How to Grow Your Business – Part 1

When business owners implement steps to grow their business, they often focus their attention primarily on winning more customers or clients. But that kind of single focus is only part of the picture. To maximize success for your investment in marketing for growth, generate the best results to maximize profitability and long-term success for your business, you should consider the “4 Ways to Grow Your Business” in greater depth. By not addressing things from this broader perspective, you will likely miss out on invaluable opportunities to grow and build the value of your business.

Let’s summarize the 4 ways to grow your business that we will be addressing:

1. Increase the number of customers (but only of the type you want)
2. Increase the number of times customers come back
3. Increase the average value of each sale you make to customers
4. Increase the effectiveness of each process in your business.

Seems simple right? Realizing marketing success is hard work and no amount of hard work, enthusiasm, passion, or talent will guarantee business growth. Common marketing strategies like direct mail, radio/TV, hard copy advertising may have lost some of their marketing effectiveness and perhaps you need to shift your focus on enhancing your online presence. Most importantly though, you need to be working ON your business and not IN your business. Just imagine if you were able to increase each one of these four factors by just 10%. The compound effect of this improvement could be an increase in your overall revenue of over 40%.

In this first of a series of 4 articles, we will focus on the 1^st way to grow your business. Stay tuned for future articles addressing the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th ways to grow your business.

Increase the Number of Customers (but only of the type you want)

 Understand Your Market – Ensure you fully understand your customers’ needs and preferences so you can market to their specific needs. Identify your customer’s key frustrations and strategize how to position your product or service so you can enhance their experience in dealing with you. Do not just simply sell your product or service features, but rather focus on the benefits your customers will get when they do business with you.

Develop and Promote Your Business’s Unique Core Differentiators – If you don’t have a point of difference in your business you’re probably only competing on price. This path could become problematic in retaining profitable margins. Instead look at what makes your business stand out in the crowd? Do you have a unique selling point that differentiates your business from your competitors? Think of ways you can differentiate your business from your competitors and how to effectively communicate this to your target market.

Consider Customer Focused Niches – For many businesses it may make sense to focus on potential niche markets. If you have a unique customer product offering or you specialize in an industry, how can you capitalize on this? Look to ways of becoming a ‘visible expert’ to the marketplace.  Perhaps consider strategies like speaking at industry conferences, writing articles in trade magazines and writing a series of blogs on your area of expertise.

Focus on Target Marketing – Consider how you currently market which may be too broad based and focus your attention on winning your ideal type of customer. Does it make sense for you to target specific age groups, income level or people in a geographic location or gender? Where do these potential ideal customers gather? Develop systems and processes to identify and target the ideal customers you are looking for that will drive your business growth.  Effective online marketing strategies can become a game changer for your business growth plans.

Optimize Your Website – For many businesses, their website is a key marketing engine. Most consumers start their search on the internet so make sure your website is working effectively as a marketing resource. We see all too often websites operating as ‘electronic billboards’ that simply list the who, what and where of the business. Think about making your website more interactive. Make sure you guide visitors to take next steps after getting to your website wherever possible. Think about ways to encourage call to action by visitors with active prompts to call us now, book a free meeting, speak with our virtual assistant, call for a free quote or get a free product sample. Also consider having your website showcase features like customer testimonials, videos, blog articles, e-books and whitepapers to name a few things to promote your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Where does your business appear when searching for your product or service offering on Google? SEO is a manageable process that can help ensure your website is working optimally. For best success, your website needs to have key inbound links, label images with key words, along with unique and relevant content that resonates with your target market. Think of designing your website that will ‘talk’ to prospects and tell them how you can help solve their issues or fill their needs.

Social Media Presence – Social media platforms are very robust in acting as the digital ‘word of mouth’ of the users. Social media presence can greatly enhance your awareness to large numbers of potential new customers. This form of digital advertising is powerful and is also a very cost-effective way to showcase your business.

Contact List – Statistics have shown that most sales typically involve 3 -5 contacts with a potential customer. Does your system track your contact activity so you can most effectively target market to contacts? Make sure your website encourages prospects to provide their name and email address which will allow you to build a pipeline of prospects. You need to regularly market to prospects so your business will be top of mind with your contacts.

Enhance Your Sales System – Encouraging new customers/clients to purchase from your business will likely require automating and systematizing the sales process wherever possible. This will help ensure your customers/clients have a consistent and positive experience when dealing with your business. Think of how you might use your customer/client database to enhance your targeted marketing efforts.

The above ideas are just a small sample of ways to more effectively promote your business. Take some time to think and strategize about other ways to promote your business. As you embark on your marketing efforts don’t forget about focusing on who and where your ideal customers gather. Brainstorm on how can you get your business in front of these potential customers? Think about joining network groups, better utilize your LinkedIn profile, deliver regular news about your new products or services, offer webinars and seminars to help position your business to list a few ideas.

If you are serious about growing your business, start taking steps in the coming months to implement some of the ideas outlined above. Go ahead and identify your ideal customer or client type, start asking your existing customers/clients for referrals or explore other strategies to win more business.

In the meantime, stay tuned for our continuing series of articles on the remaining 3 ways to Grow Your Business.

Still Have Questions About Growing Your Business?

If you are thinking about or currently working on growing your business, and need assistance, please contact Rick Gendemann, CPA, CA , one of our business advisory leaders. We look forward to the opportunity to connect with you to discuss your business and address how we may be able to work with you on developing and implementing your business sales strategy action plan.