Growing a business is a never-ending process. Certainly, yesterday’s strategies won’t always work today. Competition continually innovates, and so should you. You need strategies to grow your business. As you read, 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. Finally, there are four main areas where you can improve growth: marketing, sales, customer experience, and operations.
Consider some of the following strategies:
Marketing
1. Mass Text Messaging
Text messaging is the tool you can use in a variety of ways to grow your business in 2019. You can send promotional texts, reminders, offers, or even deliver customer support.
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.
2. Automate Processes
Plan to automate more of your marketing strategies. Automation runs behind the scenes. Moreover, automation enables you to spend less time crafting individual campaigns and draws your attention to A/B testing your outreach.
3. Build a Marketing List
Additionally, to be successful, a true marketing automation strategy requires a list of contacts. Improving your calls to action, gating content, and pushing marketing opt-ins will increase the size of your list. It will improve the chances for qualified leads to enter your sales funnel.
4. Remarket to Old Customers
Alongside new customers, your marketing list should also include old customers to whom you can remarket. On both your texting campaigns and your email blasts, reach out to previous clients to tell them about new services. Additionally, make special offers and remind them of the benefits your product had.
5. Attend Events
To increase your reach, develop an event strategy. Today, personal relationships still matter in business and a strong relationship can close a sale. If you don’t have an event strategy, consider hiring an event marketer or salesperson to start getting traction at events. You could also hire an intern. Event marketing and experience management are growing as a major contributor to new leads.
6. Host Events
In addition to attending events, try hosting them at your office. This is a great way for prospects to learn about your product and meet your employees face-to-face. For small businesses, events at your store can attract new customers to your business.
7. Recommit to Social Media
No doubt you’ve tried social media marketing in the past. It’s one of the easiest channels to let fall behind. If you haven’t had success on one channel, try another platform to see if your content stretches farther. Social media can take your message outside your local community to a global audience.
8. Record a Webinar
Especially in a B2B business, webinars make great evergreen content. You can reuse webinars time and time again. To attract the most customers, start with a high-level topic related to your business. As you learn the ropes, it will become an important niche to attract qualified prospects.
9. 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 questions and anyone can post answers. You can also include links in your answers to lead people back to your site. Reddit groups are very active. However, Reddit users are more sensitive to self-promotion.
Reddit and Quora are just the start. There are so many other Q&A platforms and content aggregators that can help spread the word about your business. Inbound, GrowthHackers, Medium are just some of them.
Sales
10. Add New Sales Blood
It’s no secret the sales floor can become stale the longer agents work at your business. Don’t hesitate to rotate staff to new roles. If that doesn’t add a spark, add new team members to keep the energy high.
11. 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. You probably split-test your digital marketing so why not split-test your sales pitch?
12. 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 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.
13. Know Your Competition
A key part of any sales strategy is to understand your competition. Your business will grow more if your pricing, pitch, and products differentiate your business from your competitors. What’s more, good competition is healthy for the growth of the economy.
Customer Experience
14. Delight Customers after the Sale
How do you ensure the satisfaction of your customers after a sale? At the very least, develop a process of conducting a follow-up to offer additional services, and resolve small issues. This will help customers use your product and service again in the future.
15. Improve the User Experience of Your Website
When was the last time you updated your website? In the last few years, user experience has consistently improved. Today, customers are more attune to changing design than you might think. This year, consider revamping your page to be easier to navigate and be on message. It is estimated that 74% of people will switch brands if the purchasing process is too difficult.
16. Create a Feedback Loop
Successful businesses always encourage feedback from customers. You can automate processes to request reviews and gather feedback. An increasingly popular strategy even for small business is an NPS score. Moreover, this will help give you a quick snapshot of your customer satisfaction.
17. Increase Customer Interaction Company-Wide
While customer success and sales have the most interaction with customers, the rest of the company should interface with clients. It helps contextualize the end-user and gives employees a purpose to see how the product works in someone’s life and business. Consider hosting customers at your place of business. Set up a program to help teams in marketing, finance and accounting, and give customers an opportunity to see new products.
Operations
18. Establish Systems
Many of the suggestions so far talk about developing processes that automate and streamline your business. Likewise, you should investigate every department and process to see what can be done to have a tighter system.
19. Focus on Analytics
Don’t forget to stay close to the numbers. There are so many platforms that can report on your business and help optimize your processes. Most importantly, a healthy dose of analytics may also show you growth opportunities that you initially overlooked.
20. Invest in Company Culture
One of the best ways to spark growth in your business is to invest in your people. If they’re motivated, your team will perform better and increase the bottom line of the business. If employees enjoy working for you, they’ll tell their friends and grow the talent of your business.
Above all, don’t hesitate to try new things in your business. Innovation isn’t easy, but it is worth it. As you start to use new strategies consider adding technology solutions, such as finding the best mass text messaging service. As well, purchase a new analytics system.
Alexa Lemzy
