How to See Growth in Your Small Business: 9 Smart Ways

By Ray O’Donnell

If starting is hard, scaling is challenging. It’s almost akin to climbing that steep hill at the end of your energy levels. But, as Ginni Rometty rightly said, "growth and comfort don't coexist." So, if you’re wondering how to see growth in your small business, you’re not alone.

You need to design an effective push advertising campaign to get more attraction for your products and services. In this process, you have to plan a robust marketing strategy that helps you generate good potential leads for your business.

Like every other business owner or marketer, even your goal would be to drive more sales and generate revenue with minimal resources and efforts.

But how can you achieve that?

Let’s find out. 

10 Tips to Grow Your Business

Here are the top strategies on how to see growth in your small business.

#1. Develop a Sales Funnel

You can streamline a significant chunk of your sales processes with the sales funnel. You can't avoid your budget system while preparing your sales funnel. You need to build a monthly budget plan for your sales team to get qualified sales for your small business.

But what is a sales funnel?

It’s the journey your target audience takes from the point they notice your brand to the point where they become your loyal customers. 

Let’s take a look at the five-stage sales funnel. Some companies add/remove a few stages while creating the funnel.

Image via Monday

But why do you need a sales funnel in the first place?

As a small business, every lead is essential so you need to develop a strategy that generates maximum leads for your small business. However, when you don't have complete knowledge about your leads, it’s going to be challenging to convert them into customers.

However, with the sales funnel, you get an insight into the journey of every lead from the time they first visit your website. The funnel helps the sales team understand how to handle the lead, nurture them, and convert them into customers.

But here’s the thing.

Every firm requires different sales funnels unique to its lead generation needs and growth requirements. It is thus essential that you conceptualize your funnel before building it.

For example, if you deal in mortgage loan services such as All Reverse Mortgage, you need to create a sales funnel that works in the market. You need to focus on the pinpoints of your customers and design your sales funnel as per them to get good leads for your business.

What’s more?

You need to prepare a verified audience list and you can do a people search using available platforms in the market.

You should also have various tools in place for each stage of the funnel, such as lead generation tools and automation tools that can improve your nurturing techniques and help you convert better through the sales funnel.

Also, consider creating high-converting sales collateral to help educate and build meaningful relationships with prospects as you move them along the sales funnel. 

#2. Use Winning Retention Techniques

As a growing business, you are constantly involved with customer acquisition. However, it is equally important to focus on your existing customers. 

We all know it is hard to acquire a new customer; but, what is more challenging is retaining that customer in your business. 

There are several ways to retain customers:

Create a Loyalty Program

A well-designed loyalty program can quickly help you retain your customers and can pave the way to seeing growth in your small business. 

Implementing a loyalty program can lead to an increase in customer lifetime value (CLV), and these loyal customers may even refer others from their social circles, further expanding your customer base. It's crucial to conduct thorough market research to determine the best market to enter, whether it's the IT sector or the cheese market, to ensure a successful expansion.

With a solid program, you can get customers to spend again and again to improve your bottom line.

Amazon Prime, for example, is one such loyalty program that keeps customers loyal to the ecommerce platform.

Image via Amazon

Engage with Personalized Campaigns

You need to stay on top of your customer's minds to remain relevant. Sending out personalized communication via emails, SMS, or any other medium can regularly help you connect with them. 

Sending a personalized product recommendation email to your repeat customer segment is an example of email personalization. Similarly, if you offer periodic discounts (to the segment that loves deals), it’d help you drive sales too. To generate unique and compelling content for your campaigns, tools like Planable AI can be quite helpful.

Sales CRM tools can also help you to generate good sales leads.

You can leverage the best sales CRM tools to integrate with your marketing campaigns and design an effective communication strategy to generate good sales leads for your business.

For instance, note how Grammarly sends personalized emails to its customers. 

 

To send personalized emails, you need to manage your email list and segment your customers well. This would help you customize your emails for each segment well. 

Invest in Good Customer Service

Who doesn't like it when treated well? 

If you want to grow your Small businesses, invest in customer service. Make sure you treat your customers as you would like to be treated. You can leverage the best virtual phone system to communicate with your customers to solve their queries in a detailed personalized manner.

You can include an auto-generated QR code facility for your authorized customers to access your services without any hassles. The codes can generate automatically when they subscribe or purchase your services. It saves your subscribers time and helps them to enter your service place.

Knowing your customer is a great way to grow your business. You can conduct both types of surveys offline and online survey. Offline surveys can conduct using an app installed on tablets, and phones while organizing events in offline stores such as retail stores, conferences, product launch events, etc.

On the basis of the feedback from your customers, you can make changes in your marketing strategy as well as product modifications if required. 

Also, you can get vanity numbers for your local customers to provide quick costless customer support. Some customers don't like the pay while talking to customers care executive.

And guess what?

89% of consumers say they are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience. This would surely help power up your small business’s growth.

Image via Salesforce

Adding a chatbot to the website is a great way of achieving this. It will help with two-way communication and the visitors can easily get answers to their questions through it.

What’s more?

You can also incorporate live chat into your website to enable real-time communication. You need to assure that it is a secure chat app, so it will safeguard your data.

This can go a long way in helping you improve the customer experience. Apart from this, you can add a feedback form on your website to collect feedback from your visitors and customers. And if you really want to skyrocket your business growth, take time to read blogs by industry experts, attend a free coaching session, and attend webinars to learn their business secrets.

#3. Use Multiple Channels for Customer Communication

As a business owner, you need to connect with your customers regularly. Start by building your presence on several channels to make communication seamless. This covers entertainment, triathlon training, or any other topic that individuals have shown a keen interest in.

The idea is to be present wherever the customers are. 

For example, if you have limited to no online presence, start by creating a website. You can install live chat software to your website to instantly reply to your customer's queries about your products and services. Follow it up with a social media presence. And when we are talking about building a strong online presence, you should also invest in online reputation management.

Depending on what your customers want and how you aim to showcase it, promotional or personalized emails can help connect better with them. 

How you choose channels for communication depends on what your business needs are and where your customers are present.  You need to analyze the audience before planning your media based on your growth goals and audience preferences.

#4. Dive Into Business Insights

Business insights are the building blocks of your marketing strategy. It all begins with you collecting the most relevant and real-time data using a top Google search API like Zutrix SERP API. You should then invest in tools that can help you analyze the data you have collected and derive insights from them.

For example, email marketing tools will give you insights into the number of people opening the email, clicking on your CTA, and other details. This data can come in handy for your marketing decisions. Also, Building a sizeable email marketing list will also require a considerable amount of time, likely a year or more, along with continuous investment to expand the list and consistently provide valuable updates and insights to nurture it.

Through analytics, you can figure out who are your repeat, one-time, and fallen-off-the-grid customers. You can take action accordingly and personalize your strategies to get them back to your business. To expertize and optimize your sales lead data resources you can leverage Zooninfo and its alternative b2b tools. Gaurav Sharma- a digital marketing consultant at Attrock, prepared the best list for Zoominfo alternatives. You can choose anyone as per your requirement.

The data-driven insights can also directly impact your business decisions and improve them.

#5. Leverage Partnerships

Partnerships are an excellent way to expand your customers base and grow your small business. However, knowing who you can partner with is difficult. Not every other business can be a good partner for your growth.

You need to make strategic partnerships with businesses from the same niche that share a common objective. That could also make warehouse management less of a hassle if you’re both an e-commerce brand since you could potentially share costs and enjoy the benefits of such a collaboration.

Partnering with them should help you grow your user base and connect with more people in the niche. 

Lastly, both you and the partner company should have a symbiotic relationship. 

So, how do partnerships help?

Say you are a PoS company with specific tools to help the retail business grow. You can partner with another company that offers store management solutions. By leveraging supplier management best practices from the start, this partnership can help you sell your products and services together.

When you partner with another business, you also gain access to their customer base, which helps you grow even further.

Whether it's a general partnership, limited partnership, or limited liability partnership (LLP), choosing the right structure is crucial for success. For those considering forming a partnership, registering your LLC in Delaware can offer several advantages, including favorable tax laws and business-friendly regulations.

And if you need advice on how partnerships should be formed or if you want to register your partnership, consider getting in touch with a seasoned business formation firm like Northwest Registered Agent, who can guide you well. 

#6. Employ the Right Workforce

Hiring employees can be tedious and expensive, especially if you are a growing business. With long-term invest in growth plans, you might want to invest in the right people who think alike and can visualize your goals.

The key?

Have a transparent hiring process. 

Know what you want from your potential employees before you get started with hiring and design the hiring process accordingly. 

Create a team member or ideal employee persona for your business outsourcing so that you know who would suit your organization the best. Consider exploring the Predictive Index types to understand the behavioral styles that align with your team dynamics and company culture.

Along with the right set of employees, you should also invest in collaborative tools and to boost their productivity and attain your goals. You can leverage an all-in-one software for your agency or business in project management, time tracking, billing, customer support, etc. to reduce your cost by purchasing subscriptions from multiple tools for your different business needs.

You also need the means to use these tools effectively, depending on the nature of your operations. For instance, if you sell services to clients, providing employees with Word invoice templates to customize and send out when the time for payment arrives is wise. This helps with productivity as well as branding consistency.

#7. Diversify for Growth

It is essential to keep diversifying your products and services to meet your growth goals. 

For example, your core product may be digital marketing services. However, you can expand into the learning markets and offer educational material to help potential digital marketers. You could even partner with virtual machine hosting service providers to provide solutions that increase your revenue and customer satisfaction. 

You arrange your product/service information and can create the infographic, small video, marketing memes, and other visual files to represent your product in a visual way and share it with marketers to promote and educate them. 

For this, you will need to find untapped potential or markets that can help you build your business. Once you have identified the need, it is essential to find the ideal product/service to offer the targeted audience.

The key?

Try to find a product/service in your niche as your brand is already likely well-known among your target market.

Lastly, it would help to create a business model for the diversified product to help you with your growth goals.

Recently, it acquired Backlinko to provide a powerful resource to its audience and to educate them on SEO-related topics.

Pro Tip: SEO is a powerful tool of digital marketing and it can help to generate online leads for small businesses. SEO is so important for small businesses and with the right SEO practices, entrepreneurs can boost their business ROI and growth together. 

#8. Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing Content is a great way to see growth in your small business without spending a lot of your capital on marketing. 

You can reach out to popular influencers and bloggers in your industry and ask them to promote your products/services on an affiliate basis. 

For every successful sale that they generate, you can pay them a commission. This, in turn, would motivate the affiliates to perform even better as it can boost their commissions. Likewise, you’d benefit from greater sales and revenue too.  

Bluehost, for example, leverages an affiliate program to grow its sales.

Image via Bluehost

#9. Apply for Funding and Grants

Everything we previously discussed will no doubt help you see growth, but you can’t utilize these tips without appropriate funding. If you have a business plan and excellent credit, you can take out a loan or credit card with a low-interest rate. This gives you more flexibility with your funds. With a solid background in private equity deal sourcing platforms, the individual showcases a keen ability to identify and capitalize on lucrative opportunities, instilling confidence in investors with their proven track record of successful deal execution.

But don’t stop there. If you want to maximize your growth, apply for an entrepreneur grant. Companies like Incfile offer two grants: the Young Entrepreneur Scholarship Grant and the Fresh Start Business Grant. Both can help aspiring entrepreneurs start or grow their businesses.

Conclusion

To grow your business to the next level, you need a solid plan. Adopting the right digital marketing tools and techniques can help you stay agile and flexible. At the same time, you should collaborate with your workforce to strategize your growth.

An integrated communication mix is apt for growing your customer base and improving revenue generation. You could also partner with other brands in your niche and understand your competition well to drive your growth. 

So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try these strategies to grow your business.

  Back to Small Business blogs