How To Make A Small Business Grow Big
News Times Link: Growth and development are essential for all small business entrepreneurs. But growth and development of your small business go through specific necessary procedures: a good business ideal model, a good customer relationship, and innovation potential.
Carry out a Market Study
Carrying out a market analysis of your business; analyze the activity of your company and its visibility on the market. The goal is to determine, in particular, the needs of your customers so that your products or services can meet them precisely.
One mistake you shouldn’t make is neglecting your existing customers. Knowing how to retain your customers is much more profitable than looking for new ones. In addition, targeting your market well, allows you not to waste your time and money by unnecessarily dispersing yourself. Finally, if necessary, a well-conducted study can reveal new markets to you. Google is your friend; simple research will better understand your market and understand who your competition is.
Studying the Strengths and Weaknesses
List the strengths of your company (customer service, technology, location, skills, etc.) and its weaknesses (lack of visibility, insufficient financial resources, etc.), as well as the possibilities (new technologies, new needs, etc.) and risks (new regulations, new competitors) in your market. You will be able to identify the advantages of your offer and find the right arguments to explain how your products or services correspond perfectly to the needs of your target market while making a difference.
Unique Aim and Objectives
These must be specific, attainable, measurable, and realistic, even if they are ambitious. We speak in this case of SMART objectives.
Establish the Correct Marketing Strategy
That is to say, decide on the right actions to take and the most appropriate techniques to achieve your goals. The possibilities are numerous, but don’t be overwhelmed and take practical and straightforward steps using the Web: improve your site’s SEO, open your professional pages on social networks, open your Google My Business page, open a blog on your site, add case studies to your site, etc. The presence at trade shows is also still relevant today, and of course, cultivates your relationships; word of mouth remains fundamental.
Write the Marketing Plan
It is now a matter of prioritizing the various actions selected and indicating the costs, implementation dates, and resources required to be mobilized. Then take action by carefully following your plan. You can smartly cut business expenses without hampering the function and productivity of the business.
Expand your Network
Meeting professionals, organizing local events, registering for trade fairs and exhibitions or significant events related to your industry are excellent ways to enrich your contact list, build relationships sustainable with win/win partners, to meet and promote your business to influential people in your field and to solicit new prospects.
Distribute Press Releases
You need to adopt the latest effective sales and marketing strategies. A new product or service, an important event in your company, share your information with the media: regional press, press specializing in your field, radio, local television channel, not to mention social networks and online media on the Web.
Build Customer Loyalty
The production of customer files and prospect files, in particular through the use of a CRM, facilitates telephone prospecting, e-mailing campaigns, customer reminders for new products or services, subscriptions to newsletters, invitations to share on social networks. You have to regularly monitor good customer satisfaction reports.
A positive word of mouth marketing is careful never to put your existing customers aside from your promotional campaigns.
Make yourself known to your Personas.
It may seem obvious, but before recruiting an army of cold-callers on an offshore telephone platform, invest heavily in targeted mobile advertising; clearly define your targets: your personas (link). Who is your offer aimed at? What problem (s) do you solve? What type of customer are you targeting? CSP? What geographic area? The more precise your offer will be, the more optimized your advertising will be, and the more new customers you will sign.
Maintain your Social Networks daily
Having a Facebook page like everyone else, or because your competitor has one, is a good start, just like owning a LinkedIn page. However, not having a photo on the Linkedin profile, posting a series of promotions for your products and services or even posting once every four months will not help you and could, on the contrary, be harmful to you.
Create a Blog on your Site to prove your Credibility
With rare exceptions, a site without a blog is not a site. At a minimum, it’s a storefront, and at best, an e-commerce site that purrs and converts your visitors into customers while on vacation. Your business blog is the journal to publish content that interests your audiences every step of the customer journey and announces product launches. Not only will this one allow you to be better referenced by search engines, but this one will be able to prove your legitimacy.
Capitalize on customer loyalty
Winning new customers is expensive, very expensive. Once these hard-won clients are in your portfolio, do not abandon them to start chasing the prospect again. Pamper them, set up a loyalty program or at least a system to stay close to them and their concerns while offering them additional complementary products or services from time to time.
A prospect is difficult to convince, but you enter another dimension when he becomes a customer: he expects the red carpet to be rolled out. He expects preferential treatment, unforgettable customer experience. He trusted you and now expects something in return: faster handling of his orders or complaints, privileged offers, private sales, comprehensive and reachable after-sales service.
Train your Sales Team
Optimizing a client appointment can be learned. Either in specialized books or on expert blogs. For training to be practical, it must be adapted to your activity, personalized for your sales teams. All salespeople have the same objective: to sell, but not all respond to the same stimuli, motivations.
Therefore, you will have to coach your sales teams beyond the sweet words you whisper to them during the very effective weekly reviews and monthly performance reviews. You will have to identify areas for improvement and involve training organizations to improve your team’s skills. You can be hiring right employees for the best result.
Everything will depend on the different individual needs of your teams, but you can train them on:
- Information research: is the prospect you canvass an excellent fit for your offer? Do the people contacted have real decision-making power?
- customer negotiation: a salesperson can quickly analyze a prospect’s “pain points”, offer the adequate offer, and stutter when announcing the price, and “close the deal”
- Their sales tool: optimize the time spent on administrative tasks to free up time “to sell.”
- Social selling: social networks are not only used to share your vacation photos. They can also allow you to build relationships with professionals in your sector (customers, partners, suppliers).