Growing a small business is no easy task. Often, you are a one-person show, which means that you must wear a lot of hats throughout the day. Your small business’s success depends on you and your efforts to increase profits, hire the right employees, and market to the right customers and clients.
Growth won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen if you don’t act upon it. There are several ways that you can grow your business so that you can generate more revenue. Here are a few ideas and tips that you can implement to begin growing your business.
1. Understand Your Customers
To be successful, you must pay attention to the needs of your customers and clients. You can only create products and services that sell if you focus on your customers. You can understand more about your customers through research and services.
Asking your customers for honest feedback can help your business grow, even if, at first, the feedback is negative. The easiest way for you to learn more about your customers is to send requests for reviews straight to their inboxes. This helps you understand what they are looking for when they purchase from you so that you can readjust any areas of your business that need improvement.
Not only that, but you will be finding ideas and ways to personalize their customer shopping experience with you. One advantage that you have while growing your business is finding ways to personalize and cater to your customer’s shopping experience.
2. Improve Customer Service
It can be difficult as a small business to be always available for your customers, especially if you are not using the right tools. If you don’t provide exceptional customer service, you can’t expect your customers to return no matter how great your products and services are.
Even customers who have complaints about your products or services are more likely to return if you provide them with exceptional service and can help address their concerns. Your customers are the reason why you are in business, so they need to know that they are valued.
If they need to speak to someone about their concerns, make sure that they have the option to do so, whether that is through an email, a chat on your website, or a phone call.
3. Hire the Best Employees
When you first start your business, you are probably looking for employees who can work for less. Unfortunately, while these individuals have the skill sets you need at the beginning of your business, they might not have the experience necessary to help you once your business has grown.
When you begin the process of hiring new employees because you have more work that needs to get done, make sure to look for qualified individuals and expect to pay more for those with extensive experience.
When it comes to hiring more qualified employees, make sure that you go the full nine yards, including following up on their references and running background checks. Now that your business is becoming more successful, you can’t take any chances.
Hiring the right employees to handle your customers is essential. You will want someone who reflects a positive attitude and represents your brand well. Not only are they helping with customers, but they are representing your brand. Therefore, you will want someone attentive, positive, and always willing to help no matter the circumstance. Having the right employee will also boost a person’s customer experience.
If allowed, have your employees take the time to get to know your customers. Having them build a relationship with a customer will form trust between them and your business. With a relationship being formed, your employees can find ways to personalize your customer’s shopping experience and find products or services that are best catered for them.
Furthermore, take time to find the right employees because having the right staff will lead to high customer service and business growth.
4. Encourage Loyalty
Customer loyalty is important because it means that you’ll get repeat customers and decrease your acquisition costs. It can take time to foster this loyalty because your customers need time to learn that they can trust your business.
You can attract loyal customers by offering rewards for shopping with you, along with access to discounts and promotions that they won’t get anywhere else.
Another great way is to offer personalized rewards for their birthday, holiday, or event. These personalized rewards can be a free item, special birthday and holiday discounts, travel size products, or more. This will help instill bond, loyalty, and trust between you and your customers.
Nonetheless, loyal customers will continue to come back if they are fond of your employees, which is another reason why the hiring process is crucial. With the right employees, customers will want to come back.
5. Build Your Social Following
Social media can be a powerful tool when done correctly. Not only does it allow you to reach hundreds upon thousands of people every single day, but it can help you learn more about your customers through insights.
Make sure that your business posts regularly on social media. This doesn’t mean that you must post every single day. Instead, begin posting enough so that you can learn which posts perform better than others in terms of engagement and interactions and which times of day are best for you to post.
Let your posts vary from pictures, videos, behind the scenes, and information. You want to use your social media to learn more about you and your brand as another outlet for your customers. These posts can of course consist of sales and new products but let them be about your company as well.
Some great interactive posts can be your employees taking over the account for the day and showing your customers what their day-to-day life is as an employee. They can talk specifically about their favorite products, what they like most about working for your company, and fun facts about themselves.
Creating these personalized and interactive posts lets your customers know more about you, your team, and your overall values.
Once you have a large enough following on social media, you can use several insights tools offered by the platforms and other providers to understand your customers better. For example, you might have thought that most of your customers were millennials only to find out that the people buying your products are much older.
These insights can help you tweak your marketing strategies so that you can market to the people more likely to purchase your products.
Expect that your customers will message you on social media, so be prepared to use social media as a customer service tool as well as a marketing tool. It is also important that you respond to their questions, comments, ideas, or concerns on time since it will be reflective of your customer service.
6. Find Better Marketing Opportunities
Marketing can be difficult when you first start your business because you don’t have a large budget to spend. However, once you start making sales and can invest that money back into the business, make sure that you spend at least some of it on marketing.
Look at your current marketing strategies and see which are the most expensive and which are the least. If you find that your cost per acquisition from Google Ads is higher than it is from social media marketing, then you know to invest more money into social media marketing.
If you don’t have a background in marketing, now is the time to find a qualified marketing manager who can help run your marketing operations and ideas so that you don’t have to.
7. Network
Attend all the networking events that you can, from tradeshows to small gatherings so that you can meet people in your niche and connect with potential vendors, customers, and partners. From finding employees on LinkedIn to meeting vendors at trade shows, networking can benefit not only your business but your career.
Networking can help you learn more about other businesses as well as their successes and failures so that you can take valuable lessons from them and use their stories to help your business grow.
Never stop networking because you never know who you could meet along that way. These individuals can help you take your business to the next level.
Final Thoughts: New ideas to help you grow your business
Not every business will grow using the same ideas and tactics, so it is important to find out what works for your business. Your business will need different marketing strategies, employees, and customer service solutions depending on your industry and what you’ve had success with.
Jacob Dayan graduated with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He began his career as a financial analyst at Bear Stearns’ industry-leading Financial Analytics and Structured Transactions group. In 2010, he co-founded Community Tax LLC, a tax company dedicated to helping customers nationwide with tax resolution, tax preparation, bookkeeping, and accounting services. As CEO of Community Tax, Jacob Dayan has assembled a strong team of attorney practitioners, CPAs, and enrolled agents to deliver superior customer service and expected results.
