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3 Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleGrowing a business is a complicated matter because it takes a lot of time, determination and sometimes even a bit of investment. Besides finding a profitable idea, defining a target audience and providing them with either a valuable product or service, one has to figure out the best marketing strategies for their company. Whether they are selling products, services or sharing information with their customers, it is important to note that the business world has become hard to access. That is why it is vital to find the right marketing strategies. Otherwise, making a profit or staying afloat is a complicated matter.

Nonetheless, finding the right marketing strategy is a struggle itself. You need to find a way to get your message to the right audience, boost visibility, increase sales and many more. To do that, you can check out the following strategies.

Create Video Tutorials

Creating video tutorials is probably the best and most effective way of getting the word out. It is simple and quite quick. Moreover, thanks to your expertise and valuable knowledge, prospects can easily turn into regular customers or at least frequent visitors of your page. Video tutorials are a very good way to start. The better those videos are, the more value you provide to your audience. As a result, you are able to boost your visibility and ultimately, increase your sales. Most people use video platforms in order to learn something quick. This could be the future of marketing, especially since people don’t have a lot of time on their hands.

Start Blogging

Every business company should have a blog. However, it is not absolutely necessary to have a blog on your own. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who find this task mundane because they don’t get that much visibility. Therefore, they start authority blogging. If you’re new to the blogging world, this is a great way to gain exposure. There are quite a few platforms out there that allow you to post valuable content. The only difference between your blog and those platforms is that they have massive audiences, a factor that gives you instant reach. Though, if you consider starting a blog, you should definitely learn more about SEO techniques. Get online and learn how powerful SEO Techniques can boost you and lead to business growth.

Build a Great Lead Magnet

Another great and effective marketing strategy is creating a lead magnet. A lot of professionals believe that the right lead magnet presented to the right candidates can have incredible results. There are many types of lead magnets that one can build from e-books, to cheat sheets to videos and checklists. Though, before doing that is it important to identify pain points so that you know how to offer solutions. Of course, the lead market plays a small part in this equation, but it is important to create the right one. If you want to reach your audience, you need to make it as effective as possible.

There are many great strategies that entrepreneurs can use to grow their business. While most of them are effective, they all require a bit of effort.

Ready to Grow Your Business? How to Appeal to Niche Audiences

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleRunning your own business means that you must make major decisions daily, but the one decision that a lot of owners tend to struggle with is when to expand their business. It’s a big leap, and you must prepare well for the transition, but how do you know when it’s time to take the first steps?

Here are 5 signs that you are ready to expand:

1. You have a loyal customer base

Loyalty is the key word here. If you have regular repeat customers, you are on to a winner. It’s a sure sign that the products or services that you are offering are quality and that you are providing customer satisfaction. The more interactions and positive experiences that your customers have with you, the more likely they are to convert from consumer into a brand advocate, and so the message of your brand will spread organically.

2. Your business is stable

You can’t base your desire to expand your business on the fact that you have had a good quarter. It needs to have been making a stable profit for at least a couple of years before you contemplate expanding. This delay may frustrate your plans, but it is essential so that you can gauge seasonal variations and confirm that your boost in profits is not just a temporary position.

3. Your team is A1

If you are planning an expansion, you need to have an efficient and strong team behind you to cope with the demands of growth. They need to be agile and dynamic to respond to the new challenges expansion creates – increased demands on their knowledge, skills and time.

4. Your processes are A1

When your operational and back office processes are aligned you work efficiently and productively. Your streamlined processes mean that you have the capacity to take on more work and the time to devote to growing your business.

5. You identify gaps

If you have steady sales of the products and services that you offer, you may repeatedly be asked for associated items that you can add to your product list. Associated items that will complement the products or services that you offer are a natural way to grow your business.

You may also recognize that you are not servicing niche audiences and that you have gaps in your products’ appeal. By adapting your marketing strategy, you will be able to target new audiences for your products and services.

Let’s look at the niche markets that you can tap into boost your business’s growth and profitability:

Seniors

With life expectancy typically increasing and medical innovations positively impacting people’s health, for the first time since records began there are more seniors than children under 5 years. This means that products or services that appeal to the older generations are tapping into a huge market with an equally impressive potential profit – something to consider for your business and perhaps where to invest your profits.

Shares in companies that supply products for seniors have a very healthy return – the health sector, pharmaceuticals, and even the leisure industry have been boosted by the change in demographics. Do your research into how to invest in a global aging economy to become inspired as to how different markets are making serious profits from seniors.

When marketing for seniors you need to pay great attention to the content that you produce, especially online. Your content should primarily focus on their abilities rather than the things that they can no longer do. You shouldn’t use over the top language; they want to know who, what, where and how – they don’t want over descriptive language that dilutes the message that you are communicating.

Moms

Nearly 60% of mothers who work control the household expenses, and make the key decisions within the household. Moms are keen to make purchases that offer solutions to the challenges they face bringing up their children – whether it’s saving them time, saving them money or offering them products that satisfy their values.

Your marketing strategy should be focused on making your content snappy – this particular audience values efficiency. Avoid trying to appeal to the stereotypes of moms who are on the edge of coping, too perfect or other stereotypes – you risk labeling women in a way that they won’t appreciate. You want your campaign to be inclusive and not something that restricts the idea of diversity.

Bilingual Consumers

In the United States, there are approximately 20% of the population speak a language other than English as their first language – Spanish and Spanish Creole being 12% of that figure. It makes great sense to provide information about your products or services in more than one language.

The rise of the internet means that you are not limited to just serving your local community with products and services. Even small businesses can embrace using different languages in their marketing strategy. The most obvious sector to benefit is the tourism industry, but other sectors can thrive by appealing to non-English speakers – we all have the same needs and requirements. If you market to consumers in their native tongue, you will inspire confidence in your offerings and profit from referral within their communities.

By tapping into niche audiences, you can access a new market in which to promote your products. The senior, mom and bilingual consumers are examples of niche markets that you can target, and by doing so, you have the very real opportunity to become a market leader by exploiting the gaps that others have not yet identified. To do this successfully, you must spend some time to understand who your consumers are and what their needs are. You can then deliver a better solution to their problem that other firms have failed to address.

Recognizing when it’s the right time to grow your business is key to its success. Your timing is critical. You want the decisions you make to support a long-term strategy to achieve your goals, expand your business and accomplish success.

Key Practises You Must Get Right To Grow Your Small Business

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Too many businesses fail within their initial stages, and you don’t want yours to be next. That’s why it’s crucial to optimize your business procedures right from the start. It will be much easier to implement them when you only have a few staff, rather than waiting until you have dozens or even hundreds.

Hiring

If your company is small, then every team member is crucial. For example, let’s say you have a team of five. Every person is responsible for 20% of the workload. Imagine if your new hire is simply not performing. That takes your business down to 80% effectiveness. Now imagine another staff member suddenly quits without notice. You’re suddenly down to 60%.

The smaller a company is, the greater the importance of each employee. It doesn’t matter if a large company hires a few bad apples because it will have hundreds of other workers to take up the slack. Unfortunately, you don’t have that luxury.

Make sure you develop a comprehensive hiring process to weed out lazy and unreliable workers. Have a look at qualityeducationandjobs.com to learn more about what you should be looking for.

Accounting

Make sure you hire a good accountant and make sure you document all your expenses and revenue closely. Any bookkeeping stuff ups can cause chaos throughout your company, potentially land you in tax trouble, and impair your ability to plan for the future.

Marketing

If you want your business to grow, then you need to get it seen. The best way to do this is to develop your online presence as much as possible. If you’re not familiar with social media marketing (you should be), now is the time to learn. You want to start developing posts that connect with your audience.

You should also aim to get your company site seen on Google. If you have no idea how to do this, then it may be time to learn about SEO (search engine optimization). This involves a variety of processes to get your site ranking on the highest page possible. The easiest and most efficient way is to develop content that is relevant to viewers. This could be in the form of articles or videos.

Quality Control

It’s easy to think that because your business is small, there is no need to implant major quality control procedures. Why it does depend on your industry, it usually pays to implement these procedures sooner rather than later. Imagine you send out an order that is completely wrong, all because of a simple mislabelling mistake. You may end up losing a customer who would have gone on to spend hundreds or thousands. While human error will always occur, it’s important to minimize it as much as possible.

Final Thoughts…

These practices are crucial to almost any business, regardless of their industry. If you’re a small business owner who wants to level up to a medium sized business, then you need to get your procedures perfect.

How Health Practices Find New Ways To Expand Their Revenue

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If you run a private practice and you’ve done for any serious amount of time, then you have probably already realized that you need to think about medicine as a business. Not just in how you maintain professionalism, effectiveness, and efficiency. You also need to think about profit, which many treat as a dirty word in the industry. However, getting more tight-fisted is not the only way to ensure you see more money. Instead, you should consider looking at just how your business could offer more and thus make more.

StrategyDriven Business Management Article
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Make use of that expertise

Besides thinking like a businessperson, to succeed in running a practice, you need real medical expertise. That same expertise could be the very same tool you use for finding new opportunities for bringing revenue into the business. Not only are blogs good ground for monetization through advertising and affiliates programs. They can also be a tremendous way to build your visibility and your personal brand online. You can also look into providing your advice as a premium product, by producing eBooks or getting into hosting webinars. At the same time, getting more involved in the community around you can help, too. Lots of experts find paid speaking opportunities to share their knowledge at seminars and other live events.

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Reach new patients

Naturally, trying to get as many patients into the business is the most obvious way to try and expand your ability to gain revenue. But you shouldn’t just think that outreach and marketing are the only ways to reach more patients. Instead, you should think about what might be preventing certain portions of the market from reaching your services. For instance, for some the barrier is physical. Some people are not mobile or well enough to reach your practice. To that end, some practices are starting to expand their services to those who need them not only by visiting more patients. Many are using more time-effective telemarketing methods from services like Chiron Health. Not only can you improve your patient portfolio, but you could be providing your services to those who have in dire need but lacking this whole time.


Photo courtesy of Pexels

Finding new niches

You might also be able to get more business from existing and new patients alike by simply offering them something that you weren’t able to do so before. When starting a practice, it’s a smart move to ensure that you’re spending on the essentials, investing in the equipment that can supply you with a steady enough flow of work to keep the doors open and the lights on. However, there are ancillary treatments that require more specific equipment or training. If you’re in a position to grow the business, then it might be time to invest in changes to the business that could open you up to extra services such as allergy testing and treatment or urgent care without an appointment.

As the practice grows, you may want to think about branching out into another location. However, that is a significant cost, so for those who want to grow without going to such lengths, the three strategies above can be tremendously helpful.

Four Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your Business

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“Things are either growing or dying” is a famous quip. While it’s unclear who said it first, it’s been used regularly at business conferences to fire up audiences over the last few decades. The speaker often follows it up with a list of suggestions like “five tips to start scaling your sales”. However, it turns out one of the most dangerous things you can do is to prematurely start to focus on scaling.

This may seem like an odd statement coming from a entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and professor who has spent the last few years in my role at Carnegie Mellon studying scaling startups and teaching a popular graduate course titled The Science of Growth that was recently turned in as a book.

I’m a big fan of scaling up innovative ideas and making sure they have as much impact as possible. In our research, to try and understand the critical success factors of scaling a startup, we followed the journeys of 10 well-known companies, ranging from modern marvels like Tesla, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn all the way back to the retail juggernaut McDonalds – and then contrasts each story with that of a lesser-known startup that was created at about the same time, with a similar product, targeting the same market.

From these cases, we came to appreciate that there were a set of four what we call ‘prerequisites’ that startups needed to focus on BEFORE growth. Just as you can’t take calculus before basic arithmetic, these are the essential foundational elements of any startup before the entrepreneurs turn their attention to growth.

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About the Author

Sean AmmiratiSean Ammirati is a partner at Birchmere Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Pittsburgh, PA, and Palo Alto, CA, and is an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, he was the COO of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most influential sites about the future of technology and innovation. Sean was previously co-founder and CEO of mSpoke, a big data SaaS company that was the first acquisition of LinkedIn.