Business owners don’t want to limit their success; they usually dream of being the biggest in their industry. But getting to that point isn’t easy. Scaling your business may require you to adopt strategies and implement technologies that differ from what has made you successful in the first place. The good news? It isn’t rocket science. Small businesses that are successful in increasing their size quickly employ many of the same techniques. Read on to learn about some of the most common.
Digitally Transform Your Processes
The first step in scaling your business is to expand your capacity to meet the needs of your customers. This often requires you to increase the size of your workforce. However, the decision to hire dozens of new employees doesn’t come without a lofty price tag. While it’s true that growing your business will involve a number of large investments, there are more affordable alternatives that can help you achieve the same goal.
For example, many small businesses are deciding to digitally transform many of the processes they’re already doing. Digital transformations come in many forms, but one of the most popular is software that lets you automate business processes. The more parts of your business you’re able to automate, the less you’ll need to employ additional workers to perform the same work.
Improve Customer Service
When your business serves the needs of hundreds, if not thousands of customers, it can be difficult to have a human representative at the ready every moment of the day. However, customers still like to have their voices heard and will appreciate any effort your business makes in helping them resolve their questions or complaints.
Rather than trying to appease them with a one-size-fits-all FAQs page, your company should feature a contact number or email that allows your customers to get ahold of you. You can also reduce the bandwidth needed to deal with customer inquiries by employing the use of chatbots who can work around the clock and be programmed to answer common questions your customers may have.
Utilize a Customer Management System (CRM)
Businesses, large and small, generate a lot of data. As you look to grow your business, it’ll become even more important that you’re able to keep track of this data and use it toward your advantage.
If you find that your company heavily relies on physical documents, make sure that you have systems in place to transform these documents into digital formats. This way, you’ll have access to the information needed at every step of the sales funnel, so you can turn more prospects into customers and better serve the needs of the customers you have already. This can be done effectively through an all-encompassing CRM system that will help you deal with the bandwidth of data your business generates.
Maximize Your Social Media Presence
In order to have data to deal with in the first place, you’ll need to have customers—and in order to have customers, you’ll need people to know about who you are and what you do. Enter: social media marketing. You probably know that social media is popular, but do you know how popular? As of 2019, 45 percent of the total population in the world has a social media profile (that’s 3.48 billion people). That makes social media a huge opportunity for your business to extend its reach.
Unlike older forms of advertising, like television or radio station commercials, you won’t have to pay extra to have an ad aired to demographics that would be unlikely to become customers. That’s because social media marketing campaigns allow you to target only those that you qualify as your target market, meaning cheaper and more effective advertising. By increasing your exposure to more potential customers, your business is sure to grow.
Monitor Your Market for New Opportunities
It may come as a shock, but 70 percent of small businesses fail within their 10th year of business. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of the most common is that they fail to capitalize on new trends in the market. As the years go by, customer needs change. It’s important to not only keep pace with what your competitors are doing, but to also identify new consumer needs before them—then, you can be the first to serve those needs. This is a marketing strategy called first-mover advantage. In other words, your business gains the ability to rapidly seize market share of a particular segment by being the first to serve them. Despite their size, small businesses are capable of this, and through successful execution, can enjoy huge profit margins and monopoly-like status.
