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How to Grow a Business: 15 Strategies to Start Using Now

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By Joe Martin

Starting a business is hard, but learning how to grow a business that’s already up and running is a challenge all of its own. So what’s the secret to success? Just like when you were first starting out, the secret to scaling is having a solid business plan and strong fundamentals.

What are the First Steps for Your New Business?

Beginning from scratch can be daunting, especially when you’re not sure about the first steps that must be taken. That’s why we created this guide to demystify the process of scaling and growing your business.

1. Research the Market

Scaling your business demands that you know the current market conditions inside and out. You need to know:

  • Whether there are enough potential customers
  • Who your ideal customers are
  • Where they’re located
  • How much they are willing to pay for your product or service

Start by establishing clear goals for the project, and then figure out which research methods will work best in helping you achieve those goals. Of course, your marketing will vary differently based on who you are as a business. For example, law firm marketing is very different than HVAC marketing, but they all start with researching your audience and knowing how to connect them to your business.

2. Analyse Your Product

To scale your business, you need to know what makes your product stand out from the crowd. If you can’t think of anything, you have some work to do before you scale.

Think about:

  • What does your product do?
  • How does it help your customers?
  • How does it compare with competitors?
  • Why should someone choose yours over theirs?

That last question is critical. Your unique selling point (USP) isn’t in your product itself but in how you market it or how it’s delivered.

3. Perform a Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is one of the most important things you can do to grow your business. To scale effectively, you need to know how others in your industry — your competitors, in particular — are faring.

A competitor analysis can help you gauge what’s working and what’s not in your market. It can help you spot opportunities and challenges before they arise or, even better, provide you with an advantage over others who don’t know as much as you do. Those who do it well can avoid blind spots and make wiser long-term decisions that benefit their business.

4. Build a Customized Sales Funnel

You likely already have some kind of sales funnel, but is it customized to your business’s needs? Developing a detailed customer journey helps you do just that. It’s a map of each customer’s steps before purchasing from your e-commerce store. The more information you have about where customers are coming from, what they’re doing on your site, and what ultimately persuades them to convert, the better prepared you’ll be for growth.

This can also help with your marketing and how you understand where your customers are coming from.

5. Employ a CRM System

Having an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system in place can help you keep all your data and relationships organized and accessible at any time, from anywhere — an essential tool when scaling.

CRM systems are extremely useful for managing contacts because they allow you to organize and analyse your customer data. This makes it easier to understand a customer’s history with your business. It also allows you to take advantage of automation to personalize how you do business with them. Most CRM systems offer automation features that let you set up rules and triggers based on specific events or actions, such as immediately after the customer makes a purchase.

6. Grow Your List

Your list is the core of your business, whether you know it or not. The people are most interested in what you do and are likely to buy from you. The more people on your list, the more money you can make. Scale your list to scale your business.

How? There are quite a few strategies you could apply to grow your business:

  • Offer a freebie, something so good that people will be willing to give up their email address for it.
  • Write a guest post to get in front of new audiences and gain authority by being featured on other blogs.
  • Write articles for high-traffic sites like ReadWrite, Medium, and LinkedIn Pulse — ending with a link back to your sign-up page, of course.

7. Establish a Customer Loyalty System

A customer loyalty system is a marketing strategy designed to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of a business associated with the program. Customers typically receive points, which can be redeemed for rewards. Loyalty programs are used by small and large businesses alike, including both brick-and-mortar and online retailers.

8. Look for Partners

You should always be on the lookout for partnerships with companies that can help your business grow. If you’re new to e-commerce, that means looking for ways to get more people to hear about your products.

It’s important to choose partners who can play a role in growing your business. Pick partners with a broader distribution channel than your own, for example. Also, consider what kind of brand awareness a partnership would bring you.

9. License Related Products or Services

If partnering with another business isn’t on the table, you can nevertheless either license your products out or license someone else’s products. The point here is to increase awareness of your brand. Licensing helps you get the word out about your business while even making a little money in the process.

The economic benefits of licensing can result in significant revenue and profit growth. The cost of sales, marketing, and distribution can be shared with your partner while you also gain access to new markets and consumer bases. Whether you are a well-established business or a startup, licensing is an intelligent way to grow your business.

10. Diversify Your Product Offerings

Adding new product lines is an effective way to grow your business. It allows you to reach new customers, expand into new markets, and increase your brand awareness. Diversifying your product line is good for your business and good for your profit margins, and the customer experience you offer.

Businesses that rely on a single product or service are susceptible to market changes or unexpected events. By having multiple revenue streams in different markets and industries, your business becomes less vulnerable to such events and more capable of withstanding unforeseen challenges in the future.

11. Automate Everything That Makes Sense

It’s challenging to handle the entire scope of your business effectively. That’s why automation is so popular in the current business environment. It’s one of the best ways to take care of many tasks at once, letting you focus on more pressing issues.

The key is to automate everything that makes sense to grow your business while ensuring you don’t sacrifice quality. The easiest way to get started with automation is by using a scheduling tool to manage your social media accounts. For example, you can use the tool to schedule a week’s worth of posts in 10 minutes. Another easy task to automate is email marketing.

12. Hire New, Specialized People to Help You

When you’re just starting out, you do it all. You build a product or service, market it, sell it, and support it. But as your business grows, you need to focus on your main strengths and hire new people to help you scale.

This doesn’t always mean hiring someone full-time. Instead, you can bring on board specialized personnel, or teams, who can help you complete specific tasks. Scorpion, for instance, often helps new and emerging businesses scale up their presence on various social media platforms, improve their SEO, or get a grip on multiple other mission-critical tasks.

13. Improve Your Customer Service Offerings

Customer service is the backbone of any business. It’s a crucial element for increasing sales and gaining customer loyalty. As your business grows, so must your customer service capabilities.

Handling customer service takes time, effort, and dedication. The best customer service takes advantage of the internet and social networking platforms already part of your business. Your customers are likely to be online and will have access to the same tools you do. Ensure that your customers have an easy way to reach you when they need help.

14. Develop Passive Income Sources

As a business owner, you need to make the most of your time — and there are only so many hours in the day. So while it’s probably impossible to generate 100% passive income, it is possible to develop a strategy to generate additional revenue streams that require less effort from you.

There are a variety of ways you can generate passive income as an entrepreneur, but all of them tie into one thing: selling products or services that require little upkeep after the sale, such as:

  • Expanding into new products or services
  • Creating and selling informational products
  • Selling physical products online

15. Become a Thought Leader in Your Field

Thought leadership is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and sharing content that shows that you are knowledgeable, credible, and trustworthy. It aims to inform and educate audiences to win their trust, and it can be a great way to grow your business.

Specifically, you can use thought leadership to differentiate yourself from your competitors and build your own authority. This can be done through social media, blogging (including guest blog posts), speaking at events, and even writing books to attract new customers.

Growing Your Business Is Exciting

These strategies won’t transform your business overnight, but even implementing a few of them can yield impressive results. And the sooner you do that, the sooner you’ll watch your business become what you’ve always dreamed it would be.

Inner Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

Top Image Credit: by fauxels; Pexels; Thank you!

By Joe Martin

VP of Marketing

Joe Martin is currently the VP of marketing at Scorpion, a leading provider of technology and marketing to help small businesses grow. Formerly he was CloudApp’s GM and CMO and a Head of Marketing at Adobe. With over 15 years of experience in the industry and tech that makes it run, he provides strategic guidance on how to build and use the right stack and marketing for businesses to grow. Joe believes marketers need smart training and leadership to scale company growth. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @joeDmarti.

Sourced from readwrite

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How to Use Technology and Social Media for Business Growth

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By Zeinab Mehdi Poor.

What business doesn’t use technology? Yes, that is the unmistakable sound of crickets. But here’s another, more pertinent question: which businesses maximize their use of technology to generate revenue? The world is abuzz with technological chatter, with the noisy flux of shifting processes, incoming apps, innovative start-ups and increasingly simplistic digital tools which help us streamline our businesses and make a bigger splash for less cash.

As a business leader, you’re constantly learning. Searching for new growth strategies, emerging trends in your industry, and new products and services is a consistent part of your routine. Technology is about innovation and innovation in business is all about doing things differently so as to supply better products and solutions, and an improved service to customers.

If you are a business owner or leader means you’re constantly learning.

Researching new marketing strategies, emerging trends in your industry, and exciting new products is certain to be a continuing a part of your weekly grind. But are you furthermore may maintaining with similar changes in technology? If not, you’ll be missing out on tools which will make your life easier and your business stronger. Technology isn’t just essential for day-to-day business processes, but it also can help companies to realize growth and success when utilised effectively. Successful businesses don’t view technology simply as how to automate processes, but instead use it to open up new ways of doing business. But are you furthermore may maintaining with similar changes in technology?  technology is helping firms of all sizes fulfil their business potential. While the pace at which technology is evolving is faster than ever before, these advancements present a range of growth opportunities for business leaders.

Technologies help you reach more potential customers, around the clock.

Various types of content marketing  increase the visibility of your business far beyond your local community—often on a reasonable budget. Technology can help business owners leverage capital in smarter, more effective ways. In some cases, using technology provides greater efficiency and versatility, making it a natural progression for processes you may already have in place in your business. In others, you may need to make some adjustments to reap the benefits of tech-friendly alternatives. Use digital technologies for more effective marketing.

Businesses are now operating in an era where having a strong digital presence is essential, not only for success, but often simply for survival too. The lack of a strong digital presence is thought to be a contributing factor in the failure of many SMEs, half of which are failing in their first five years of existence. With limited marketing budgets, SMEs got to be wise about how they utilize digital technologies for max impact.

They key is to develop a clearly defined digital marketing strategy, including your aims, your tactics and how you’re going to measure performance. Many companies are digitally active, but not following a defined strategy. This can lead to resources being wasted and opportunities being missed.

Here are ways technology can help your business grow

1. Use a high-quality VoIP system

The benefits of using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) should be obvious, but if you’re still tempted to use the conventional or analog system in your office, know that you could be missing out massively. Using the internet to make calls far cheaper and means you can log in anywhere in the world, conduct videoconferences, discuss important deals, and otherwise stay on top of things as if you were in the office. Mobility, functionality and adaptability are the three key benefits of putting in VoIP, which has undoubtedly enhanced communication within the business world and led to increased productivity across the board.

2. Don’t be afraid of video

A lot of business owners are afraid to put themselves out there: to add a face and voice to the text-based voice which narrates their online story. But embracing video, whether within the sort of live videos and ‘stories’ on social media or product-, category- or topic-led videos on your website, are often a winning strategy. Not only will it help to build brand transparency, making browsers feel like they’re getting to know you, but it will help to stimulate engagement.

3. Connect with people.

One of the best features of technology is the ability to communicate and connect with other people right at the fingertips. More people in the United States are leaning towards the use of technology for connectivity. It has become an essential and worthwhile part of not only an individual’s life but also his business. Technology is a great tool to get in touch with customers and employees. Nowadays, even remote working is a theme. When it involves modern technology, sending targeted emails and newsletters to the designated customers can lead one to grow his or her business over time.

4. Technology as a mean of security.

Apart from the many benefits of using technology for business owners, the best one is how it impacts the security of the business. Technology can be used to prevent any hacking done by hackers over the original work of authorship. In this way, issues like copyright infringement and other copyright laws get easily bypassed. Usage of the proper amount of technology or rather information technology can prevent any breach of security. With active firewalls and encrypted passwords, avoidance of this particular problem, in the long run, is possible.

5. Save on IT spending

Cloud-based technologies help businesses grow with technology by providing state of the art tools without the high cost usually related to huge enterprise software programs. Web based technologies allow multiple users to collaborate during a single document or provide unlimited data storage. Cloud technologies eliminate the necessity for IT departments and therefore the solution providers perform backups, tuning and upgrades as a part of their offering. Small business owners can access their data from any location at any time. These tools are often free or pay as you go eliminating the need for long term contracts.

Social Platforms for Business Growth

Social platforms helps you connect with your customers. What are the advantages of using social media for business? Consider that there are now quite 3 billion using social networks across the world and these people are using social to interact with brands. Social networks offer you the chance to interact directly with customers and fans, and likewise give them the prospect to interact directly together with your brand.

Unlike traditional media, which offers only one-way communication, social media may be a street . If you would like customers and followers to be engaged, you’ve got to be engaged yourself. Stay active and answer comments and questions on your own social media posts during a way that’s appropriate to your brand. Here are reasons why investing in social media may be a wise business move.

1. Build Awareness

If people don’t realize your business, they can’t become your customers. Social media boosts your visibility among potential customers, letting you reach a good audience by employing a great deal of your time and energy . And it’s liberal to create a business profile on all the main social networks, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Define what you would like to urge out of social media to develop a social media strategy. does one want new customers to get your services? does one hope to bring more local shoppers into your stores? By keeping your strategy specific, you’ll determine which social media channels are the simplest fit your business.

2. Improve Search Engine Ranking

There’s a lot of debate around this subject , but rock bottom line is that, this  social media can (and will) improve your program ranking. How?  The domain authority  increases when the social media share rate increases. This results in an improved program ranking of your pages. But it’s quite just that. Many consumers visit your social media profiles before heading to your website to urge a far better understanding of your brand before they create a sale .

3. Social media is cost-effective

As more social networks add algorithms that filter what users see in their news feeds, your organic content may stray within the shuffle. cash in of the low-cost advertising features offered by the social networks to market your content and special offers.  Some social media advertising is cheaper than traditional advertising, so you don’t need to spend tons of cash to increase your audience, and grow your business.

4. Tell Your Brand’s Story

Using social media may be a good way to share your brand’s mission and share stories. Effective stories can have an excellent impact on your brand’s image. they will be simple or extensive counting on what you think that are going to be best .

5. Boost sales

No matter what you sell, social media can assist you sell it. Your social accounts are a critical a part of your sales funnel—the process through which a replacement contact becomes a customer. As the number of individuals using social media continues to grow and social sales tools evolve, social networks will become increasingly important for product search and ecommerce. The time is true to align your social marketing and sales goals.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay

By Zeinab Mehdi Poor

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

 

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How to Use Facebook Groups for Business Growth

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By Baishali Mukherjee

It is now a reality to use groups for positioning yourself, acquiring new customers, and many things more

Today, most of us are part of one Facebook group or another. But have we considered using the groups for business growth? Probably not! But it’s high time we start doing it effectively. Leveraging a Facebook group for business can yield delightful results. But before you create a group and start inviting others; it is important to know certain things, so that the group and its activities, create desired impact.

Wondering how to promote your brand in Facebook groups? You can do it either by creating your own Facebook group or by joining one managed by others. It is now a reality to use groups for positioning yourself, acquiring new customers, and many things more.

Scroll down to know more from experts about how to use Facebook groups to support and market your business.

According to Skannd Tyagi, founder, E Info Solutions, Facebook groups are a pool of people with common interest areas. “By joining such a group you have access to people who match the profiles of your target audience. These groups will provide numerous opportunities to create awareness about you and your brand simply by being proactive and helpful. To explore such opportunities, just write the keyword in the search section at the right-hand menu of the group’s page, and get going,” he shared.

Pramod K Maloo, founder Kreative Machinez, a digital hub for business promotional and marketing, believes, there are multiple benefits for entrepreneurs who are part of Facebook groups. He enumerated six of them-

Discussion – Facebook groups are sort of like the new kind of online forum. They have great features like polls, and large-format status updates to encourage group members to interact with your content. You will get regular updates on what is going on in the page, other social media handles.

Polls – Polls can be used to get customer insights and to understand what the customer wants and to receive immediate feedback from polls. Groups are a great source of immediate feedback, and if you build a niche group from the beginning, the feedback you receive will be extremely valuable.

Selected People, group – People who have been in constant interaction with a business page are definitely the ones who are interested in the services they provide. Therefore, making a group of those selected people and giving them the required content and information for what they usually look at. Drive these people to get engaged with the call to action, via campaigns, contests, takeaways etc.

The credibility of the brand – Having groups can help increase the credibility of the brand. The discussions that happen in the groups can also be used as answers or questions in Quora. By doing this we will increase engagement and presence on other social media handles.

Reach – It’s a viable way of building a highly engaged community of individuals who are likely to be interested in your business. You can reach out to masses without spending on Facebook ads.

Economical– If you can reach out to the masses plus targeted masses without pinching your pocket, it`s a great deal. So remember to always provide value to the customers and give them reasons to stay in the group.

Maloo also advised against talking about one’s business and products every time. “Sometimes small talks are important to make your products worthy. If you keep on talking about your products, things will be monotonous and people will lose interest. Also add company employees in the group, to increase the number of positive reviews about the services/ product offered,” he advocated.

Potential to Attract Future Customers Absolutely Free

Ajay Mittal, Founder, Kolkata Clean Air and Mera Workshops, has over the last few months, spent time talking to individual business owners to understand about how they generate business. Interestingly, one of the top platforms for them was Facebook and Whatsapp groups which were helping them attract more customers. He found that these groups can really help grow all business, be it, small or large, B2C or B2B.

The point Mittal wants to make is the sheer potential of Facebook group in attracting thousands of members, many of whom could be your customers, absolutely free. “If you compare this with any other marketing techniques, and the cost of reaching out to 10k eyes balls which are mostly targeted as potential audience having one or more common factors, and you will understand the immensity of the potential. That is not all, Facebook group posts allow easy communications and response which results in much higher engagements,” he opined.

Another interesting thing is that the posts stay in the groups forever so many people who view these posts can always search back when they are in need of the requirement, even months after the post was made.

Starting a Facebook group could be a great strategy if you are ready to do some hard work in building a successful group as Facebook Group Admin has much higher visibility and privileges than any other members. Mittal maintained that if you are into a business that has potential to take a community along you, should start building a group today.

Engaging successfully in a Facebook group

To engage successfully in a Facebook group you must make interesting posts. Now, what is engaging to a Facebook group might be very subjective and it depends on the target audience. It also matters what is the time you have made that posts.

There is no real secret to what makes a post successful, but a few things that you can consider as tips from Mittal’s observation:

1) Keep it short, easy to understand and very clearly highlighting the value proposition.

2) Most responsive posts are that are linked to a current event for e.g. Posts on beautiful hampers on Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day will attract more response around those days.

3) Ensure you have a completely updated and active Facebook profile as that is important for people to trust you before enquiring or buying from you. Most people after reading a post will visit your profile before connecting with you to buy.

4) Make sure you engage in other posts but somehow connecting your comment with the post and not randomly posting your comment on every post. Best is to read through comments and reply to people who you see as your target audience.

Isn’t it a great opportunity for business owners to grow their business using these free techniques? All one needs is to be consistent and explore more and more groups to discover platforms that help to generate business, find ways to engage with target audience. What is even more interesting is that it is not limited to just B2C business; in fact B2B businesses have much higher potential but with a totally different strategy of selling directly but through education based marketing and engaging communities by sharing tons of value to appear as an expert in your domain.

Feature Image Credit: graphicstock

By Baishali Mukherjee

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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