How Can You Grow Your Business?
When you’re trying to grow your business it can put a strain on your finances. Paying for advertising and marketing to gain new customers can be a costly task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
It’s also tempting to take shortcuts because of limited resources. However, this doesn’t have to be the case, because there are effective and inexpensive ways to grow your business.
Here are 10 ways of saving money and growing your business, while still making sure you deliver quality products or services.
1. List Your Company on Google My Business
Most customers search for products or services online. So, leverage the power of the world’s largest search engine to improve your online visibility. Google My Business is a free service that enables your business to show up on the map when potential customers search for local businesses. You’ll get special promotions and discounts from Google after listing your business. It’s an excellent way to grow your business without any cost to a wider target audience.
FREE Checklist: 12 Ways To Make More Money In Your Business
2. Use User-Generated Content
Encourage your customers to leave feedback and give testimonials and reviews about your products and services. User-generated content is a cost-effective way to broadcast your business. For instance, BuzzFeed uses this method by encouraging community posts. Encourage your customers to leave feedback and make reviews or testimonials about your products or services by giving them special gifts. Also, you can create contests to get the best user-generated content. This way customers will be invested.
3. Encourage Customer Referrals
Encourage your customers to refer their friends or family to your business. For example, Uber and Airbnb have grown significantly because of their powerful referral programs. To bolster your referral program, offer small incentives or discounts to the source and recipient of the referral.
4. Improve Your Social Media Presence
Social media platforms offer cost-effective channels for marketing and growing your business. Creating interactive and high-quality content is one of the best ways to leverage social media for gaining new customers. Investing in social media marketing is a great way to improve your brand awareness and reach new markets. Using social platforms, you can target your followers’ friends with advertising messages. This can gradually expand the pool of people who are aware of your brand.
5. Repurpose Old Campaigns
Instead of creating new marketing campaigns from scratch, you can update old ones to save money and time. Refashion what works and toss out the unsuccessful aspects of the campaign. This way, you’ll deliver a consistent message to your target audience, which will improve your brand recognition. Remember, inconsistent messages can be costly, and this can hurt your brand recognition.
6. Prioritize Networking
As a business owner, you probably have a list of contacts that you can leverage to grow your business. If you haven’t been in touch with these people for some time, reach out to them with special offers. Also, you can ask them if they know anyone who needs your products or services. You can network in your local area, or you can use online sites such as LinkedIn.
7. Partner Up with Other Brands
Partnering with other businesses can really help you grow your business. For example, if you sell phones, you can partner with a phone service center down the road, and you could direct customers to the service center for maintenance. And in return, the service center will direct customers who want to buy or upgrade their phones to you.
This kind of partnership is great for local businesses and it creates a sense of community. It will boost your brand recognition too, and the good thing is that you won’t spend even a single penny.
8. Leverage Online Marketing Tools
There are many free or low-cost online marketing tools, which can help you save time and money on your marketing efforts. As a starter, these free tools below will boost your marketing efforts, which will ultimately strengthen your business.
- For market research, you can use SurveyMonkey, which offers free online surveys and questionnaire tools for polling your target audience and analyzing their responses.
- If your website is built in WordPress the free lead generation plugin from HubSpot includes embedded forms, pop-ups, live chat and website analytics. From pop-ups to scroll boxes, banners and embedded forms, HubSpot’s high-converting lead generation tools will help you upgrade your marketing in minutes.
- Email is still an effective online marketing method. AWeber provides 45 free email content templates to help you write emails like an expert whether you’re just getting started or want better results from your emails.
9. Develop Strong Branding
Branding isn’t just for big, multinational businesses. Your brand is all about what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, what they need, and how you’re different. Your branding needs to do all that for your audience. To grow your business, you need to establish strong and distinctive branding which sets you apart from the competition and boosts customer loyalty.
10. Re-Engage Existing Customers
While gaining new customers is crucial to any company’s growth strategy, what makes a successful business is re-engaging with existing customers. It’s five times cheaper to re-engage existing customers than to gain new ones.
One great way to re-engage existing customers is by having them sign up for email newsletters and regularly sending them store updates, new sales notifications, and special discounts. When sending email newsletters, make sure the content is well-crafted and offers your customers value. Also, engage current customers by encouraging them to follow you on social media. Incentivize them to post relevant content, such as images of your products and the latest deals. And always include links to your social networks in all email communication.
Free Checklist: Grow Your Business & Make More Money
Every business owner wants their income to feel secure and stable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen right away. Are you struggling to increase your online sales? Do you feel like you’re stalling out? Many entrepreneurs and small businesses hit income plateaus, but there are ways to push beyond them. For more tips on how to make your business grow and make more money, download my free checklist, How To Make More Money In Your Business.
