2017 is set to be one of the biggest years of economic change the world has seen in decades. However among the uncertainty, as a small business owner, you don’t have time to sit it out.
You need to grow. You need to keep the phone ringing and the work coming in. You need to find a proven and effective way to grow your small business.
To help you, and the millions of small businesses across the globe build in 2017, below you’ll find 3 of the most effective, and proven methods to grow your business.
These are methods that have been proven through depression and boom, and that have their roots in the core of business, not just the latest fad.
1. Get in front of more traffic
Since the early days of the industrial revolution, the most important part of any business is to get in front of traffic. Back then that meant being on the main street of town where everyone travelled through.
During the 1950’s that turned into having your business located in malls and strip malls. In the 1980’s it meant taking a big ad in the Yellow Pages. And since 1990 when the World Wide Web was created, you need to be online.
In 2017 the world’s #1 traffic source for businesses is Google, followed closely by social media sites.
The fundamental difference between the two, however, is the intent. You see, when people turn to Google and find your business, it’s because they are looking for you, just like in the good ole’ days of the Yellow Pages. However, unlike the Yellow Pages where you had to pay to get listed, you can get your website visible in Google through a practice called Google SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
2. Increase your average lifetime customer value
Mathematically speaking, every single person who walks past your business or who ever contacts you has a particular value to your bottom line, and by increasing that value incrementally in several areas’s you can exponentially explode your business.
For example – if 100 people hit your website, and only five people contact you, then by improving your site and increasing that to 10, you’ve actually doubled your sales if all else remains equal.
Other ways to increase lifetime value include:
- Boosting total traffic
- Increasing conversion to leads
- Increasing conversion to sales
- Increasing purchase frequency
- Increasing investment value.
3. Reactivate old customers
Research has shown that its 7-13 times easier to keep or sell to, an existing customer than it is to sell to a new client.
So while all your competitors are spending a small fortune trying to attract new customers, how about looking at your past to generate some new revenue?
There are many reasons why people stop buy. Perhaps they moved, maybe they got busy, and sometimes they simply just forgot to come back.
By just getting in touch it’s very easy to re-open the relationship, offer a promotion, and get them back through the door.
If you follow these simple steps and implement them all in your business, you’ll find that you can ignore the negativity in the media, and instead focus on the best year your business has ever had.
A good article with some interesting points.