Growing a business isn’t fair weather and smooth sailing, and it can never be. According to stats, 50% of small businesses fail in their first year. The data is enough to give goosebumps to any small business.
However, you can avoid the risk of failure with a few smart moves. Therefore, we have shared some tips for you that can help your business to grow in 2021.
1. Hire the Right People
“Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was — and still is — the most important thing we do.”
— Marc Benioff, Founder, Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce
It’s indeed all about hiring the right team, and it’s not only us who agree with it. Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Simon Sinek, Jeff Bezos, and other prominent entrepreneurs believe the same.
Your team will lead your company in terms of business growth, revenue, and customer experience. And if you make mistakes in recruiting, your business is likely to face the consequences.
2. Build a Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a journey that potential customers cover before making a purchase.
According to a Salesforce’s study, 79% of marketing leads didn’t turn into sales — all because businesses fail to identify their sales funnel.
Ultimately, the sales funnel assists in more conversions and allows you to see the inefficiencies in the system.
3. Competitor Analysis
Customers have more options to choose from than they could ever have in the past. This led to fierce competition among companies for people’s attention.
And that’s why researching your competitor becomes a necessity. It’s a process of evaluating and categorizing your competitors’ companies to test their strengths and weaknesses to your own.
You can try SWOT analysis in this regard, a competitor analysis framework discovered by Albert Humphrey — to test you and your competitors.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. You can create a matrix of four boxes, one box for each element, and then gather the data from brainstorming sessions to identify yours and your competitors’ position. This will allow you to create a map that will distinguish you from your competitors.
4. Focus on Your Customer Experience
Recent research of XM Institute has found that a good customer experience:
(i) Leads to more customer referral
(ii) Improves repurchasing
(iii) Improves trust
(iv) Builds a base of early adopters for a business
In a nutshell, a good user experience leads to business growth in terms of users and revenue. To this, Jeff Bezos says;
“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”
You can also improve your customer experience by personalizing it. According to SmarterHQ, 72% of customers say that they only engage with brands’ marketing messages if they are tailored for them.
5. Nurture Existing Customers
Acquiring a new customer can cost companies five times more than retaining an existing one — Huify.
And when you’re building a company, retaining customers becomes even more important. Therefore, companies must shift their focus towards nurturing customers rather than acquiring new ones.
Emails are one of the best forms of content to nurture leads and existing customers. According to Active Marketing, nurturing emails get 4-10 more responses than standalone email blasts.
6. Level Up Your Social Media Game
According to Backlinko, 3.96 billion people actively use social media worldwide. And when businesses ignore social media, they also ignore their business growth.
Creating your online profile on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin — especially the ones your audience uses — and showing up consistently can reap incredible benefits. A social media strategy can help small businesses with brand awareness, lead generation, and many more.
Apart from taking help from the organic reach of social media channels, businesses can leverage paid social ads in their favor. Almost 90% of marketers say that their social marketing efforts have improved their brand’s exposure.
7. Build Networks
Building a network can help any business in attracting more customers via word of mouth or referral. Not just that, you can also find new customers via networking.
According to Marketing experts, Approx. 40% of prospects become new customers after meeting in person.
If attending and hosting networking events doesn’t seem a good idea in a pandemic time, you can conduct online events. Social media can also help you build one-on-one connections with people, where Linkedin is found to be the best resource among all.
35% of professionals say that a casual conversation on Linkedin has led to a new opportunity.
8. Invest in Your Business Branding
77% of B2B marketers say that strong brand building is a key to their business’ growth.
However, branding isn’t limited to a fancy logo and brand aesthetics. In fact, it is more than that. To create a branding effect for your business, ask yourself;
- What do you want your customers to feel like when they hear your brand’s name?
- Does your business stand on its missions and values?
- How does your business stand apart from its competitors? Have you conveyed the same in your marketing efforts?
- Is your brand’s aesthetics consistent with the business’ ideologies and values?
Once you identify the answers to all these questions, it’s time that you start investing in resources to build a brand — a brand that can communicate to its audience well and feels relatable.
9. Build Online Presence
Your business exists to only a handful of people if you’re not doing business online. For the rest of the world, it’s non-existent.
According to KPMG Global Online Consumer Report, 55% of consumers will search online for company reviews and websites before purchasing.
And if you choose to neglect your online presence, you might lose a good number of sales.
Here’s what you can do to build an online presence;
- Leverage Content Marketing
- Use local listing on Google My Business and other directory websites
- Create SEO-optimized content to appear on search engines
- Create a Website for your business
10. Get a Website and Utilize it for SEO
As per KPMG Report, 47% of consumers visit a company’s website before making a purchase. Therefore, a well-developed website can push the decision in your favor.
However, your job must not end with building a website. 90.63% of pages receive zero organic visits from Google, and if you choose to ignore SEO, your website or business may never get attention.
And if you’re wondering what will help in this case, blogging has got your back.
11. Keep Track of Your Business Goals
Tracking your business goals is a huge insight to measure the growth of any business. You can also identify where your business is falling short and how you can improve it.
A business that sets goals and tracks them can grow 30 percent faster as compared to businesses that don’t.
Moreover, it also helps in improving clarity, productivity, satisfaction, proficiency, and lesser mistakes.
Conclusion
Growing your business has never been so easy before — all thanks to the Internet. It has indeed improved businesses’ efforts too, but it has also shown unexpected results.
And when it comes to your business growth, you must not sell yourself short and rely on online practices only. The more efforts you put in-and-out of the virtual world, the more growth your business will experience.