The objective of every business is to survive and grow. Different companies use different marketing and brand management strategies for increasing their sales and enhancing their brand image.
We all know that scaling a business is not easy. It requires a lot of strategic planning to get to the point of growing a business and seeing it thrive. Like everything else in life, growing a business would require you to put in time and effort before you can reap the benefits. Sometimes you need to focus on your short-term business goals, but at the end of the day, it’s all about building a sustainable stream of income for your business for the long run.
Trying to grow your business can really take a toll on you. But remember, there is always light at the other end of the tunnel. If you are one of those who are trying to figure out how to grow your small business, then you have come to the right place. Today we’ll be discussing some practical strategies that can help you grow your business in 2021.
10 Different Ideas to Grow Your Business
If you want to know how to grow your business, have a look at these 10 different ways to go about it. These ideas are suitable for adopting in this modern age, where almost everything is digitized and globalized.
1. Build a Sales Funnel
A sales or marketing funnel is the path through which your potential customers pass until they get to the point of purchasing from you. Not having a sales funnel for your business is like making an enormous mistake. This is the age of automating business processes and reducing the contribution of manual work. Many people still use direct marketing and other stand-alone strategies to make sales, but they can only get so far by walking on that path.
A sales funnel enables you to automate your entire sales process and catalysts to grow your business. Once your sales funnel is ready, you only need to maintain a minimum amount of front-end work while the rest of the process is smooth-sailing for increasing your sales.
Sales funnels have recently gained popularity because they work very well with contemporary marketing and outreach strategies.
2. Use a Customer Management System
Most of the businesses these days are selling their products and services over the internet. This makes it more complicated than ever before to track all your orders and keep a record of all your customers. Gone are the days when transactions could be easily tracked manually. Even if you begin with keeping records manually when you first start a business initiative, it will become too cumbersome to continue doing that as you grow your business.
If you want to grow your business faster, you should utilize a customer management system. There are plenty of those available in the market these days, and most of them are simple to use.
What you can also do is use a website builder, such as Strikingly, that equips you with the order management feature within your website’s editor. You can easily track all your orders and customers from there as you grow your business. This way, you don’t need to use a separate customer management system to keep track of your orders and transactions.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Conduct Market Research
For growing a business, you need to keep yourself up to date with your surroundings and competition. Make sure you do a thorough competitor analysis and come up with your pricing strategies accordingly. You wouldn’t want your competitors to penetrate the markets where you are performing your best by offering prices that are way too lower than yours.
Looking into your competitors can also help you find out about their advertising strategies. Observe the ads that they have been running successfully over time, and try to emulate those. This is one of the quickest ways to grow your business.
If you have a website for your business, it is also good to check your website analytics. This will keep you informed about where you stand within your target market and competition.
Building a website in Strikingly gives you access to your website’s statistics through your dashboard. These statistics are easy to understand but thorough enough to let you track your site’s unique visitors daily.
Image taken from Strikingly
4. Identify New Opportunities
As part of your SWOT analysis, you need to constantly keep identifying new opportunities for your business. This can mean making a product line extension or starting an entirely new product line. Once you become good at identifying market gaps and coming up with ideas for penetrating them, you will grow your business faster.
Opportunities for your business can arise from different aspects of your external business environment. Therefore, keeping a keen eye on each of the following helps in growing a business.
- Distribution channels
- Direct competitors
- Foreign markets
- Potential industries
- Economic situation
- Trending products
- New products
5. Build a Subscribers List
Building an email list is absolutely crucial for growing a business. You need to have a means of keeping in touch with your customers, or at least with your site visitors. A good way to build a subscribers list is to have a sign-up form on your website or landing page. This means you offer something to your site visitors, such as a free e-book or podcast, in return for their name and email address. Once you have their email address, you can send newsletters to your subscribers regularly. This will keep them reminded about your brand and the products or services you have to offer.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Form Strategic Partnerships
The right strategic partners will boost up your morale, support you in your initiatives, and help you grow your business. But identifying the right partnerships, or even sponsorships, is easier said than done. You need to find those companies to partner with that you think can be complementary to yours. Build propositions for them to partner with you. Then contact them and put out your proposal, and see if they can agree on some kind of mutual collaboration.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
7. Collect Regular Customer Feedback
If you want to truly grow your business, you must be constantly updated and informed on how your customers feel about your brand and products. This is why you must regularly collect feedback from your customers.
There are many ways of collecting customer feedback. One way to collect feedback through your website is to build a contact form that your site visitors can fill up and submit any time they have something to say to you. Encouraging your customers to communicate with you will help you get first-hand information about your customers’ experiences interacting with your brand. This will give you chances to improve your services and coming up with more effective marketing strategies. The feedback that you get might also give you ideas to grow your business.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
8.Use Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is becoming more and more popular these days. Organizations prefer to post their brand messages and run ads on social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter, more than running ads on television and print media. While some businesses still use mixed media, most of them are more inclined towards using digital marketing and social media influencers. If you want to grow your business, you must also include social media marketing in your strategies.
The best way to incorporate social media marketing is to integrate your social media pages with your website. This can be done by inserting social media icons into your website’s footer or on other parts of your landing page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
9. Create Licensing Deals
If you want to grow your business with little effort on your part, you might want to consider creating licensing deals. This means you take one or more of your products and license them to others. The sales revenue that the other party gets from your product will be shared. This will saturate the market with your products and help you gain market share.
When you build your networking for offering licensing deals, you will automatically create a brand community. This kind of community is good for building brand awareness, growing a business, and encouraging public engagement with your products and brand.
10. Strive for Global Expansion
The ultimate level of business growth is global expansion. If you can get international clients and start making international sales, you will grow your business in no time. Growing a business involves researching new markets and figuring out ways to enter them.
Selling in global markets opens doors for new revenue slices for your business. You can benefit from currency fluctuations and have more opportunities to specialize in different areas. Global expansion also lets you have better risk management for your business.
So these were 10 different ideas to grow your business. If you would like to create a website for your business using a platform that makes it easy for you to apply all the strategies mentioned above, sign up for your free account in Strikingly today.
