Every year, around 627,000 businesses open their doors to begin operations.
Unless you have started a business before or have been around a running operation, it’s easy to think that new firms are easy to operate. Once you launch your small business and combat the initial risks, growing it becomes a significant concern.
Keep reading for five tips on how to grow your small business to greater heights.
1. Understand Your Customer Deeply
Having a deep understanding of the clients you serve is one way to grow your small business. The clearer your grasp of their needs, the better you can position your business to fulfill them, driving your revenue up.
A multi-pronged research strategy is a powerful tool that helps you uncover various angles of your customer understanding. That means going beyond studying your website analytics and surveys to find out more about your clients.
While you’re conducting this in-depth research, you need to segment your customers.
Placing the various types of customers you receive in groups that share similarities can help you better target your sales and marketing, which grows your business.
A significant benefit of deep customer understanding is it places your finger on the pulse of their motivation.
Accurately identifying why your customers gravitate to the products and services they buy gives you crucial insight. With this information, you can shape your strategy and offerings to better appeal to clients, thus growing your revenue.
2. Take on Email Marketing
For every dollar you invest into email marketing, you can get $38 in return.
It may be shocking to small business owners to learn that email has more significant reach than social media. You can make a case for email is the currency of the internet.
However, another critical factor makes an email subscriber valuable compared to a social media subscriber.
When you get an email subscriber, you are receiving permission by a user to engage with them. The relationship you create will be a direct one without an intermediary.
Thus, a direct customer relationship that takes you to their inbox is something you can leverage over the long-term to grow your business.
Keep in mind that unless you spam a subscriber to the point they get off your list, you have direct control of this relationship.
When you marry the customer insights you develop with email marketing, you get a potent tool for long term business growth.
3. Commission a Public Relation Strategy
For many firms, public relations seems like something best left to the big boys. However, there is value to using PR as a small business growth hack, check out more here.
PR is a tool to help you tell the story behind your business. At the very essence, customers buy into stores and relations that businesses create.
The product or service is the means through which clients access this magic.
PR helps you direct your firm’s story to grow your customer base continually. Moreover, when you deploy PR, it helps you support your content marketing strategy.
A PR editorial bank can help connect with your content marketing efforts. In addition, some of the material you use for your PR can be repurposed for your content marketing.
4. Ship an Unforgettable Customer Experience
In time, your customers will forget any discounts you gave them or other such offers. However, how you make customers feel will linger in their minds long after everything else fades away.
That’s critical to realize because if you make customers feel good, that memory will keep them coming back.
When you treat customers well, they inevitably tell their friends and family. That personal recommendation is a high-value asset that builds confidence in your business.
If such a customer comes to check your business out and your offering lives up to their expectation, you will gain a fiercely loyal customer. You want to develop such clients as they are the ones who have a long lifetime value due to repeat spending.
To fortify your customer experience, you need to run an extensive customer analysis to discover touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the moments in which clients interact with your firm.
The moment you know where and how customers interact with your firm, you can craft an unforgettable experience.
No customer experience strategy would be complete without feedback. While positive customer feedback is welcome, you should spend time studying negative customer feedback too. Understanding what your clients don’t like is valuable as it points out what you need to change to ship a better experience.
5. Open a Franchise
Specific small business models lend themselves better to franchising, and that can give you an expansion avenue. Arguably the most prominent benefit of franchising your business is that you can grow it without investing the capital.
Every franchisee that meets your requirements typically puts their money in the ring to set up their outlet.
Can you picture the possibilities if you don’t need to look for the capital outlay to expand your small business?
Franchising also delivers a self-motivated management team to navigate the brand’s expansion. That’s because every franchisee brings their managerial team to take their business off the ground.
As a result, every successful franchise you commission has skin in the game. If it fails, the owner loses their capital.
In that sense, you gain an inherently motivated team with every successful franchise application that can drive your brand’s expansion.
That shifting of a significant portion of the risk to the franchisees reduces your liability exposure.
Any problem that arises at a franchise isn’t yours to deal with. The franchisee bears the responsibility, and that delivers a more predictable growth trajectory for your small business.
How to Grow Your Small Business
Starting a business is easy. However, running is challenging, and unless you focus on scaling, it’s easy to get distracted by growing pains. As you navigate operational challenges, take time to research how to grow your small business sustainably.
Are you inspired to start and run a business? Check out more of our content for valuable tips to help you start and grow your small business.