3 Proven Strategies for Growing Your Small Business

For most small businesses, finding ways to get new customers is an essential part of being successful long-term.  Word-of-mouth local marketing can only take you so far and you need a larger marketing strategy if you’d like to get to the next level.

We believe growing your small business should include a relatively simple digital marketing strategy. 

Let’s get straight to it. There are three parts to this strategy:

1. Digital Real Estate – Build your authority in your industry by being ever-present across the internet. This includes your website, social media, directory listings, videos, and articles on other websites.
2. Customer Acquisition – Use a strategy of driving targeted visitors to your sales funnel and converting them to paying customers. This includes SEO, paid traffic, and inbound content marketing.
3. Marketing Optimization – This not only improves your current marketing systems, but looks to manage your reputation and improve customer retention. This focuses on the data & analytics, the customer experience, and continuously improving your operations.

Not too complicated, right?

Let’s dive into each one a little further to show you exactly what you can do in your own business.

Check out our free checklist with actionable steps designed for small business growth.

Step 1: Build Your Digital Real Estate

In the first step, the goal is to improve your online presence and become an authority in your industry.

This is done by building out your digital real estate. And the goal is to become a digital real estate tycoon.

So how do you do this? Our strategy focuses on building out as many digital properties as you can while staying consistent with your marketing message.

Website

Your website is the first thing you should focus on since it is your digital front door. It often provides people with their first impression of your company and is a platform for giving further information about your products and services.

A poorly designed or outdated website makes it much more difficult to convert visitors into paying customers. Spend the time to make sure your website is functional, attractive, and has the information your visitors are looking for.

Your website should function as a sales funnel that drives cold traffic and gradually warms them until they become paying customers. This can be done through a variety of educational and follow-up strategies that keep your visitor’s attention.

Social Media

Social media platforms are an excellent way to connect with your target customers and send them to your website for a sale. They can include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok.

When you’re just starting off, pick one or two of these social sites to focus on first. It can get overwhelming to try to update numerous sites at once, so grow your following on one or two first before branching out to other social media sites.

The goal is to use social media as a way to converse with your customers, answer their questions, and get to know their needs. Over time, you can grow a group of loyal followers that will help to promote your business and generate repeat sales.

Directories and Local Listings

Directories are sites like Yelp or YellowPages that help to make it easier to find companies. Create a listing on as many directories as you can while staying within your niche.

For example, a real estate agent could create a listing on a general directory like Yelp to help with their search engine rankings. After that, they should focus on niche-specific directories like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com.

Of course, don’t forget to include your Google My Business listing to show up on the first page of Google for your company name.

Tie Your Properties Together

Once you have established your listings, you’ll want to link them together appropriately to be most effective. The directories and social media sites should link to your website to drive traffic there.

Think about it as a hub and spoke model where the outlying digital properties attract traffic and send those visitors to your main website. You sales funnel on your main website continues to convert them into loyal customers.

Besides physically linking your properties together, you also want to create a consistent brand across all of them. That means using the same logo, avatar, colors, and photos. That also extends to your content so that you use a similar tone that people can recognize as your company.

Step 2: Focus on Customer Acquisition

Once you have your digital properties set up, the goal is to start using them to get more traffic and, ultimately, more customers. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is important to rank in Google and drive organic traffic.

For the most success, find people who are the most likely to be interested your product and then make an irresistible offer. Paid traffic can be an effective way to get the attention of these people.

Acquiring new customers for your business can be made easier with a systematic way to convert visitors to lifelong customers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Your website is the most critical piece to focus on first when you’re starting to optimize it for search engines. This will help you get found for the most common search terms and create a steady stream of free traffic.

SEO includes a variety of basic and advanced techniques that can be made simpler with tools such as WordPress plugins and external audits. In general, look to make your website mobile responsive, fast loading, and provide useful information to your visitors.

Besides your website, you can also take steps to improve your search engine optimization for your social media and directory listings. Start by using the same name, address, and phone number across all your listings so that search engines can recognize you as the same company.

Content Marketing

Content marketing, or inbound marketing, is a strategy of creating valuable content that helps to convert visitors. Types of content can include blog articles, videos, podcasts, photos, infographics, and guest posts.

A blog on your own website is a great way to show your authority and knowledge of your field. As you build up more articles, it will also help you rank in search engines and drive organic traffic for various keywords. This doesn’t happen overnight, so it is important to keep consistently posting over time.

Creating and sharing interactive content like videos and infographics on social media is a great way to increase engagement. As people engage with you, they will be more likely to become customers or refer friends to you.

Paid Traffic

To complement your SEO and content marketing strategy, include paid traffic to reach targeted visitors. Paid traffic can be in the form of pay-per-click, such as Facebook ads, or pay-per-view, such as banner ads.

Facebook ads can be a great way to reach your target audience because you can filter who sees your ad by geography, demographics, and interests. With a properly designed ad and landing page, you can build your list and get more sales.

Paid ads can be costly if you don’t set them up appropriately, but they can also be very effective. The benefit is that you don’t have to rely solely on slow organic traffic and can turn on a stream of visitors whenever you need them.

Use our checklist to see the specific steps to improve your marketing.

Step 3: Optimize Your Marketing

Effective digital marketing should evolve over time as you determine what works best for your specific company. Using the same techniques for months or years at a time will generally not work as well as if you continually optimize.

Your marketing optimization should extend to other areas of your business operations, such as your customer experience and your reputation.

The key to this type of optimization is to use data to form your decisions instead of going off just your intuition. Using your own business data and tracking performance over time is an excellent way to improve your strategies going forward.

Reputation Management

Reputation management is essential to all businesses because it addresses the public perception of your company. If the perception of your company is that it is not reliable, slow, provides poor service, or anything else negative, it will be harder to make sales. Word gets around and people will simply not recommend you.

Managing your reputation starts with seeing what people are saying about you on the internet. Check your public review sites to see if people are rating you favorably. This changes constantly, so you’ll want to monitor your reputation over time.

For negative feedback, reach out to your customers to address the root cause. By doing so, hopefully you’ll be able to fix the problem and let your customer know you care about fixing it.

Promoting satisfied customers to leave positive feedback on Google and your public listings can dramatically improve your social proof. When people see other people enjoying your product, they will be more likely to sign up themselves.

Customer Experience

Tied to reputation management is monitoring and assessing your customer experience. Did they have a good time interacting with your company? Was it easy to get information and perform the transaction? Did they get the service they needed at minimal hassle?

A positive experience will keep your customers happy and that increases the chances of repeat business, referrals, and positive public reviews. Those three factors can dramatically increase sales organically.

The first step is to have a system for getting feedback about your customer experience. Regularly ask them questions and use surveys to automate the process.

After you determine your strengths and weaknesses, put together a plan to correct any flaws. On the flip side, see how you can play off your strengths and amplify any positive aspects to improve the customer experience.

Business Data & Analytics

A critical aspect to improving your business performance is to be able to measure and track data. This means identifying key areas of your business that can be measured and then tracking their performance over time.

From the simplest standpoint, this could be number of customers acquired per period or how many are lost, which is the churn rate. Other metrics can include the customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, customer lifetime value, and Net Promoter Score.

After you have a baseline with your key performance indicators, keep tracking them over time. Watching the trends for over multiple years can help to give additional insights into best times of the year or how to adjust at different points.

Continuous Improvement

Growing your business is not a one-time event. It is a continuous process that requires optimization, tracking, and effort to make changes. Without a dedication to make improvements, you’ll end up not being able to grow at the same rate.

For maximum growth potential, make improvement a part of your company culture. Get your employees engaged by getting their ideas on how to make things better. Solicit feedback from customers to see what is actually happening on the front lines.

Identify target areas for improvement on a regular basis and then come up with a plan to address them. Even with small adjustments, they can add up to have a large impact on your revenue and sales.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to grow your business, it starts by building out a base of online properties. This will help to improve your authority and increase your organic traffic to drive new sales. With a well-designed sales funnel, you’ll be able to convert cold visitors into paying customers over time.

Once you have an solid online presence, maximize your digital properties by employing a marketing strategy. This should include search engine optimization, content marketing, and using paid traffic.

These two steps will help to launch your sales, but getting to the next level year after year requires consistent improvement. Determine key goals, measure and track your data, and optimize your marketing.

Check out the full checklist of actionable steps to help grow your business through effective marketing.