10 Strategies for Quickly Expanding Your Business

Unlike 9-5 secured jobs, building a business is a rollercoaster ride. There will be both highs and lows. There will be times when you feel like this is your cup of tea, and there will be times, you’ll think entrepreneurship is so out of your league.

Either way, building a business is all about never giving up. And if you’ve got that in you, we believe, success is your only destiny.

With that said, it’s easier to say than to actually execute. So, here we’ve compiled some super effective tips to help your new or existing business get a headstart, fetching you more promising highs than disappointing lows.

#1. Research the Market & Competition

Perhaps, the very first tool that you require to scale up your business is knowledge. You ought to know:

• What’s going around in the market?
• What are the needs and requirements of your audiences?
• And who’s your competition?

With this information at your desk, you can plan a more effective marketing and business expansion strategy.

If you wish to proceed with the process manually, we recommend researching the client base first. It doesn’t matter whether you do have a clientele as of yet or not. Determine your niche, identify your competitors in the market, and take a step further to analyze their clientele. That’s your target audience! You also conjure up the demographics of an ideal client on your own.

Next, proceed with market segmentation and divide your potential clientele into different groups. These groups should be based on their reasons to reach out to you, i.e., buy your product or avail your service. It will bring you clarity on your production needs and will also give you a lead on the X-factor of your business.

*X-factor refers to the unique element of your business that helps you stand out from others.

Lastly, study your competitor’s approach towards meeting the production needs. It will help you devise a strategic and effective approach in one go. Some reliable sources to acquire your competitor’s marketing approach are SimilarWeb, Adbeat, SurveyMonkey, and Sprout social.

#2. Build a Sales Funnel

Fundamentally, a sales funnel is the complete journey of your customer. It begins at the top with discovering your brand or platform and involves all stages until there’s a conversion, i.e., they become your customers.

For a successful and expanding business, we recommend thinking and planning out a thorough sales funnel wherein you should track each stage of your customer’s purchase journey. Add elements that will motivate the purchase in each stage. For example, a dentist could begin by offering a free cleaning service and motivate the client to revisit by offering a discount coupon for the next visit. Once the trust develops, they will come back to the same dentist for their major dental concerns and expenditures.

#3. Build an MVP

No man’s an island, and no business is an established million-dollar firm since the first day. And so, MVPs are immensely important.

MVP stands for a minimum viable product. It is the very first version of a product, which addresses the customer’s needs adequately and leaves room for growth on your end. Simply put, it allows a business to identify what more could help them make more profits without humongous initial investments.

And so, if you build an MVP, it can help your business expand phenomenally. Introduce your first-generation product in the market, observe the problems that arise. And then address them by investing more resources in your product until it is the only perfect solution in the market.

#4. Manage Your Clientele Smartly

Another great way of quickly expanding your business is to reduce the unnecessary wastage of time and human resources. On that note, in any business, customer management demands the most time. If you begin with the process manually, it could cost you loads of time, attention, and focus.

Instead, it’s best to make use of several cloud-based CMS (Customer Management Systems) OR CRM (Customer Relation Management) available these days. We recommend Zoho, Fresh Sales, and Zendesk Sell. As for accounting, you can make use of QuickBooks and InfusionSoft.

#5. Expand Your Reach Socially

In this age of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, it’s difficult to maximize your reach without having a social presence. On average, people spend about 2-3 hours on social media. As a business, you can use this opportunity to reach out to your potential customers.

First, establish your social channels, especially on the following three platforms:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn

Once you have done so, begin sharing content that could bring you, customers. One effective way of increasing your reach and expanding your business quickly on social media is to reach out to influencers. And we particularly recommend you to find Instagram influencers.

According to a survey, 59 percent of brands today keep a separate budget for content marketing, and 79 percent of this budget goes to influencer marketing. Why should you run behind?

#6. Seek Strategic Partnerships

If you are a developing, young startup, then it’s best to pair up with other struggling or established businesses of the same domain. Two innovative teams can yield better results than one.

Naturally, it’s best to partner with a brand that’s already established and has better recognition in the market than yours. It could lead to better business opportunities, escalated growth, and of course, more profits!

#7. Host Giveaways

Giveaways are an immensely popular way of increasing your brand awareness. Everybody wants to get hold of discounts and freebies, and so giveaways can increase your business awareness within days. According to a survey, giveaways have a conversion rate of about 34 percent as compared to other forms of content.

So, when building your social media presence, we recommend hosting at least one to two giveaways every month. It will motivate your current followers to bring their friends, family, and acquaintances to your platform.

All you’ve to do is think of a highly specific objective of the giveaway. It could be any one of the following:

• Increasing Follower Count
• Building an Email List
• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Driving Engagement
• Promote Newer Products/Services

Once you’ve decided your goal, pick a social media platform wherein you expect to receive the greatest engagement. You can direct the rest of your audience on the same platform. We recommend increasing traffic on a single platform or on a single platform as it makes management of the giveaway easier and generates game-changing results. Also, if you’re running ads for the giveaway, it reduces your expense on the campaign.

Note that the more specific and strategic your giveaway is, the better results it will yield. For example, if you are an electric scooters selling company, then you can offer a discount on one of your trending and best-selling scooter as the giveaway prize.

To maximize your reach, set up an extensive timeline and broaden your horizon to several countries. Say you’re based in Europe, wherein the usage of green transport and electric scooters is extensive, you can target the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, and the rest of such countries to make the most of your virtual campaign.

#8. Host Events

Similar to virtual presence, it’s also important to build a physical presence in the industry. Host corporate events and invite other businesses in the industry to showcase and share your progress while developing friendly relations with them. It would open gates to newer business opportunities.

Similarly, you can offer public welfare or customer-centric events for brand awareness purposes. Invite your existing customers to the event and encourage them to bring their connections.

In case you’re wondering about where you’ll get access to your existing client base. Well, you’ll have to work for this a bit. Use your social channels to stay in touch with existing customers and stay involved with them. Similarly, your CRM will help you acquire this data.

But the most effective means of reaching out to your audience is by building an email list. It’ll help you keep track of the client base that actively takes an interest in your company and its products. Plus, emails also serve as an important part of the sales funnel.

#9. Offer Customer Loyalty Programs

If you know how things work in the digital space, you might as well have a good idea about the retention rate. The better you retain your audience, the more successful you are.

The same rule applies to businesses. The greater your customer retention rate, the greater your reliability and the greater your credibility.

Offering customer loyalty programs, i.e., discounts and offers to your existing customers, will help you excel a great deal. Satisfied customers will not only come back to you for their needs but will also recommend your brand to their friends and family.

#10. Consider a Brand Relaunch

Brand relaunch can offer quick expansion to dying or static businesses. Recently, Eka Software relaunched its brand under a revised identity and generated a 233 percent traffic increase to their website in a single day.

The company used employee advocacy on LinkedIn but also effectively used paid and organic marketing to achieve this. All in all, the results were overwhelming and refreshing for the brand!

Final Thoughts

Summing up, quick expansion of your business is all about merging in smart approaches with patience. You’re implementing shortcuts but even with that, you should expect a turnaround time of a month or two at the very least. Things may seem to be taking time but you’ve to stay put and never give up!

About the Author!

Shawn Mack is a content writer who offers ghostwriting, copy-writing, and blogging services.His educational background in business and technical field has given him a broad base from which to approach many topics. He is also fond of writing interesting articles on technology & digital marketing related topics.