Growing and scaling a small business is no easy task. It takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of time, before you start seeing the success you’re hoping for. But when small business owners follow a few simple proven strategies to help grow and scale a business, the timeline to success is faster and more likely. Here are some strategies you should try:
Generate Return Customers
One of the first things you should focus on is generating return customers over new customers. While all businesses need new customers in order to keep growing, they are also more expensive. In fact, it costs five times as much to bring in a new customer compared to bringing back an old one. So, if you can focus more attention on bringing back past customers, you’ll increase your sales at a fraction of the cost.
One way to bring back customers is through exceptional customer service. Make it a priority of your business to handle every question and comment with high quality responses. This means answering questions quickly, addressing concerns appropriately, and providing your customers with multiple ways to contact you. A great, but simple, way to do this is by adding a live chat feature to your website. This will allow customers to talk to you quickly and get the answers they’re looking for.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most powerful tools currently available to small business. This is because it allows you to reach potentially millions of people, all while using the sites for free. If you want, the only cost you’ll have to pay to use social media is your time. Or, if you have a bigger budget available, you can put a comprehensive social media plan into action to start drawing in more leads.
Which path you follow will depend on your own situation. However, regardless of where your business is at, you should have some kind of social media plan in place. Proper use of social media is a small business strategy that helps businesses to grow and scale. Not only can this strategy help improve customer relations, but it will increase brand awareness, help to make you an authority within your niche, and help promote your latest sales. To learn more about building a social media strategy for your small business you can check out this guide.
Hire the Right People
The key to success for any small business is the people working there. In a small business each person has a large responsibility, so it’s important you hire the right people from the start. When you have the right people on staff, they provide better results and are therefore worth the investment.
As a business owner, you should take the time to consider whether your current staff is the right one. Are they able to handle their current responsibilities? Can you see this business growing with them handling major parts of it?
Once your business begins to grow some more, you’ll then start to hire additional people. If you want your business to continue to grow, you need to take your time with these hiring decisions. Here are some tips you can use to get the hiring decision right for your small business.
Automate and Outsource
Finally, in some cases it makes more sense to let a third party, or a piece of software, handle some of the work. Rather than spending money trying to grow and scale a small business, another strategy is to figure out how to spend less. You need to find the most profitable way to do things and sometimes that means outsourcing or automating certain tasks.
For example, if you wanted to have a live chat feature on your website, you might not be able to afford having your customer support team monitor it 24/7. To keep the feature active in the off hours you could install a chatbot which would answer basic questions while your team is away. Or you could outsource the customer support operation altogether if it will save you some money.
Think about which tasks in your business take up the most time or cost the most money. Then explore your options for automation and outsourcing. These aren’t the easiest decisions to make, but if it will allow your business to grow, then it’s the right decision.
Finding Better Ways to Do Things
For every business owner that is attempting to grow and scale a small business, strategies help provide guidance. Strategies help you find better ways to do things. Whether it’s a better way of interacting with customers, changing your focus on the type of customers to go after, or which tasks you automate, finding better alternatives should be a priority. Hopefully this guide was able to give you some ideas as to how you can do that, and before long your business will be on the way up.