow your small business with online marketing.

Do your research

The first step you want to take when trying to grow your business is to conduct research on the market. This is essential for you to understand your existing customer base. You want to pay attention to trends occurring among your current customers.

Similarly, it is crucial to understand why these customers purchase your product in the first place.

This would help you build a comprehensive profile for your customer base, highlighting your customer’ needs and challenges. With this strategy, your business might be able to unlock additional value by addressing the unmet needs your customers have.

In addition to leveraging your existing customers for growth, you can also conduct market research to identify and understand potential customers. This way, you can expand your customer base alongside your entire business.

Acquire new customers

As mentioned earlier, expanding your customer base can be a valuable strategy when growing your business. Acquiring new customers is, however, easier said than done.

It may require some modification of your existing products and services to appeal to a broader audience. You might even have to develop new products altogether.

Furthermore, a crucial part of expanding your customer base is getting the necessary visibility. This means you will have to develop a strategy for promoting your business. You can look into digital marketing to improve your business’s visibility on the internet.

Focus customer retention

Getting more customers is one thing, retaining those customers is another. For your business to grow effectively, you must be able to retain customers. Being unable to keep customers is not only bad for business, but it is also very expensive.

The cost of customer acquisition has increased by over 50% in the past five years. This, no doubt, translates to a significant cost for businesses that can’t retain customers and have to constantly acquire them.

Here’s how you can retain more customers:

Improve customer service

If you intend to retain more customers, your customer service is one of the first areas to improve. You want to ensure your customers feel heard and prioritized.

Thus, it is essential to invest adequately in your customer service, making for a great overall customer experience. By delivering superior customer service, your customers will likely make more referrals for your business.

Consider a customer loyalty program

A customer loyalty program is a great way to increase sales while improving customer retention. These are programs that reward existing customers for patronizing your business.

While it might cost you more in the short term, it will likely pay off in the long term if your customers have a clear incentive to keep spending money on your business.

In addition to retaining existing customers, customer loyalty programs can also attract new customers.

Leverage a customer relations management (CRM) system

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a technology that can be used to manage all your business’s relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers.

If you are seeking to scale quickly, a CRM system is practically necessary as it helps you stay connected to customers. A CRM system can help your business with sales management, customer service interactions, agent productivity, and marketing.

Launch an email campaign

An email campaign is a great way to stay in touch with your existing customers, stay on top of their minds, and win over potential customers. The first step to launching a successful email campaign is building an extensive contact list.

Furthermore, it might be beneficial to leverage an email marketing software tool. Other factors to pay attention to include concise messaging and catchy subject lines.

Adopt a growth-oriented recruitment strategy

A big part of scaling your business company is investing in the right staff. Hiring the right people is crucial to attaining fast business growth. Thus, you want to adopt a recruitment strategy that helps you attract hardworking employees that will be committed to your business’s success.

By expanding your business, you can expect an increase in workload. If you don’t have the right people to support you in dealing with this workload, customer disappointment is inevitable.

The good news is, you can prevent this by proper planning and finding the best people to hire. When searching for the best candidates, don’t shy away from exploring the global workforce. You can easily hire highly skilled independent contractors and freelancers across the globe with the help of an EOR like Remote.

Furthermore, hiring more people to handle some of the direct administrative business tasks frees up more time for you. This way, you can focus more on strategic partnerships to further accelerate your business growth.

However, it is worth noting that employee recruitment is expensive. Thus, in addition to hiring top talent, you want to make sure you can retain your employees. You can do this by creating a healthy working environment and providing competitive employee benefits.

Build a sales funnel

Many of the customers who visit your website are actually not prepared to make a purchase. This is why it is crucial to have an effective sales funnel.

A sales funnel is essentially how you move a potential customer from merely a visitor to a paying customer. Since the sales funnel reflects the path a customer would take towards making a purchase, you can analyze this path to understand what’s working and the loops in your sales funnel.

Armed with this knowledge, you can optimize your sales funnel in various ways to influence customer behavior and improve your overall sales. A great sales funnel starts from an appealing landing page with relevant messaging to an excellent value proposition for the client.

Once your sales funnel is in place, and well-optimized, many aspects of your marketing are automated, and you can expect to scale quickly.

Make strategic partnerships

Business growth does not have to be achieved by internal expansion alone. You can also significantly increase your sales by leveraging synergies from strategic partnerships. You can identify and reach out to businesses that complement your business for potential partnerships.

This way, you can reach a broader network of potential customers. When planning strategic partnerships, it is important to ensure that there is some value to the other business. Businesses are only likely to consider a mutually beneficial partnership.

In addition, it is crucial that the other business’s values align with yours. This will help ensure a long-term and hitch-free partnership.

Make the necessary investment

Almost no business can scale without significant investment. Of course, depending on the industry, the required investment could vary. Nevertheless, you must be prepared to invest considerably in various aspects of your business to support.

This could mean investing in areas core to your business operations, such as software technology, equipment, and infrastructure. Your investment could also be in the form of funding marketing campaigns and branding.

By reinvesting profits made by the business. you can fund the scaling of your business. In many cases, however, this might be insufficient as your business may be making little profit or none.

In this situation, you might want to secure business loans to make the necessary investments. If your business is still in the early stage, you can also leverage some easy personal loans to get.

Pay attention to business branding

There is no gainsaying that branding is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business. Almost all the top businesses in the world have recognizable and clear brand identities. From Coca-Cola to Apple and Tesla, all of these businesses invest in their brands.

This explains why the strength of brands alone accounts for about 20% of the total value of S&P 500 companies. It is, therefore, essential that you invest in your brand.
Good branding starts by adopting a clear identity and staying true to it. Your brand must be meaningful, distinctive, and salient.

You want to create a comprehensive message that is communicated in your logo, slogan, website, and across your social media accounts. Another vital part of branding is staying consistent.

Maintain a significant online presence

Without any doubt, the internet is an indispensable tool for any business seeking to scale. Whether your business is predominantly online or offline, there is certainly some value to be gained in maintaining a good online presence.

Posting consistently on your social media accounts and responding to customer queries helps you achieve a significant online presence. You can also have newsletters that go out periodically. Another way to generate buzz around your business online is by organizing contests and giveaways.

Final Thoughts

Clearly, scaling a business can be a lengthy, complicated and daunting process. Nevertheless, with the tips discussed above, you should stand a good chance of achieving exponential business growth.

Author Bio:
Becky Lopez is a finance enthusiast who has created and published various business-related articles. She is deeply interested in the dynamics of early-stage stage business management and financing. Becky is a certified Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA) and is currently pursuing her Business Intelligence & Data Analyst (BIDA) certification.