Looking for strategies on how to grow your business is a never-ending process. To gain a competitive edge and expand your organization at a steady pace, you have to constantly adapt your current strategies and stay on top of the latest trends in your industry.
As you read through this article, you’ll notice some tactics that are not used that often, like mass text messaging for business, and others that are time-tested processes, like creating buyer personas. There are four main areas where you can boost growth—marketing, sales, customer experience, and operations—which are all described below.
Consider some of the following strategies if you wish to steadily expand your business:
Marketing
1. Develop a results-oriented marketing plan
Coming up with a marketing plan that perfectly aligns your sales, marketing, and service teams should start with setting rough estimates. Think about how much you need to spend over a specific period (year, quarter, month) and include every associated cost (paid ads, marketing tools, maintenance expenses, etc.).
Then, consider which strategies have the potential to maximize your ROI, and expand them.
- Could you create better content, and how?
- Which new technologies might help boost your reach?
- Is going over budget worth it for any of these?
Pick the strategy that suits you best and set aside a more significant part of the budget to develop it. If you’re not sure how to get started, check out these marketing plan examples.
2. Build a strong marketing list
An effective marketing automation strategy requires a top-notch contact list. Improving your calls to action, gating content, and pushing marketing opt-ins will enhance the size and quality of your list. It will also improve the likelihood that qualified leads will enter your sales funnel.
Here are nine quick list-building strategies to get you started:
- Exclusive notifications and deals;
- Social media marketing;
- Fully or partially gated content;
- Influencer marketing or collaborations;
- Exit intent or behavioral targeting pop-ups;
- Loyalty and referral programs;
- Personalized CTAs for every landing page;
- Manual outreach for personal contacts;
- Giveaways (just make sure the giveaway is actually relevant to your audience and doesn’t result in cold leads. Shopify has a step-by-step guide on how to host a successful giveaway).
3. Use a remarketing strategy
Your marketing list should also include established customers or unconverted leads you can remarket to. This is a cost-effective way to grow your business by using audiences that already know about your product or service.
Try to reach out to previous clients with your texting campaigns and email blasts and tell them about your new services or product features. Send out special offers and remind them of your product’s benefits and new ways to profit.
Integrated multi-channel remarketing campaigns work best when it comes to targeting interested prospects and can be twice as effective as single-channel campaigns.
Over three-quarters of surveyed businesses use remarketing on their social media platforms and 69% remarket on Google Ads | Image source: 99firms.com
Engage people using YouTube, Google, or Facebook ads. Create clean banner ads using a catchy CTA that stands out, and make sure customers can relate to the message you’re sending.
Take it one step further by personalizing your ad distribution according to every stage of the user’s journey. Addressing pain points in your copy is a very effective technique that will generate relevant traffic to your website.
4. Grow your network
Attend industry events
To expand your reach, develop an event strategy. Building close relationships with potential customers is often a decisive factor in closing a sale. If you don’t have an event strategy, consider hiring an event marketer or salesperson to help you start gaining traction at events.
You could also hire an intern to network on your company’s behalf. Event marketing and experience management are both factors that contribute significantly to new lead generation.
Host events
In addition to attending events, try hosting them at your office to give clients and potential leads a sneak peek into the creative process.
This is a great way for prospects to learn about your product and meet your employees face to face. In-store events can attract new customers, especially if you’re running a small, local business.
5. Diversify social media channels
No doubt you’ve had a go at social media marketing in the past. It’s one of the easiest channels to fall behind on. If you haven’t been successful on one channel, try another platform to see whether your content resonates with different audiences.
Social media takes your message to a global audience instead of limiting it to your local community. The only thing you should be aware of is that, because of different demographics, expectations around your social media content will also vary by platform:
- Video social platforms: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Stories, Facebook Watch, Reels
- Used for: consuming short-form videos.
- Business goal: to create brand awareness and highlight your products or services in a way that static images can’t.
- Value: to educate, entertain, or inspire your audience.
- Social audio platforms: Twitter spaces, Spotify, etc.
- Used for: listening to podcasts and conversations on different topics.
- Business goal: to engage with your customers and conduct live conversations, become a thought-leader in your industry.
- Value: to educate, nurture, and inspire.
- Discussion forums: Quora, Reddit
- Used for: helping others solve a problem.
- Business goal: to be genuinely helpful and a subject matter expert to see traction from these platforms. Not ideal for blatant self-promotion.
- Value: to engage with highly targeted audiences.
- Social media business platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter
- Used for: connecting with other businesses or professionals in the industry.
- Business goal: to share company news, recruit, build business relationships, network.
- Value: to network, join in events, participate in conversations.
6. Mass text messaging
Text messaging is a dynamic tool you can use in a variety of ways to grow your business in 2023. You can send promotional texts, reminders, and offers, or even deliver instant customer support. Business texting is also incredibly cost-effective.
Like email, you can run campaigns from your computer using a mass text messaging service. These services allow you to track the performance of your messages so you can optimize them as needed.
Here’s an example of a promotional text message that will help you boost sales and increase the number of your subscribers:
7. Start a webinar
Especially in a B2B context, webinars make great evergreen content that you can reuse time and time again. To attract a maximum number of customers, start with a high-level topic related to your business.
As you learn the ropes, it will become an important niche where you can attract qualified prospects. Your webinar doesn’t have to be perfect from the outset. Be consistent with your webinars, as each experience will help you improve in the future. Here’s a master checklist to get you through your first webinar.
8. Explore new channels
If you aren’t active on Quora or Reddit, you’re missing out on interacting with interested customers. On Quora, people ask industry-specific questions, and anyone who holds relevant information can post answers.
You can also include links in your answers to lead people back to your site. Reddit groups are very active as well. However, Reddit users are more sensitive to self-promotion.
But Reddit and Quora are only the start. There are so many other Q&A platforms and content aggregators, closed Facebook books, or communities that can help spread the word about your business. Inbound, GrowthHackers, and Medium are just a few of them.
9. Automate marketing processes
Automate more of your marketing strategies as you start growing your business. Automation enables you to spend less time crafting individual campaigns and allows you to A/B test or experiment with different strategies.
A great tip on automation involves personalizing communications across all channels. Send your clients anniversary emails that hit the spot, include numbers (“we’ve been emailing for 365 days now”), and end with an anniversary gift (30% off on a next purchase, etc.).
10. Create compelling videos on YouTube
To drive engagement and promote your product effectively on YouTube, you need to:
- Understand how different video formats work and which to choose;
- Set up your channel like a professional;
- Start making creative videos that are closely connected to your business goals.
Sales
11. Create buyer personas
Buyer personas tell you everything you need to know about your target customers. Moreover, knowing your audience helps you optimize your content. It will also improve your sales calls. To begin, comb through the data to learn more about your customers.
Then, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Finally, try interviewing customers or sending out surveys. These can help you learn more about buying habits, product use cases, and demographics.
12. Reorganize your sales team
It’s no secret the sales floor can become stale the longer agents work at your business. Don’t hesitate to rotate staff to fresh roles. If that doesn’t add a spark, add new team members to keep the energy high.
13. Optimize your sales pitch
If your sales team follows a script, spend time reworking the script or testing new pitches with members of your team. If you can split-test your digital marketing, why not split-test your sales pitch too?
14. Know your competition
A vital part of any sales strategy is knowing and understanding your competition. Your business will grow more rapidly if your pricing, pitch, and products differentiate it from what is already available on the market. What’s more, high competition will spark product innovation and introduce your product to a new set of customers.
Customer experience
15. Delight customers after every sale
How do you ensure continued customer satisfaction after a sale? At the very least, aim to develop a process of conducting a follow-up to offer additional services and resolve any minor issues that might arise. This will encourage customers to use your product and service again in the future.
To make it easier for clients to respond, try offering numbered options:
- 1 – I can’t reply right now; please text another time.
- 2 – I’d like to be contacted by one of your consultants.
- 3 – I’m not interested in your products/services.
16. Improve your website UX
When was the last time you updated your website? In the last few years, user experience has consistently improved. If you want to grow your business, the UX of your website is a great way to start. Nowadays, customers are less conservative and might appreciate periodical changes in design and functionality if these improve their user experience.
This year, consider revamping your page so it’s easier to navigate—and refresh its message. It’s estimated that 74% of people will switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult, and an outdated web page is very hard to navigate.
17. Create a feedback loop
Successful businesses always encourage feedback from customers. To facilitate this, you can automate processes to request reviews and gather feedback. Getting an NPS score for your organization is an increasingly popular strategy, even for small businesses. Moreover, this will help give you a quick overview of your customer satisfaction levels.
18. Increase customer interaction company-wide
While the customer service and sales departments have the most interaction with customers, the rest of the company should also act as a client interface. This helps contextualize the end user and gives employees a purpose: they get to see how the product benefits someone’s life and business.
Consider organizing get-togethers with customers at your place of business. Set up a program to help teams in marketing, finance, and accounting, and give customers a unique opportunity to see how new products are developed—while you benefit from the customers’ priceless insights.
Operations
19. Perform regular system checks
Many of the suggestions so far talk about developing processes that automate and streamline your business. You should investigate every department and process to see what can be optimized to spark business growth.
20. Focus on analytics
Don’t forget to keep a close eye on your numbers. There are so many platforms that can report on your business and help optimize its processes. Most importantly, a healthy dose of analytics will also highlight new growth opportunities you may have overlooked
21. Invest in company culture
One of the best ways to spark business growth is to invest in your team. Keeping them motivated will improve performance and increase your business’s bottom line. If employees enjoy working for you, they’ll tell their friends, and the referrals will expand your organization’s talent pool.
In addition to that, you shouldn’t hesitate to use new strategies—consider adding new technology solutions or even purchasing a new analytics system. Use innovation to your advantage: as far as automation goes, finding the mass text messaging service that’s the best fit for your business will take some research, but the results will make it worth your while.
Alexa Lemzy
