- Know your customers
Understanding your customers and their needs is an important aspect of running a small business. Know the needs of the customers regarding the products and services and what will make them happy. With this knowledge, you can easily personalize your services or products and encourage your customers to buy more. Act on the feedback from the customers, respond to every question and need.
- Develop a growth strategy
As your business grows, you need to have a clear strategy that will guide you. Growth strategies are like a ladder where the risks increase as you go up. Focus on the strategies that apply to your current status and gradually revise your strategy as you move up. Each step in the growth brings in more opportunities and risks. Some strategies that you should employ include:
- Market penetration: For any business, the easiest thing to do is to simply sell the products to the existing customers. While the strategy may work mostly for the larger companies, small businesses need a concrete market penetration plan to reach newer horizons and make themselves known. Find new markets and better methods of selling products if you are to make new customers.
- Market development: Devise a way tosell more of your products and services to a closer market. Start by offering your product or service to the customers in the nearby city or town and move ahead. Market development is the main strategy that will enable your business to grow.
- Develop alternative channels: The growth strategy of small businesses must entail developing multiple channels to reach customers and sell products. You can think of methods such as online channels. For instance, there is an increase in e-commerce platforms and customers seem to love it. Embracing e-commerce means that your customers can access your products everywhere and at any time.
- Focus on product development: The right strategy entails developing the right products to sell to the existing customers and the new ones. While the existing customers are good for the company, you need to look for new ones and address their needs appropriately. This means developing new products that will fit into the new customers. While doing so, you need to know that selling a product to a new customer is much riskier than doing so to the existing ones.
- Develop new products for new customers: New customers come with new demands. Some of the demands may include the need for new products. New products can give your small business the impetus that it requires to conquer the market. If unfulfilled, customers will choose a competitor and leave you struggling.
- Use social media:Social media is a powerful tool that can transform your business for the better. With the right social media strategy, you can promote your product and gain valuable insight through “social listening.” Through social media platforms, you can reach new customers, understand their behavior and see the trends that appeal to your target customers. Therefore, use social media to build your business profile and attract new customers.
