This year is truly legendary. Legendary in the amount of darkness it contained! But, for entrepreneurs worldwide, this is just another chance to plan their next move. And that’s exactly what you should do as well – find ways to get ahead in the game and use advanced planning to secure your place in the business lifecycle. This is the chance to grow your business and take a step towards creating the best marketing strategies to grow your business in 2020. Sounds pretty difficult and scary – especially for startups and small firms. We know. But, it isn’t impossible. With the right marketing strategy, you can grow your business regardless of your budget. Being smart doesn’t require having a large budget in hand! All you have to do is create your own opportunities that will generate good revenue and then use that money wisely. Assess your business for a proper marketing strategy, check where you are, and where you want to be. You have to create a marketing strategy tailored to your own firm that helps you grow your business in groundbreaking innovative ways. That’s how you make it ahead in 2020. Even if the year has you discouraged. But, it’s okay! You can still get back on your feet and take the steps towards growth and development. Take it from the experts. Here are 13 marketing strategies to help grow your business!
How to Grow Your Business Like a Pro!
There are so many ways out there that claim to help grow your business. But each era has it’s own technique to get you through the business lifecycle. Nowadays, it’s all about strategic planning through social media and online platforms – the age of technology! And it’s smart to acknowledge that fact and make good use of it. The year 2020 has odds looking very bleak, but these expert tips are guaranteed to successfully grow your business. This is a guide to help you sort through your options, make the best decision, and make the most of what’s ahead. You have to keep in mind that everything takes some time. Rome wasn’t built in a day! But with patience and proper guidance, you’ll definitely make it happen!
Grow Your Business Through Connections
A strong web of connections is a great foundation for any business – the building blocks to grow your business. You have to build a concrete solid network of connections and relationships with everyone in your industry. It would be best to keep the companies and firms you do regular business with close by you and maintain good relations with them. This way guarantees that you can always count on them when you need them. Keep your connections alive by constant periodic communications and meetings. It’s good to have allies in the industry you work in. You can also work towards building good partnerships and possible mergers to make the growth easier. Investing in partnerships creates great opportunities and opens doors to fresh amounts of resources. This is exactly what you need to grow your business, and it makes things go much smoother. Possible mergers also bring forth great opportunities, products, services, and a larger customer base. It would be best if you also created a great network of loyal customers. These customers will provide a safety net for whatever comes by – through the ups and downs. They also create better credibility and trust for future customers. All these connections help grow your business into a well-established and respected firm with a larger customer base!
Grow Your Business With a Customer Loyalty Program
So, you created strong connections, and now you have a solid customer base. Do you know what would make these customers love you even more? Making them feel appreciated. And the way to do that is through a customer loyalty program. Often in business, it matters more to maintain your current customer base than to expand it. And that means you can’t lose your most loyal customers! It costs you more money to get new customers than it does to sell your products and services to your old loyal customers! It’s all about customer acquisitions vs. customer retention! A loyalty program helps you retain your current customers and could potentially bring you new ones. So, create a really nice loyalty program, and make it available to your most loyal customers. Pretty easy.
Do You Even Exist Without an Online Presence?
As we mentioned before, this is the era of technology and the internet. People spend most of their days online. So, an online presence is an obvious and easy way to grow your business. You can have an online presence through a website, blog, or social media platforms. And since this is 2020, the year of mishaps, an online presence broadens your customers’ spectrum. People feel more comfortable handling their businesses online. It’s all about online shopping now. Online mail campaigns featuring catalogs of your products are also great for building a customer base. Digital marketing is on the rise, and, as an entrepreneur or business owner, you have to realize that a digital presence is crucial for growth. You can pick a platform, one that suits your industry best, and focus your energies on building a base. This also makes you seem more interactive and caring with your customers. It builds a sense of trust and connectivity with your potential clients! You’ll gain loyal customers – a huge plus! You’ll have an open means of communication with your customers. It’s all about social media these days.
Quality over Quantity for Optimal Growth
One of the key factors that keep you going in the business lifecycle is by providing real longlasting value to your customers – the type of value they can only find at your firm. You have to make a difference and focus on the quality of the service or produce you provide. Find out what your customer base really wants the most and then make a difference by taking a step further. Put yourself in their place, what more would you want? You have to make your mark in the world of business. It’s a tough industry, but making a mark ensures your firm will last for a very long time. You have to create a company that people will rely on throughout generations – one that will not be easily forgotten with time. The way to do that is by providing quality value in every service or product you provide. Devote more time to discover exactly what your customers want and what they find interesting. Sometimes, it’s not always just about the end-goal. Sometimes you have to think about the long-run and how your brand plays a key role in your customers’ lives! So, to grow your business, think about how you can produce products or services that can not be provided by anyone else but you! Quality over quantity.
Self-Financing and Growth Investment
When you decide to venture into how to grow your business, you often find that you need more capital to do that. So, what are you supposed to do? You have to find a good source of capital with small amounts of liabilities attached to it. And the best way to do that is to self-finance your growth! It’s the easiest, fastest. And the cheapest way to finance your growth! At this point, you have to make use of the resources you have and push your way through growth. If you do it right, you can completely finance your business’s growth using cashflow purely from your sales! But you have to make sure you take into consideration the gross margins, growth rate, and payment cycles before you go through with this. You have to be sure that this path is sustainable for your company. So, self-financing is a debt-free way to grow your business! Nothing sounds better than that!
But what if your company can’t afford to finance its own growth? Here you have to turn to growth investment. These situations often mean that you have to resort to debt, which isn’t such a bad thing in the long run – especially if you have complete confidence in your company’s growth! Therefore, taking out a growth debt brings in crucial funding and great resources that help the process of how to grow your business! You will have to accept some liabilities as an entrepreneur, but nothing comes free in this industry. Besides, it will all be worth it as you watch your company grow!
Grow Your Business with Time Management
We can NOT stress the importance of proper time management enough to the growth of any business. Time management is the most efficient way to significantly cut the time needed for growth and make the whole process easier. You don’t have to spend hours and hours focused on growth. Instead, if you spent a specified amount of time in your day proactively working towards growth, you will achieve must better results in less time! You have to give some time to strategic planning on itself, then go all-in on the tasks that add major value to your growth. When you have a proper plan or strategy, the execution goes much smoother and takes much less time to finish. Planning is when you actually make time to nothing but planning – scheduling and resourcing. Whereas, strategizing refers to time evaluation of performance, cash flow, and customer satisfaction. Both put together to create the greatest strategic plan that boosts your execution process.
This strategic plan should include short-term goals that you have to achieve on a specified deadline – quarterly, semi-annual, or annual. Put all your resources in front of you, and understand how you can use them to achieve the goals. Then, decide on the end-result – customer satisfaction! And that’s how you use your time to grow your business. In this industry, time is money.
Grow Your Business with Strong Cybersecurity
A cyberattack might be any business owner’s greatest nightmare. If you don’t have proper cybersecurity, you might just be doomed for life. Cyberattacks are an attempted (or successful) breach of your system’s information. They are usually formulated by competition or just someone who wants to bring you down. This is where cybersecurity comes in. It is the only way to make sure you never go through a cyberattack. It protects your systems, networks, and programs against any form of digital attack. You definitely do not want your private files to be in the hands of your competition, nor the public. If you fall in the hands of a malicious hacker, he could extort you or your clients for money, destroy sensitive information, or ruin your complete business process! This is why your business needs to be prepared for the worst, and have a solid cyber-infrastructure – one that could withstand any threat. Small business owners have to realize that weak cybersecurity could be its downfall! Not to mention that this is 2020! As technology develops, so does cyberattacks and hacking. Therefore, you have to invest in cybersecurity, or your whole firm will pay the price! All your hard work will go to waste.
Are You Even Ranking?
Another cool and easy way to grow your business is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is basically putting your company under Google’s microscope. This will increase your business’ visibility, especially if your whole company is based on an online presence. If you learn about SEO, you open up a chance to rank on the first page of Google – that means showing up on the first page of Google. You can’t depend on social media on its own if you have an online website. You should set up an online blog and work on the SEO. This drives tons of organic traffic to your blog, and thus, to your website. This means a bunch of potential new customers and clients. Everyone uses search engines, and you have to do your best to make sure that your company is at the top of the options they get. You can even go for paid Google ads that can drive more traffic to your blogs. Provide high-quality content that interests people and watch the traffic grow!
Grow Your Business Through Money… More Money!
To scale and grow your business, you should resort to sales funnels. Sales funnels put your business on auto-pilot, and everything else will be smooth-sailing from there! First-things-first, you have to comprehend the character of your clients and customers. The main goal you should have in mind is that these sales funnels should solve your customer’s problems. Identify the possible problems they might face, and then provide them with an enticing and valuable solution. A proper sales funnel goes through four essential stages: Awareness, interest, decision, and action. We’ll walk you through the phases if you are not familiar with them.
Awareness: This is the phase where the potential customer becomes aware of your existence in terms of product and services. The potential customers identify the problem and search for the best solution to solve it. This is where you come in with your problem-solving product or service! This comes in the form of a visit to your website through SEO-based organic traffic, Google ads, or social media platforms.
Interest: At this point, the potential customer knows he/she has a problem, and they are searching for a solution to this problem. At this point, it is your duty to seem most appealing with attractive value-packed content!
Decision: They liked your content! Congrats! Now it’s time to make a choice and consider your solution as an option. This is where you put your ‘sales face’ on, and place all your sales offers out. The potential customer will check out what your services or products include, and what else you have on hand before deciding.
Action: What do you know! He liked what you have to offer. The potential is now real! This is where you close the deal, signing the agreement, or clicking the red button! The transaction is complete. You have just completed a successful sales funnel. We are so proud of you!
After that, it’s all about customer retention. Just like we mentioned before, retention is better than acquiring new customers. So, make sure to stay in touch with every successful funnel. This way, you’ll grow your customer base and grow your company too. Rely on email marketing to convert more sales after using newsletters, thank you emails, and subscriptions to the latest updates.
Grow Your Business Through Webinars
Webinars are the same as seminars, but you hold them online. This works especially well in 2020, and it also makes it easier for customers worldwide to attend. All you need is the right topic to attract a huge load of new subscribers or customers to your product. It’s a more interactive way to provide service for your customer base. It’s an exciting event that has people engaging in Q&A, polls, and provide direct feedback. You have to create a solid webinar topic, with an intriguing title, and a user-friendly registration page. The webinar has to revolve around solving the problems that your customers are most interested in. The upside of a webinar, besides customer attraction, is that you could always follow up with subscription emails, newsletters, feedback emails, and much more. You’ll have a direct connection to your attendees, and they’ll welcome this interaction. It all depends on what you have to offer and how well you make it seem appealing. You can also send recordings of the webinar to the attendees, which grow a sense of trust and loyalty to your customers. It is one of the most important aspects of any successful webinar. So, if you want to grow your business, think of how to host a great webinar!
What About Residual Income for Growth?
Residual or passive income is another way to grow your business with minimum cost. It’s a fast and easy way to make money and provide a financial safety net – basically money you don’t have to work so hard for. You can run ad sharing networks on your websites if you happen to have a decent load of traffic. You’ll run some ads for other companies that will bring you enough revenue to pay off domain and web hosting! You can also go for online subscription services on special products or paid services. Also, affiliate sales are another form of residual income that doesn’t change much of your usual business. You add affiliate banners and links to your blog or website – not ones of your competition, of course. Passive income assures that you remain financially stable, and you can grow your business without worry. Get creative, find ways to make passive income, and go to town with it. You can even invest in stocks and completely forget about it. You don’t have to put too much time or effort into this. All you have to do is pick a venture that takes up the least of your time. Just be smart, and go for it!
Grow Your Business with Testimonials & Reviews
People take other people’s word for things – especially when buying something online. We all do it, scroll down to the comment section, and check the reviews. People trust the ‘tried and true’ point of view more than all the features and advertisements you could put. So, if you have good reviews and testimonials, you’re a shoo-in for business growth. This is exactly why you should have a rating system enabled, comments on, and use social media to your advantage! Show off what people think of you. Positive feedback is free advertising. Large brands use social media to promote customer reviews, feedback, and experiences, especially social media. You can also get bloggers, influencers, YouTubers, and other experts to review your product or service and give you a shoutout. Believe it or not, it actually works wonders!
Grow Your Business with Giveaways & Promotions
Although it might seem counterintuitive to give something away for free, think of it as an investment towards your business’s growth. Giveaways, promotions, and offers are the most effective ways to keep the people coming and interested in your company and product. This has been done for ages! Companies love giving away free stuff like mugs, pens, and other trinkets with the brand logo on them. And, honestly, people love that! Now, it’s even on a larger scale. Big brands giveaway products worth hundreds of dollars, but they get their money’s worth for sure. Could you imagine how happy your customer would feel when he or she finds a gift alongside their order? We’ve all been through that. We know for sure that it had us feeling super happy. People love gifts. It makes them happy. It also grows trust and confidence in your customers, and they will most probably buy again.
Bigger, Better, Stronger! Grow Your Business Today
Every business goes through ups and downs, slumps, and slow days. But, as business owners, it is your duty to push through the tough times and come out bigger, better, and stronger. We all have to do that in the year 2020 – it’s pretty bad for everyone. This is exactly why we should stay optimistic and use whatever the year has in store for us. That’s the key to a successful business that ensures your place in the business lifecycle stays for a long time. So, now you know how to grow your business like an expert. Remember, plan and strategize before you proceed with the execution. Planning is a fundamental key in every kind of business or industry.
