How To Grow Your Business

Research the market – Who is your target market? What are their needs? How can your business meet these needs?  Research your competitors.  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  As a customer, would you choose them?  Why?  Why not? 

A sales funnel is weird marketing jargon for the journey potential customers go through on their way to a purchase. There are several steps to a sales funnel, generally known as the top, middle, and bottom, though these steps may vary depending on your business service/products. 

New customers are great but you also need to keep your existing / past customers happy.  So depending on your business you will have existing customers or past customers.  Eg. If you’re a House Sales Agent, your past customers are just as important as any new customers as they are your very own referral program! Or if you are a hairdresser, you’re existing clients are your referral program. So how can you bring in new customers and obtain referrals from your existing/past customers?   A few ideas to get you started…  

1. Use a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system. CRM systems help your business manage relationships with existing and potential customers. They help maintain your customer information and identify sales opportunities. One of the biggest benefits is that the data gets stored in one place, so you and your employees can access it.
2. Create a customer loyalty program - Reward existing customers for supporting your business. Depending again on your type of business, this can be anything from a referral program to discounts on repeat services.
3. Social media campaigns – we know, we know! This can be a turnoff for some business owners who just don’t know where to start.  There are a lot of services out there to assist you, with even the social media platforms themselves having some helpful how-to hints. 

Get yourself out there!  This can be a great personal growth journey as well as a wonderful business growth journey.  Start local…. Things like Chamber of Commerce events, other local business or even sporting events.  So many options!  You could even put up a booth to promote your business (choosing the most appropriate event to promote your business of course… for instance a booth for your home-made leather belts business may not be well received at a ‘save the animals’ carnival in the park)

Again, depending on your business type, expanding your market can be done on so many different levels and in varied ways.  A few ideas might be:  Franchising - Export opportunities - Global platforms – even consider your suppliers… could you BECOME one of your suppliers?  A fun part of cost accounting is to explore this as an opportunity.  Not sure how?  If you want to know more, or want to see just how cost accounting might assist your business, get in touch and have a chat to one of our wonderful Accountants. 

While there are a variety of strategies you can use to grow your business, it’s important you measure what’s working. If you create a customer loyalty program or launch social media campaigns and are finding that they are just not generating enough traffic or enquiries, you may need to change your strategy and revisit your Business Plan to ensure your forecasts are realistic and accurate.