Growing Your Business
Spring is here. It is a time of natural growth, and it should also be a time of natural growth for your business. As Tax Season comes to a close and refunds process, it is the perfect time for you to strategize ways to improve your existing strategies and draft new ones. There is no one size fits all solution to business growth. What worked yesterday may not work for today and what didn’t work today may still yield results tomorrow. This post won’t help you find the secret recipe for success, but it will help you realize the ingredients you already have at your disposal and the ways you can use them to create your own recipe for business growth and success.
Expand Your Marketing Channels
How are you spreading the news about your business? When attempting to expand your business, it is crucial to consider all of the marketing opportunities at your disposal. Many people do not realize the sheer marketing power they carry around in their pockets. Your phone is your gateway to hundreds of websites, platforms, and mediums that can help get the word out about your brand. If you wish to expand your business, consider utilizing that technology in new ways.
This may mean exploring different social media platforms to create marketing campaigns on. This may mean utilizing different mediums to create content with. Is your business putting out image campaigns? Videos? Just text? Make sure that you are approaching a variety of platforms with a variety of mediums and forms. This diverse approach allows your content to feel more varied and not become lost in the endless scrolling of your potential customers.
Refine Your Sales Funnel
How are you getting users from potential lead to confirmed customer? It is critical that you develop unique and intentional strategies to walk anyone who sees your content from click to sale. This sales funnel is the backbone of any income your business brings in. If you are not refining it continually, you can quickly fall behind the competition. Make sure that you use a variety of mediums and messages across social media, email, and your website to gradually lead users through the products and services you offer, while slowly incentivizing them, and delivering the pitch after you have made the case and stated their needs for what you have to offer.
Narrow Your Demographics
While the bulk of this article is talking about growth, sometimes the best way to increase your success is to narrow down your demographics. Many newfound entrepreneurs and marketers make the mistake of casting the widest net as possible. While this seems enticing, this often means that your time and money are being wasted on leads who lack potential. Your marketing campaigns are useless on users who lack the needs that your product or service fulfills.
Effective marketing campaigns require you to know your intended audience and target demographics to a tee. You need to know where they live, what their age and gender are, and what similar interests or needs they may have. By narrowing down your target audience you can create campaigns and materials that are unique to them, and that target specifically the needs they know that they have. This more personalized approach helps boost the appeal of your products and emphasizes the ways they can benefit the consumer. Narrower demographics save you from wasting time and money putting your content before blind eyes and deaf ears.
Grow Your Team
One way to grow your business financially is to grow it physically. This can mean bringing on new employees, but it also means expanding your network. What other businesses, entrepreneurs, and leaders can you partner with. Personal networking is an asset to your business. Not only does it generate the potential for sales based on a vested interest, but it creates opportunities to exchange goods and services for the benefit of mutual growth and success. You can expand your team without having to hire new employees or place yourself under someone else. Find ways in which you can offer something to other small businesses in your network and give them something in return, either to increase your marketing potential or to save hard earned gains.
Stay on Target
Aimless expansion is a great way to create a giant mess. Muck akin to casting the widest net possible in hopes of targeting as many people as possible, trying to expand your business without discernable goals in mind is a great way to expend effort on fruitless ventures. When seeking growth of any kind, make sure to set goals that can be measured and evaluated. How much money would you like to bring in? How much money are you looking to spend or save? How many further leads are you seeking? What do you hope your conversion rate increases to become?
These are all important questions you need to be asking yourself before investing heavily in new mediums, strategies, or partnerships. Massive growth rarely happens overnight, but intentional steps forward that can be measured and pursued incrementally catalyze your business for positive change and exponential growth over time.
Trial and Error
No business is a constant series of successes. There will be things that do not work, especially when aggressively pursuing growth or attempting new strategies. New marketing strategies take time to master. New channels have steep learning curves. There will be times when you put more in than you get out. One of the most critical parts of any pursuit is the assessment and reevaluation phase. After you have implemented new strategies, started on new platforms, and created new partnerships; it is important that you reevaluate them from time to time. Your recipe for success will often be found in flux, and a partnership that was great a year ago may no longer be as beneficial as it is detrimental. Your resource, both time and money, are incredibly valuable. Do not waste more of either of them than is necessary. Changes will often have to be made, and humility will always be required when determining whether one of your ideas works as you dreamed it would.
Maintain Your Growth
The only way to maintain your growth is to keep pursuing it. Evaluating your successes is just as important as evaluating your failures. Take the time to break down and focus on what works. Are there specific verbiages that convert ad clicks to sales. Do particular mediums work better on certain platforms. What about a successful campaign do your customers find so appealing?
Continual growth requires follow up and follow through. Commit to making contact post-transaction and gathering valuable feedback from the leads you converted. Take what they have to say and find ways to either expound on it in other successful campaigns or inject it into floundering ones.
Featured Image:
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
