So, you’re running a business, and it has been doing good for the last five years. Now, how do you make it even better? How can you grow your small business so it continues to attract customers, earn profits, and build a strong brand in the market?
Your business’s growth is an ongoing process that doesn’t happen overnight. You must consistently exert time and effort to ensure that your business moves forward and is never stagnant. And while there are no secret ways or special steps to achieve growth in the business arena, there are proven tactics to help your business attain immediate success.
Listed below are five ways to grow your small business:
1) Invest In Systems
It’s common for entrepreneurs to micromanage their businesses. You probably consider your business as your baby, and you’d want to be there every step of the way. However, trying to do everything yourself can do more harm than good. This will limit yourself and your business to reach new heights.
Investing in systems is one way of growing your business. Depending on the nature of your business, you can incorporate robust systems, namely powerful e-commerce software or solid CRM, to improve your daily operations. If your business is product-focused, you can invest in Selery Fulfillment and other fulfillment services to expedite your production.
Review your existing operations and assess which are monotonous, repetitive, or unnecessary. Strive to outsource or automate as many processes as possible, so your business can grow fast.
2) Work On Your Homepage
The internet impacts customer behavior. The information people see online can make or break their decision to buy from a brand. Regardless of how effective your products are, don’t expect to haul in customers if this information isn’t properly communicated online.
Another way to grow your small business is to improve your homepage. Statistics show that 96% of online visitors aren’t ready to purchase something, and greeting them with a cluttered website will only cause them to abandon your website. In worse cases, they might choose to patronize offerings from your direct competitors.
To ensure that your homepage converts, take note of the following tips:
- Update your content regularly: Develop a content calendar and publish high-quality content regularly. This will enable your business to gain authority in the industry and give your target audience something to look forward to.
- Use call-to-action buttons: Make it easy for online users to navigate your homepage by adding call-to-action buttons. These buttons also serve as signposts to help them act on your website, whether they submit their contact details, buy products, or book appointments.
- Stay on top of the trends: Web design trends come and go, and a homepage using design elements prominent in the early 2000s will not contribute to your business’s growth. Improve your homepage by updating its design to current standards. Some of the newest web design trends for 2022 include visible borders, handmade graphics, and typographic hero images.
3) Utilize Data
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs commit is implementing strategies and paying no heed in assessing their effectiveness. Many believe that well-planned and well-executed strategies always warrant positive results. However, this isn’t always the case.
Your business’s most valuable resource is data, so make sure to generate and utilize it when implementing strategies. For example, if you want to assess if the changes you made in your homepage increased your conversion rates, use Google Analytics. This tool shows data on your site’s page visits, bounce rates, and how online users arrive on your website.
The data you can get from various tools will help you determine which strategies are working or not. With this in mind, you can prevent wasting resources and allocate these to strategies that benefit your business.
4) Make Your Blog Stand Out
Additionally, statistics show that 81% of customers conduct research online, so publishing high-quality blogs is crucial. Your blogs can become your ticket to hauling in new customers and retaining old ones.
Marketing experts believe that blogs play a vital role in any business’s inbound marketing activity. By publishing high-quality blogs, you can generate more traffic to your website, convert those traffic into leads, and achieve long-term success for your small business.
Ensure that your blog stands out by following the tips listed below:
- Use killer headlines: Headlines are the first things online users will see in your blogs, and how these are created can affect their decision to continue reading. Lure more readers to your blog by crafting killer headlines. You can achieve this goal by ensuring that your headline is unique, specific, and conveys a sense of urgency.
- Create a professional-looking blog design: First impressions last, so make sure your blog design looks professional. Ideally, your blog design should be clutter-free and mobile-friendly. It’s also important to use simple navigation to help users find the information they’re looking for fast.
- Add visuals: Filling your blog design with large chunks of texts will adversely affect its readability. This might be reason enough for users to leave your website. The solution? Utilize the power of visuals in your blog design. This means adding different multimedia, such as videos, images, and infographics to break the monotony of texts. Visuals can also make your blog design more fun and enable the material to explain diverse topics.
5) Learn How To Be Financial Savvy
The financial health of your business will impact its ability to grow. It’ll be challenging for your business to grow if it doesn’t have sufficient financial resources. In worse cases, forcing your business to expand when you don’t have enough funds will only cause problems down the road.
For your small business to grow, you need to learn to be financially savvy. This means that you should leave extra padding in your budget for things you didn’t account for or might have overlooked during the expansion. Small things, such as miscalculating recruitment costs or failing to budget for an additional workforce, can derail your overall budget. This is especially true if you have limited funds.
It’s best to overestimate your budget rather than underestimate it. In this way, you won’t end up being in a financially tight spot as your business grows.
Even if you followed the tips mentioned in this article, don’t expect that your business will immediately catapult into its growth and long-term success. As mentioned, growth is a long-term process that requires a lot of your resources. So, make sure that you’re ready to go through several trials and errors for your business to grow successfully!
