Initial Ways to Ensure Your Business is Set Up for Growth
Setting up your business for growth is hard and demands considerable effort. However, there are a few fundamental steps you need to take to kick start the growth of your business.
First, I would recommend you outline your brand’s goals and values. You should ensure that the goals are specific, measurable, and time-bound. This will help you to quantify and track the growth of your business.
Once your goals are defined, I would suggest that you identify your target customers. This will help you to generate high-quality leads. It will also help you discover more relevant and compelling ways to position your products, thus increasing sales and generating more revenue.
Identifying your target audience is vital because as business coach Russell Ruffino told IB Times, it could set the entire landscape for your lead generation efforts:
“If you can’t attract the right clients into your business, you’re in fear,” says Ruffino. “It’s feast or famine.”
It’s not enough to target just any consumer. If you know the right consumers to target, you’ll have a better chance of attracting new leads
I would also advise that you create authentic, relevant, and original content to drive organic traffic.
These are some of the most basic yet important ways to kick start the growth of your business. Now, I’ll provide you with four actionable strategies to ensure that your business is set up for growth. Let’s get started.
1. Study your competitors
The next important step is to study your competitors and use your insights to improve your marketing and business strategies. Identify all the top brands in your industry as this will help you understand their marketing strategies. This gives you an opportunity to learn about their weaknesses and strengths and avoid the same mistakes.
A great way to do this is through social listening with tools like SentiOne. Using this tool, you can monitor discussions about your competitors online and listen in on unfiltered feedback about their services or products. This can give you some useful information about their strengths and weaknesses which you can leverage to stay ahead in the game.
Image Source – G2 Crowd
2. Use attractive visuals to promote your products or services
Promotions are a very important part of your business growth. No matter how good your products or services are, nobody will know about them if you don’t promote them. Set aside a separate budget for the promotions of your products and services.
I believe that videos and images are the most effective formats for promoting your products or services. Since they’re a visual format, they make a long-lasting impact in your audience’s minds.
So, start with an informative infographic which clearly explains your products or services. In addition, you can create an infographic of fun facts about your industry, how to use the product, how to find the right product, etc. Infographics are effective because they are attractive and informative at the same time. Plus, they’re more likely to attract a social media audience compared to links and text posts.
You can also use a video maker to create engaging content that talks about your products or services. You could create demo videos and tutorial videos aside from the usual promotional videos. This is a great way to ensure that people not only discover your product but learn about it and how it can benefit them. This could compel them to make a purchase.
For example, Subway has 23 million followers on Facebook. And they chose the platform to promote their new product. They created a simple but enticing image to promote their newly-launched product – the Ultimate Cheesy Garlic Bread.
Image Source – Facebook
3. Develop an effective content strategy for your website
Just setting up a website will not ensure the growth of your business. You need content for that website to not only entice visitors but also to gain visibility in the search engines. So for this, you will need a good content strategy. This content strategy largely depends on your business’ goals, objectives, and target audience.
The content will attract your target audience to visit your website. And it can also motivate them to make a purchase. So, I would recommend that you use convincing content for your website’s landing page and product description pages.
For product description pages, it’s a common practice to copy-paste the same description provided by the manufacturer. However, I would strongly suggest that you avoid doing this. Instead, invest some time into re-writing the same description in a more creative and compelling way.
Make it more customer-focused so that the customers can clearly understand what role the product will play in their life. Talk about how the product will benefit a customer rather than going on and on about the product’s features. You can then include the product specs from the manufacturer’s website.
Take a look at the following example from Beauty Bridge. Notice how creatively they’ve written the product description. It’s enticing and compelling, and it isn’t lengthy or fluffy. You can also see how they have listed the main features and benefits of the product.
Image Source – Beauty Bridge
Blog posts are also an essential part of your content strategy if you’re trying to achieve business growth. You could write buyer guides, reviews, product updates, and more. You can use tools like Squarespace powered by WordPress to set up your own blog. Otherwise, I would suggest you leverage host platforms like Medium to publish your content.
You can also leverage social media and post your content to attract the attention of your target audience. I personally believe that social media is the best channel to win the trust of your audience. However, I would like to give you a heads up on selecting social media platforms.
Make sure you select social platforms that can reflect your brand’s value. You also need to find out on which social platform your target audiences are spending the majority of their time on. Primarily, you need to consider these two points when selecting a social platform.
4. Leverage the power of influencer marketing
The way you present your brand to your target audience impacts the growth of your business. You need to communicate your brand’s values in a simple yet effective way. And for this, I think it’s best to collaborate with an influencer.
Influencers are experts at communicating your brand’s story in the form of stories that will resonate with your target audience. You can leverage the creativity and authenticity of an influencer to create relatable and compelling content, which can help you connect with your audience.
Now, you must be wondering how you can identify a relevant influencer.
I will give you two very useful tips that will help you easily identify influencers for your brand. You can leverage social media platforms to find suitable influencers for your business from a relevant industry.
Search for influencers by using relevant hashtags on social platforms like Instagram or Twitter. You can use hashtags like #blogger, #sponsored, #influencer, or #ad to find relevant influencers. You can also use forums related to your industry on platforms like Quora or Reddit to find a suitable influencer for your business.
For example, when you search for #influencer on Instagram, you are likely to come across many posts from influencers.
Now, if you like any of these posts, you can go directly to their profile to learn more about them. Based on their bio and content, you’ll be able to understand if the influencer will be suitable for you.
Image Source – Instagram
You can use these effective tactics to identify suitable influencers for your business. However, I want to remind you not to fall for the number of followers an influencer has. Often, businesses think the more followers an influencer has, the more influential they are. But that’s not always the case. You also need to evaluate your potential influencers based on their engagement rate, reach, and relevance.
5. Deliver excellent customer service with the right tools
It’s not easy to gain a satisfied and happy customer base. However, one of the most effective ways to keep your customers happy is by providing exceptional customer service. 64% of customers are known to contact customer service for some of the other reasons. This indicates that a huge chunk of your customers is likely to reach out to you for help as well.
You need to make sure that you don’t miss out on these requests, even inadvertently. Train your support team to respond to customer requests quickly and efficiently.
To make the process smoother and efficient, you can use help desk tools like Groove. You can integrate it with your email software so that your support reps can respond to requests quickly and easily. It can even help you create a knowledge base that has the answers to the most commonly asked questions by your customers so that you can provide support even when your team is unavailable.
Image Source – Groove
Last but not least, I would suggest that you leverage social media to deliver excellent customer service. In this regard, many brands underestimate the power of social media.
Social media bridges the communication gap between you and your customers. If you are present on social media, they can reach you at any time and from anywhere. And it enables you to immediately respond to your customers’ questions with the best possible solutions.
So, I cannot stress enough the importance of social media to provide excellent customer service. Preparing to deliver prompt customer service through various channels will ensure that your business is set up for growth.
For example, Starbucks has a very strong presence on social media and they are famous for their immediate responses. They provide the highest quality of customer service to their customers from their Twitter account. And they ensure to respond to these queries as quickly as possible. 
Image Source – Twitter
Final thoughts
You cannot sit on your hands and expect your business to grow by itself. You need to use strategies like collaborating with influencers or using social media platforms to deliver great customer service. You can also use tactics like promoting your products and planning a content strategy to ensure the growth of your business.
When you implement these strategies correctly, you will witness the growth of your business. Do you use any other effective strategies to ensure your business is set up for growth? Please share them in the comments below.
