When your business is ticking along nicely, hitting targets, bringing in a profit, is this the time to sit back and be satisfied with what you’ve achieved? Do this for a minute or two if you must but when things are going that well then it’s exactly the right time to take your company upwards and on-wards and into the next phase of its growth.
Resting on your laurels simply isn’t an option in this hyper competitive market, so think carefully about what your business growth plans are. Are you looking to expand in size, in capacity or have you got an income-based figure in mind that you’re striving to reach?
When you’ve been given some breathing space, turn that time towards some creative thinking and some serious business planning. In this blog we take a look at some sure fire ways of growing your business, taking you to the next level.
Image from Pexels
Expand Outwards
What does this mean to you? It might be that taking on more members of staff is how you envision your growth, or maybe you’re looking to move to bigger premises to give your existing team more space to do more of what they already do so well
Perhaps expansion means opening a new office, or outlet in another part of town or a different city altogether. Your expansion plans are only limited by your imagination.
Let’s look at expanding your team. The first step towards creating this area of growth is deciding on what role or roles you’re hoping to introduce. To do this, you’ll need to create a simple list of all the work and tasks that need fulfilling. You may well find that, as the list grows, there is room to create several jobs out of this list.
Once you’ve created a list of tasks and found a suitable job title, you need to think about the skills you’d be looking for in an individual to fill that role.
Think specific. Great communication is good, but too vague. Who will they be communicating with? Is it a customer facing or internal role? You want to narrow down the skillset of your ideal candidate in order to save time and effort filtering out candidates who can’t demonstrate the specific skills you’re looking for.
Expanding Capacity
Quite simply, can you do more? Can you produce more of the goods you make or offer more hours towards the services you offer? Many entrepreneurs will answer yes to either question because they want it to be true. While this is ambitious, it might not be realistic. Growth in this area must be planned for or it will come crashing down as you struggle to meet the demands you have created.
Growth like this requires careful planning so get that started. Dust off those old business plans and see which areas require updating in order to allow your business to start meeting its potential. It’s time to start setting new, more ambitious goals but having the plans in place to allow that to happen and not jumping in feet first.
If, up until now, your marketing has been rather more of an organic affair with customers finding you on social media or through word of mouth, then it might be time to up your game.
You might want to hire in a marketing guru to your team, someone who can kick start a proactive, intentional marketing plan with tangible objectives and outcomes. If you’re not looking to recruit someone internal, then think about hiring a consultant or taking on an agency through Agency Loft, for example.
You might ask them to draw you up marketing plan, concentrate solely on your social media or take on a direct mailing activity as a one-off. Whatever it is you ask them to do, make it specific to your own business plan and build your growth around the success of this task.
Prepare to Succeed
If you think all this talk of growth is just lip service then chances are you’ll be caught on the back foot when you do see actual, real success in your business. So many business owners strive for growth and success but are taken aback when it actually happens. Don’t get put in that position, have faith in the work you do and its capacity to take your business further and further.
You’ll want to ensure that you have everything you need in place to succeed. You’ll need to have your team, IT specialist or consultant take your tech for a thorough test drive. Can your website, your ordering and payment systems handle an increase in traffic and sales? Take a look at your software too. Is that old but steady accounting software really still up to the job or is some investment needed to keep your finances in better shape?
Get your team trained up to use any new software and confident in their abilities to deal with an influx of customers. Share your business plans, share your expected growth rates and have them fully up to speed, able to help you fulfil your business objectives.
Running your own business is exciting, terrifying and ultimately very rewarding. When things go right, they go really right but the mistakes and the disasters are on your head too. Give yourself and your business a fighting chance of staying ahead of growth by getting your planning and preparations done in plenty of time.
Recruit new staff that fit exactly the roles that need to be filled. Helping you to pick up the work that you don’t have the time or the skills to do yourself and supporting other team members.
Have your existing team trained up and ready to work with you, prepared to help you take your business to the next level.
When things are going well then now is the time to plan how you’re going to take your business from good to exceptional. You and your business deserve it and there’s no time to lose so get planning for growth today.
As a business owner, one of the things you are continually striving to do is to increase the exposure of your business to new and existing customers. Whether you have a small business or you’re a well-established firm with a large client base, there are always fresh and innovative ways of showing off your company. But how do you increase your visibility in the business world, especially when it’s likely that there’s plenty of competitors in your industry? Check out our tips for getting your business noticed.
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
Increase your online visibility
Everybody who is anyone is online, and in this day and age, you should be too! Even as a business, it is crucial to establish a prominent online presence, and not just to keep up with the times! Being online can significantly expand your business, as well as increasing your online visibility. Take a look at these tips on how to use the world wide web to get your business noticed.
Build up your social media following. You can do this in many ways, including using online tools to build social media, but it’s important to remember that a small amount of dedicated and engaged followers is much better than a massive following with many inactive accounts.
Post regularly to keep your followers interested in your business. It can be anything from a block of text, a picture, a video, or even a song. Anything that is related to your business will keep interest piqued.
Use your social media platforms to link to your website. Clicks through to your website increase the chance of sales or collaboration.
Keep your website updated with regular posts about your company and content that’s going to be useful to your customers. For example, if you’re a mechanic, post content about car care and the latest car news to keep people coming back for more.
Use SEO (search engine optimization) throughout your website to help organic visitors land on your website. Remember to think about keywords that are relevant and related to your business and use them in your posts. If you’re not confident in using SEO correctly, you can hire the professionals to give you a hand. Just make sure that you do your research on how to pick an SEO provider.
Doing all of this can and will increase your online visibility. Since pretty much everyone is now online, an online presence = a more visible business.
Use free publicity
A common misconception about publicity is that to have it, you must know journalists. This isn’t strictly true. The truth is, there are millions of journalists that are looking for new pieces of information to share with the world, and if you give them that information, it’s likely to be a quid pro quo situation. A great way of finding journalists that can offer this for you is by looking for magazines within your niche and contacting the editors and also contributors of similar brands. More often than not, you’ll find that there will be plenty of journalists that want the first inside scoop on your business news. Use free publicity to get your business noticed more!
Run a competition
Everybody loves a freebie, so running a competition to win a grand prize will certainly pique interest. Use your social media profiles and your website to promote your competition. This will encourage people to share your posts for a chance to win the competition. Not only that, you’re likely to gain new followers and also see an increased amount of user engagement on your online content. This is another prime example of a quid pro quo situation - you give your existing and potential customers something for nothing, and in turn, your exposure continues to grow. Some businesses use competitions as a strategy to keep exposure levels high, so it might be something to keep in mind for the future too.
Don’t copy your competition
One mistake that similar businesses often make is trying to out-do each other with their strategies. While there’s nothing wrong with competition in business, the mistake they’re making is using the same kinds of strategies. Set your own strategy and take a different approach at how you run things and you’ll soon see that you’re sticking out much further than your competition.
Show that you’re not just another corporate company
Whether you’re a big business or not, companies that aren’t approachable or ‘customer friendly’ will often lose out on customers more than those who are. While it’s important to remain professional with your business, you should also try and adopt a ‘friendly’ approach to your customers. One that makes each of your customers feel like they’ve truly been taken care of, rather than just being passed to another member of the team. Making your company likable by supporting charities and not being afraid to have fun with your business will make you stand out from the crowd.
Follow a trend
You’re probably familiar with many internet trends such as ‘flossing’ or the ‘ice bucket challenge’ - use these to your advantage! Not only will you be supporting a worthy cause as a business, but you’ll also be harnessing the power of trends to expose your business and get yourself noticed! Alternatively, use the power of the internet to create your own direction and reap the benefits of exposure from that too.
As you can see, getting your business noticed isn’t as difficult as you might think, and you don’t always have to use conventional methods such as networking and word of mouth. Try out these unusual yet useful tips and see for yourself how much more attention you’ll receive as a business!
You may be someone who loves technology but isn’t quite sure how to go about working it into your business on a regular basis. The upside is that with a little knowledge and determination, you can use the advancements in this space to help your business succeed.
It won’t be long before you’re growing your business and improving your operations so you can get ahead and win over more customers. What you don’t want to do is nothing and then fall behind your competitors and not be able to keep up with the other companies out there who are using technology to their advantage and innovating their products and services.
Sales & Marketing
With a well-designed and highly functioning website technology can help your business succeed. It’s an important tool that should be a part of your sales and marketing strategy, and that will help you to get the attention you deserve. Combine advertising with SEO, and you’ll be on your way to attracting new leads and increasing your customer base. You can also hire a company to help you achieve application integration, so all of your systems and technology solutions are talking to each other and working simultaneously to help you reach your sales and marketing goals.
Productivity & Efficiency
You can work smarter instead of harder and be more productive when you use more technology in your workplace. You’ll produce fewer errors and will have the information you need instantaneously so you can make wise decisions based on data and hard facts. For example, file sharing and working in the cloud will allow you and your team members to get on the same page and hit your deadlines at a quicker rate. No longer do you have to wait to sit side by side with someone else on your team to discuss your work projects when you have technology solutions in place.
Client Management
Technology will help your business to succeed through better client management techniques. For instance, you can use a video conference to conduct a sales pitch instead of having to fly to a different location if you’re tight on time or resources. You can also use client management systems and programs to track sales and organize customer information in one place. Communication is made simple, easy, and quick with technology, and there’s no reason you can’t return a message from your client almost immediately these days.
Customer Service
Finally, technology can help your business succeed by allowing you to offer more customer service outlets. You can now use social media platforms and chat applications to answer customer questions and inquiries. No longer do your clients have to wait for days or even hours to hear back from you regarding their concerns. It’s essential to have multiple options for your customers to get in touch with you, such as via phone, email, and even your website. Technology also allows you to take care of issues in a timely manner so you can deliver on your promise and keep your customers satisfied with your services.
Developing a winning digital marketing strategy is so difficult because there is a lot of conflicting information out there about what works. Some people say that SEO is the most important thing to consider while others swear that it’s all about social media. Others suggest that digital marketing is overrated in some industries and you’ll still do better with more traditional offline marketing strategies.
Trying to make sense of all of that conflicting information is tough and it often leads to disjointed marketing campaigns. Businesses end up spreading themselves too thin across lots of different strategies without a cohesive plan, and that’s never effective. However, if you’re looking for a digital marketing strategy that brings multiple benefits to the business and is cost effective, content marketing is the way to go. It still needs to be part of a wider digital marketing plan but if you can deliver regular, good quality content to your customers, you will see improvements across the board.
Source
Most people automatically think of blogs when they think of content marketing but that’s only one small part of it. Content marketing refers to any valuable content that you deliver to your customers free of charge. That could also include ebooks, online tools, infographics and much more. Offering this kind of content can benefit your business and improve your marketing performance in so many different ways. If you haven’t put much thought into your content marketing strategy so far, it’s worth considering these benefits that it brings to your business.
Promoting Without Selling Yourself
Let’s face it, nobody really likes adverts. You’re not likely to pay much attention to the social media page or website of a business if you’re constantly bombarded with adverts for their products and nothing else. If you consider the social media pages of most successful businesses, only a small percentage of their output is direct marketing like that because that’s not what customers want to see. If that’s all you offer, people will unfollow you and they probably won’t visit your site again. That’s why content marketing is so good because you’re offering your customers something without the expectation of payment.
It’s important that you build a relationship with a customer before they are willing to spend their money and you’re not going to be able to do that simply by filling their inbox with marketing emails. If anything, that will just put them off ever wanting to deal with you in future. However, if they’re regularly visiting your website to make use of the quality content that you post on there, you start to build that relationship. If they are in need of products similar to yours, it’s likely that they will think of you first.
Whether you agree that SEO should be at the center of your digital marketing campaign or not, you can’t deny that it is very important. SEO is a tricky thing to get right and so many businesses struggle with it because a lot of them don’t realize how important content marketing is. In fact, content marketing and SEO are intrinsically linked and you can’t really be successful at one without being successful at the other. Good SEO requires keywords, articles, and links, all of which can be found in your content. You can think of content marketing as the practical application of SEO in a lot of ways. Site mapping is another central feature of SEO and a good content marketing strategy always encourages that as well. Constant updating and output is important in SEO too because a site that hasn’t changed at all in the last year is not likely to appear very high in the search rankings because the algorithms will consider it outdated and irrelevant. As expected, constant output is a central feature of content marketing as well.
However, it’s important to understand that content marketing doesn’t automatically equal good SEO and vice versa. The two are very closely linked and when combined properly, they are very effective, but a lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking that they don’t need to bother with SEO because they are good with content marketing but that isn’t true. Content marketing is important but ideally, you need a good SEO company that will help you to build that content marketing into a wider SEO strategy. A lot of businesses fail at both because they’re only doing one or the other.
Reaching A Wider Audience
Increasing the scope of your marketing is important if you’re going to see continued growth. There are a lot of different ways that you can do this, social media marketing or referral programs, for example. But one of the best things that you can do is up your content marketing game. When people find something that they like online, they share it with their followers on social media. That means if you’re putting out great content all of the time and your site is being shared often, you’ll be exposed to a lot of new customers. Your investment is relatively small but the return that you will see on quality content is very big in comparison. This is a far more effective way of expanding your reach than something like marketing emails, for example. Once the articles are live on the website, they will continue to draw more traffic to your site at no extra cost. When you compare this to something like pay per click advertising where you’ll be paying a fee for each new visitor to the site, it’s clear that content marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to expose your business to new customers.
Shortening The Sales Cycle
Getting customers through the sales cycle and closing a sale as quickly as possible is important. Often, access to information holds up the process because customers have a lot of questions about the features of a product or the materials that the product is made from etc. If your sales and customer service team are constantly on the phone or emailing responses to these basic questions, that’s not a very good use of their time. But if you use content marketing effectively, you can often shorten the sales cycle. If you’re posting quality content about the products and going into more detail about the features, those questions are answered. You can also write about the manufacturing processes that you use and any changes that you’re making to reduce your impact on the environment. Those sorts of things improve your public image and also give customers the information that they need to make informed purchasing decisions.
Another benefit of using content marketing is that you can give people a sense of your company culture. Your attitudes toward the environment are a part of that but people may also be interested in the way that you handle employees and what your eventual business goals are. People are increasingly interested in what kind of business they’re dealing with, rather than just the product itself, and you can use content marketing to show your customers who you are.
Solidify Your Brand
Source
You should already know that your brand is a very important part of your marketing strategy. It’s always the companies that can build the strongest and most recognizable brand that have the most success. There are lots of different ways to increase brand awareness from good social media to more traditional techniques like branded merchandise. But you should never underestimate the power of content marketing when building a good brand.
The brands that people connect with the most are the ones that they consider to be leading authorities in their industry. Amazon, for example, has the strongest brand in the online retail world because people know that they can get you almost any product and deliver it to you the following day. In short, they know everything there is to know about online retail and they’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of delivery times and choice of product. If you want to be successful, you need to be the Amazon of your industry and content marketing is one of the best ways to do that.
If you’re posting regular, good quality content that gives people a lot of useful information that relates to your products, you show them that you are an expert in that area and you are a trusted source of information.
Build Trust
Trust between you and your customers is important for a number of reasons. As we’ve already seen, content marketing can help you to position yourself as an authority in your industry which is important because it means that customers will trust in the quality of your product. However, it’s also important that your customers trust you as a business, especially if you’re selling products online because there is always a danger of scams. If a company is consistently releasing quality content on their website, customers know that they are a legitimate business.
Content marketing is a hot topic at the moment for a reason, because it’s so effective and benefits your business in so many ways. If you aren’t using it already, you really need to invest in it.
Web developers are some of the naughtiest marketers in the world. For starters, they don’t call themselves marketers at all - that’s far too low brow. A designer is somebody who creates something to be marketed. He or she does not engage in the vulgar marketing process itself. And second, web designers very much do get involved in marketing, embedding small nudges to encourage users to do what companies want them to do, often without users even knowing.
Pixabay
If there’s any group in the world who is trying to affect the mind of the average person subliminally, it’s not the Illuminati; it’s legions of web designers working for SEO and web design agencies. Practically everything they do is what behavioural economist Richard Thaler would call a “nudge” - surreptitiously taking advantage of some aspect of our psychology to get us to do something that they want.
Take the practice of mimicking messaging apps on websites. Websites will create imaginary inboxes with the small “1” in a red circle, indicating unread mail. Of course, it’s nothing of the sort, but it’s a way of creating a situation in which people are much more likely to click the call-to-action. It’s a trick.
Web developers are beginning to realise that by appealing to people’s online habits and instincts that they’re able to boost conversions and get people to do their bidding. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before gamification came to web design in a big way. Thanks to platforms like Roll20, it’s easier than ever for people to get involved with games online. In fact, that’s now what people expect. A website experience seems a little empty without there being some kind of optional in-browser game that people can play.
Hide-And-Seek To Increase Dwell Time
Ever since Google included “dwell time” as a marker of site quality, web designers have been looking for ways to increase the time that people spend on their pages. Most quality companies have exhausted the regular avenues of improvement: plenty of white space, fast loading times, snappy navigation, engaging content, and so on. But relatively few firms employ gamification to keep people hooked.
A small web design company called Zurb, however, has created a game that attempts to increase dwell time on its site by getting them to play hide and seek with cows. When a user arrives on the company’s website, the impulse isn’t to read the beautifully-crafted copy or read about the product. It’s to find where all the cows are hiding to complete the game.
Think for a second just how clever this is. Not only are you exposing a person to your brand, but you’re also providing them with a dopamine hit from playing the game and signalling to Google that your pages are giving value to users - far more than your competitors.
There are dozens of other examples of gamification of websites, but the Zurb example gives us all of the information we need. Web sites that use games put themselves at a critical advantage, over and above their competitors.
