Growth is one of the essential goals for your business that ensure your company thrives and survives. Not to mention that without significant improvement, your business will not be able to outperform your competitors. Here are eight tips to help you scale your business and take it to greater heights.
Put The Focus On Customer Service
The ability to retain desired customers is critical to the continued success of the company. Having loyal customers not only means a regular income, but satisfied clients can also provide effective word-of-mouth marketing, helping grow your business and customer base.
Along with providing your customers with an exceptional product or service, you can stimulate repeat business by focusing on customer service. This means resolving issues and complaints quickly and thoroughly, asking for and acting on feedback and being constantly available.
Automate Manual Tasks
Small business owners often prefer to do most of their tasks manually. As a result, this has two major drawbacks – it is time-consuming and prone to human errors. When you automate your day-to-day tasks, it saves you a lot of time that you can invest in growing your company. For example, automating all payroll-related operations with payroll software saves you from all that hassle of doing various complex calculations and ensures that your team always receive their payments on time. It also allows you to conveniently store and analyse payroll data to make more informed decisions about your company’s finances.
Use Social Media To Your Advantage
Since everyone has a gadget that connects them to social media, small business owners should leverage this powerful tool through various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Social media not only allows you to grow brand awareness and promote your business to potential customers but also gain valuable information through “social listening”. You can identify what customers are saying about your company, understand their behaviour, find out trends and keywords that are relevant to your target market, and therefore, improve your customer service quality.
However, companies need to break the bad habit of constantly selling on social media. Sales and marketing are two different things, and implementing a sales-only strategy on social media can also be a fail-only strategy. Try to create relevant and appealing content that adds value to and builds relationships with your audience. These can be useful tips and tricks, industry trends and insights or entertaining behind-the-scenes videos. With thorough research, you will be able to find great formats, topics and messages for your audience, depending on your type of business. As a result, when it is time for a potential customer to make a purchase, they can turn to a company they know and trust — you.
Collaborate With Bloggers & Influencers
The benefits of brand awareness and the ability to reach a target audience on social media make influencer marketing one of the best methods to promote your products or services.
Whether it is beauty products, games, apps, clothing lines, many companies are using this trend to grow their business, so why can not you? Collaborating with bloggers, YouTubers, social media influencers, or podcasters make a significant difference in sales and help to drive a stream of regular traffic to your website.
An unbiased third-party review is a popular and effective technique for convincing people to buy your products/services and attracting new customers. Many consumers tend to trust the recommendations of others and feel inspired to make a purchase, even if they don’t know the person.
Build The Right Team
Hiring key people who can help your business grow is one of the biggest investments you can make. Therefore, build a team of collaborative and proactive professionals and make sure you are hiring individuals who also dream of expanding their careers. The right team can add value to your business and develop new and better strategies to make your business stand out from competitors.
Also, many small business owners are accustomed to doing a lot of tasks themselves instead of getting help from others. However, as your business grows, you probably won’t be able to do everything yourself. Trust your employees enough to delegate work to them. While it can be challenging to identify tasks that you don’t need to do on your own, this way, you will have more time to devote yourself to what you do best – grow your company.
Support Innovation
No matter if you are innovating your logo, slogan, product or work culture, innovation plays a key role in every business. Every day and every minute, new things are happening, so it is essential to do whatever it takes to stay current with trends and keep your brand relevant. Research what your customers want, identify what the competitors are offering and train your team on the latest skills in the market. Make sure to keep up with new and changing technology, think outside the box and plan for moving your business forward.
Prioritise Generating Cash
Even if you can put some of the suggestions above into practice, you will probably need extra finance for your business’ growth strategy. Luckily, there are several local, state, and federal programs that can help small businesses maintain healthy cash flow.
Also, as many organisations are dealing with the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak, you can take advantage of as many grants and programs as your company is eligible for to cover essential costs and keep your funds safe. For example, the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS scheme) can offer two fast and flexible financing options for both small and medium-sized UK businesses affected by the coronavirus crisis. CBILS lenders allow you to quickly get financial support through the use of a hassle-free CBILS loan or a flexible CBILS revolving credit facility to help your business stay afloat even during these uncertain times.
Measure & Evaluate Your Success Regularly
Finally, don’t forget to keep track of your progress to determine if your business is improving or not. After implementing new campaigns, make sure to evaluate if they provide better results and bring significant growth to your company, like improved brand recognition or increased sales. If not, you might need to rethink your methods and strategies and come up with a new game plan.
