The top 2 tips to boost growth for small businesses
First, the caveat. I run a business that focusses on the two things that this blog is about to talk about – it doesn’t make it any less valid, but I just want to be transparent.
But before we look at what small businesses can do to help their growth, let’s think for a minute of how and why many small businesses are run. Many small businesses are run by business owners who start their business for one of 2 reasons – either they have a real passion for what they do and / or they have already been doing it successfully for many years for someone else and want to use that experience to go it alone. Either way, this passion and experience often serves as a differentiator, meaning that their products or services are able to compete very well in the market they are in. Combine this with an existing network of contacts, and the result is very often an initial successful burst of business growth.
The second phase of growth for a business can be somewhat more challenging but by focussing on the following 2 areas, businesses can boost their growth and maintain that upward trajectory.
Digital Marketing
The beauty of digital marketing is how accessible it is for the smaller business. There are so many ways that a business can attract and engage a relevant audience, but before focussing down on campaigns, it’s always useful to think about the 4p’s of product, promotion, price and place. In other words, what do we do, how do we provide business value, who and where do we sell and how do we promote to that audience? Once this is clear, then this can feed into your digital marketing assets and campaigns. For most small businesses, the following are some digital marketing bases which really must be covered:-
Website – Be clear about what the website needs to do, define the success criteria and use analytics to measure the success of these goals. Look at the key metrics of enquiries vs traffic, bounce rates etc. and make sure that content and promotion strategies support the improvement of these key metrics. ‘Build it and they will come’ simply isn’t a strategy.
SEO – One of the most important considerations when building a site is whether or not that site will get found. Make sure your pages are all built to best practice and have the optimal keyword density and structure for your key search terms.
Social – Ensure you are on the key platforms for your audience and that your messaging is consistent across those platforms. Measure the engagement of your social media activity – content needs to be interesting or useful otherwise your subscribers lose interest.
Content Marketing – If you are good at what you do, then let your prospects know. Whitepapers, Blogs and case studies all demonstrate competency and build credibility. These content pieces should offer value in their own right and should not be a thinly disguised sales pitch. If done correctly, they can drive relevant, engaged traffic and can be a tool to gain an engaged subscriber base. Cross pollenate and promote these content pieces through social channels.
Email – you may hear that email marketing is dead. It isn’t – it’s alive and well and remains one of the most effective forms of digital marketing there is. Of course, you need to make sure that you deliver a relevant message to a relevant audience, but done correctly, email continues to deliver excellent results.
Analytics – whilst not being a marketing activity in its own right, analytics are essential to understanding how well your campaign are working. By becoming intimately familiar with analytics it’s possible to constantly evolve your marketing activity to make it more effective.
Of course, there’s also PPC, display advertising and numerous other activities that augment those mentioned above, but consider the listed ones to be the core of any strategy.
Sales Skills
So having focussed on digital marketing and having started to generate leads, the next stage is to start building a pipeline of opportunities and ultimately to start closing business. Unfortunately many smaller businesses, particularly those that are owner managed, have little or no formal sales training within the business. This means that the sales funnel will not be operating as efficiently as it would otherwise be, with deals being lost and contracts being negotiated on less favourable terms.
Having a good conversion rate of opportunities to sales allows businesses to maximise the ROI from their marketing efforts. It also enables the business to be more profitable, allowing the pricing of products and services at the appropriate level. Without sales training it’s too easy to drop the price as soon as a price objection comes up, instead of selling on the value of the product or service being delivered. In fact, if you have a 40% margin and you drop your sales price by just 10%, sales would need to increase by a whopping 33% to maintain profit at the same level!
It’s also a mistake to think that being ‘good at sales’ is something which can’t be learned and requires some inbuilt natural ability. Sales is almost as much about process as it is about the qualifying and closing techniques that are more readily associated with sales people. Understanding the numbers required in the sales funnel and learning how to move an opportunity through the sales funnel and managing that process is equally important.
Summary
So in order to grow, the focus for small businesses should be simple – to generate more leads and to convert the maximum number of those leads into opportunities and sales. By focussing on being better at digital marketing and by sharpening the sales skill set, small businesses can maximise their growth and profitability.
At The Business Boosters we focus on Digital Marketing and Sales Training. If you would like to find out more, contact us and find out how your business could be getting a boost.
