“Every big business starts small.”
Richard Branson
As the contemporary business world is constantly evolving, small businesses need to stay updated with the actionable and latest strategies that can assist them in gaining a competitive edge over their competitors.
However, in the race to be the consumers’ favorite brand, large businesses US wholesale vendors often spend huge amounts of money on their strategies to foster healthy growth. But we all are very well aware of the fact that this is not possible in the case of small businesses.
Due to being short on budget, small businesses often look for effective and affordable strategies that can assist them in enhancing their growth. That being the case, below are some of the foolproof strategies that can assist you in enhancing the overall growth of your business without spending much.
5 Exceptional Growth Strategies for Small Businesses
Focus on Digital Marketing
As Jeff Bezos correctly quoted, “It is hard to find businesses that don’t sell online”. Keeping this in mind, businesses are now realizing the importance of digital marketing and are making it one of their top priorities. Small businesses are often short on budget because of their initial investments in the startup. In such a scenario, in order to grow rapidly, one of the best growth strategies that can be implemented by small businesses is to level up their digital marketing. Digital marketing will help startups in building their online presence and connecting to a large audience by spending minimal cost. Although the spending is less, digital marketing requires constant time and effort with effective strategies in order to earn big from your invested efforts.
Moreover, multiple pieces of research and studies have actually proven that if digital marketing is well-executed, it can assist your small business to get big in no time. To validate,
- As per OptinMonster, email marketing has a 4400% ROI on average.
- According to Screwpile Communications, 78% of businesses are using social media platforms and are performing better than their peers.
- As per eMarketer, reviews of a product are 12x more trusted than their descriptions written by businesses.
To continue, these stats are pretty evident that if you will effectively optimize different marketing channels, digital marketing will bring many benefits along. Hence, you need to widen your knowledge base about different channels that can assist you in enhancing the growth of your business. Having said that, the further section sheds light on various digital marketing channels that can optimize your business to enhance your business growth.
- Email marketing – Businesses can create multiple email lists and use various automation tools to deliver their message directly to the inboxes of their target audience. Various email automation tools are available in the market that will assist your business in sending multiple emails at an affordable cost.
- Social media – Various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter can be used by your business in creating and strategically communicating your business message to your target audience. As the trend of collaboration and videos is rising on social media, you can create multiple videos or collaborate with other businesses to enhance your online presence.
- Podcasts – Podcast is a recent trend that is gaining wide popularity on the web because it allows businesses to reach their target audience with engaging content in various forms such as interviews, storytelling, etc. This is one of the affordable mediums because there are many apps where you sign up and start your podcasts at no or low cost.
- Websites – Websites have always been a great way to grow your business online. The presence of the website can be created organically using search engine optimization or inorganically using pay per click or PPC.
The above-stated digital channels will provide you with a great opportunity to pitch your business to millions of people around the globe and to gain a competitive edge over all your competitors. Hence, in order to grow as a small business, you need to get your hands on digital marketing and make the most of it.
Effectively Penetrate Your Existing Market
Every business dreams of being in the top 500 fortune companies all around the world. However, in order to successfully conquer the business world, firstly, you need to focus on effectively penetrating your existing market.
To elaborate, effectively working on penetrating your existing market is one of the most successful growth strategies. The reason is it can assist in enhancing the overall growth of your business by expanding your product’s total share in a market.
To define, market penetration is an effective measuring tool that will assist you in calculating the total amount of product sold in the market compared to the total share of the market for that product.
Probing further, there are multiple ways in which you can penetrate your existing market and some of the foolproof ways are mentioned below,
- Start a consumer loyalty program – A consumer loyalty program can be built by offering various offers and coupons in order to encourage existing customers to return to your business to avail of exclusive offers. Along with this, you can also offer first-time discounts to your new customers in order to encourage them to make purchases from your business.
- Constantly upgrade your product – In order to penetrate your existing market, it is essential for you to constantly work on upgrading your products according to the preferences of your customers. In order to make that happen, it is essential for you to understand your market and your target audience. Then only you will be able to match your product to your customer’s expectations
- Lower your price – If your product offers good quality at a reasonable price then it will effectively assist you in acquiring new customers and retaining the existing ones. This can further encourage your consumers in choosing your products over your competitors. If you successful in coming out as a cost leader among all your competitors, it will assist you in successfully penetrating a larger share of your existing market.
However, it often gets difficult for small business owners to lower their prices because of already existing less margin. In such scenarios, you can offer attractive offers or gifts in order to attract a large share of your existing market. This will assist you in boosting your market penetration.
Keep a track of efficiency
One quote by Lord Kelvin highlights the key significance of our last strategy that states, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it”. In order to enhance the growth of your business, it is really important for you to constantly improve the efficiency of your business.
Further, in order to substantially measure your improvement, it is crucial to keep a track of various aspects of business such as sales, IT, marketing, and operations. All these departments have their own key performance indicators that can assist you in tracking the efficiency of these departments of your business.
Along with this, monitoring your efficiency will also highlight the key gaps that are causing hindrances in the growth of your business. After identifying the key factors, you can effectively implement the other strategies that will assist you in filling the differences.
To continue, all this together will assist you in recording your performance and improvising it regularly which will further assist you in the growth of your business.
Build better by outsourcing
Outsourcing is one of the most underrated business growth strategies that is often neglected by small businesses. To define, outsourcing refers to hiring a third party outside the business to get work done instead of doing it in-house. Every small to big company is already hopping on the trend of outsourcing multiple tasks. That is the only reason that as per Fortunly, businesses have spent almost 75.2 Billion dollars on outsourcing last year.
Furthermore, some of the crucial benefits of outsourcing are mentioned below
- Saves cost -Many businesses often outsource during the time of their peak season. This assists businesses in saving up the extra cost they have to spend on paying employees when the season is off. As you will have the privilege to get the work done from outside, it will save you up on the cost of hiring full-time employees.
- Get your work done by a professional
As a small business owner, you might not know everything or you might not be good at performing every task. In such scenarios, outsourcing can be one of the most efficient solutions as it will assist you in getting the work done by a person who actually has expertise in that particular field. This will assist in getting work done more efficiently and effectively which will benefit your business in the long run.
- Saves time – one of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is that it frees you up from performing multiple tasks at a time. As a small business owner, you already might have a lot on your plate, and getting free time is often really difficult. Outsourcing will help you in saving time and allowing you to focus on other significant tasks.
- Segment your market smartly
Lastly, another effective strategy that can be implemented by small businesses is that they divide up the large target audience into small sections based on their specific attributes. This is called the process of market segmentation.
To continue, market segmentation can be an effective way to reach the right target market. The reason is that instead of targeting the whole market, you will be able to target specific segments that can assist you in earning maximum profits.
Probing further, the market can be segmented based on the demographics, physiographic, geographic, and behavioral dimensions of the target market. A detailed elaboration on the types of segmentation is given below
- Demographic segmentation – Demographic segmentation is the most common and widely used form of market segmentation. This segment categorizes the target audience based on age, gender, ethnicity, income, level of education, and religion.
- Physiographic segmentation – This segmentation is majorly based on the personality traits and interests of the target audience. This segmentation divides the target audience based on their hobbies, life goals, values, beliefs, and lifestyles.
- Geographic segmentation – As the name suggests, in geographic segmentation, the target audience is classified on the basis of its region, country, district, or city.
- Behavioral segmentation – This is one of the most useful and effective segmentations used by many businesses. In this type of segmentation, the grouping is done on the basis of spending habits, purchasing habits, browsing habits, interactions with the brand, and loyalty to a brand.
To conclude, working in a small business often requires a lot of effort, patience, and determination. The need is to effectively understand the market and then opt for the right strategy that will help your small businesses to become big. Moreover, the above given are some of the meticulously researched strategies that will help you and your business outshine in no time.
