Small Business Expansion and Growth Strategies for 2022
Personality Traits that Every Top Entrepreneur Must Adopt
February 4, 2022
Small Business Expansion and Growth Strategies for 2022
Every business is unique and there is no perfect way to grow your business, but can we give you helpful advice on this? Definitely yes.
There is no golden rule to follow. As a small business owner looking for ways to grow your customer base, your business success is solely based on your company profile and your products and services.
That's exactly why you need to throw the rulebook out the window and start thinking about different growth strategies for businesses. This article is a good source of information for you if you’re ready for rapid growth.
It's Time to Scale Your Business
All entrepreneurs know that business growth is critical to business success over the long term. Relying on existing customers is not enough to stimulate your cash flow.
However, as a new business, the bottom line is that expanding too quickly can hurt your business in short term. It can even cause your business to fail.
You know your company is ready to improve its business model when:
- Your business has three years of uninterrupted profit.
- Your business is already growing year by year.
- You have a loyal customer base that is constantly growing.
- Your business niche grows.
- Your business plan has already achieved its goals.
- You have stable relationships with suppliers for products or services.
- Your business has a healthy, reliable cash flow.
- You cannot keep up with the demand of new customers.
- You have examined a viable business model.
- You would not only be small business owners.
If this sounds like your business, you're probably ready to move on to the next gear and bring in new customers. These are our top strategies for growing your small business.
Engage your Customer Base
Customer retention is at the top of this list as it is the best choice for building loyal customer relationships. In business, it is always more cost-effective to keep your existing customers than to acquire new ones. Growth is expensive and when building your business you cannot afford to lose existing customers in favor of potential customers.
Before you can engage your customer base, you need to know two things:
Who are your customers?
What do your customers need?
It doesn't matter if your business is a small one or a huge one. You need to make sure you already meet the needs of a well-defined target market before you can start thinking about new customers.
Use your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Your USP is what convinces your customers and is the reason why they choose your company over other competing companies. To determine the USP for your customers, you need to think about the product or service that your company offers.
USPs can be divided into three categories:
- Price. Your product or service is cheaper than those of competing companies.
- Product. Your business offers higher quality products than other small businesses in your niche.
- Service. Your company provides better customer service, after-sales service, warranties and technical information than competing companies.
To properly leverage your USP, you need to incorporate it into every aspect of your business plan. That means building your business identity, company values, marketing strategies and the team around it.
Expand your Online Presence
Expanding your online presence is the best way to attract new potential customers to your business. To truly capitalize on the growth potential of your small business, you need to maximize your online presence.
In general, you can do this in three ways:
- Marketing. Use email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising to reach new leads.
- SEO. Optimize your website to take advantage of new organic search traffic opportunities.
- Social media. Have a clear online presence on the social media platforms that your target audience prefers and uses frequently.
- Email marketing. It makes sense in every way. After all, your capital for growth as a small business is limited.
Develop your Current Products and Services
A common belief is that service-based companies are much more difficult to scale than traditional product-based companies.
To be honest, whether your business is product or service based, the trick to scaling your business will be the same. The best way to scale a service-driven company is to think of it as if it were a product-driven company. For your customers, this means three things:
- • Define your approach and the key needs of the target customer.
- • Be sure to determine the production stages or product line in your company.
- • Identify the roles of employees in your team.
After that, it's important to find a branding line that clarifies the problem you're solving for your customers versus the benefit of your product or service. Finally, show people the actual results of your products to ensure that the original problem has been solved.
Present a Colorful Catalogue
Adding more products to your corporate product line is a great way to increase sales and provide new opportunities for your customers. Use customer service and online platforms to find out what products your customers really need and what people are talking about. Diversification is only useful for growth if the new products really improve the customer experience. Otherwise, it can quickly become a costly mistake.
Adjust to the Changing Times
You may have heard the phrase "fit or die" in business growth. Adaptability is key to surviving in times of volatile markets and uncertainties. But more importantly, take advantage of the opportunities to make money fast.
Simply put, the survival rate for any business is small. More than half of all companies fail after five years. To avoid this, your company should be flexible and your team should always be up to date with the latest technologies and trends. Spend part of your work week learning about changes in your industry and, if necessary, devote money to networking events and conferences to access the latest information.
Attend Networking Events
Conferences, trade shows and conventions are the perfect place to network with other industry professionals and introduce your business to potential clients. While your business may not make any sales that day, the people you meet can lead to long-lasting partnerships that can stimulate growth.
Instead of always talking about your own business at a conference, take the time to listen and learn how others are talking about their own experiences. After the conference, make sure to cement your new business connections on social media platforms like LinkedIn.
Increase Your Social Media Presence
Optimizing your social media presence can mean the difference between growth and stagnation for a small business. It's one of the most effective ways to bring new hires to your business, drive traffic, and build authority without investing a lot of money in advertising. To implement an effective social strategy, your business must first consider a few things.
Find the Right Platform
Facebook. Facebook is the largest social network and is best for generating leads and attracting new customers. Twitter. Twitter offers a level of immediacy. It's good for customer service, answering direct inquiries, and updating about rapidly changing topics.
Instagram. Instagram is perfect for marketing models like influencer marketing. As a visual-first platform, it enables your business to communicate a different side of the story. Instagram also offers powerful targeted marketing tools that are among the most effective on any social platform. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a B2B and B2C social platform good for networking, social proof, and building trust in your company among potential employees and customers in your industry.
Create Content
In practice, your social strategy must include a detailed content calendar. First, it's important to clearly define your audience and consider the type of content that will appeal to the people who follow your business.
Then publish your content regularly and on time. Always prioritize video and image content as these formats have proven to be the most effective. In fact, video marketers get 66% more qualified leads each year.
Leverage the Power of User-Generated Content
Over 86% of companies use user-generated content in their marketing strategies. Why? Aside from the fact that content created and shared by customers gets much higher engagement, it's also much more cost-effective. When you create a brand that users love to interact with, people often talk about your brand organically online. This can come in the form of viral content like GIFs and memes, or it can be product reviews on YouTube or people creating filters on Snapchat and Instagram.
One way your business can promote user-generated content is by running a contest on different social platforms. To build a network of partners to provide recommendations, you need to follow a few practical steps:
- Perfect your pitch. Some of the best pitches are the simplest. Be clear about your intent and provide a brief overview of your business, achievements, and products. Do your research, never send out identical pitches, and always tailor your message to the needs of the person you are addressing.
- Maintain relationships. Relationships take work to become effective. Keep an open line of communication and always keep your partners updated of any changes.
- Deliver exceptional quality. Remember that referrals are not only about your reputation, but also that of the third party. If your product isn't up to date, both reputations suffer and people are less likely to work with you in the future.
Reduce Risks
It may sound obvious, but reducing risk and fostering successful growth go hand-in-hand. Risk is anything that can cause your business to falter or cause an unexpected cash deadlock that you cannot overcome.
Risk takes many forms, but some of the most common risk mitigation methods include:
- Make an insurance
- Reduce loans
- Secure data
- Get legal advice
- Hire experts
- Diversification of your products
Track and Optimize
Data, analysis and testing are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal to drive intelligent, growth strategy. While analytics platforms can seem daunting at first, it's important to realize that without data, you're essentially trying to blindly optimize your website.
With data, you can ask the right questions and provide the right answers — and thankfully, there are multiple ways to collect that data. Google Analytics looks at user behavior on-site and can view and track key metrics like bounce rate, abandonment, session time, and time spent on each page.
Google Search Console looks at inbound traffic and how users are getting to your site. If your website is showing bad traffic from search engines, it might be time to change your SEO, including Meta and title tags.
Conclusion
Finally, it is important to conduct A/B testing. A/B testing allows you to compare two different versions of an item to see which performs better for your users. Remember that your website needs at least 25,000 visitors per month to get reliable results.
