How to grow a business online seems to be the common question of businesses of all sizes.
Whether you just have an idea to start a business, or you are a small business thriving to exist. Or you are a giant in your industry, but who wants to settle, right? Everyone wants to grow.
The legendary Jay Abraham always say; there are only 3 ways to grow any business,
- First, by increasing the number of clients, formula famous
- Next, you increase the transaction value at the point of sale
- Lastly, you increase the frequency of which clients come back to do business with you.
Now, how that translates online. The truth is, there are just dozens if not hundreds of ways to increase each of the 3.
Let’s dive in deeper and see how you can increase each so that you will see your business grow exponentially.
Now this formula makes it all sound really simple, but each step is rather complex. In this post, I am going to show you some easy and simple ways, you can successfully apply each one. What is rather cool here, is that in this new economy, you can leverage digital marketing, skillfully, to do all of it seamlessly.
Here is how…
Step 1: Increase the number of clients, get more new prospects into paying customers
There are numerous ways you can around if you want to increase the number of new customers. I will only list few as there are dozens if not hundreds of ways you can find new customers.
There is advertising, which is considered a quicker way to get new clients. And there is the slow but long-lasting effect source of new customers acquisition, which is referred to as organic.
- Paid Advertising: You run some Pay per Click or Pay per view campaigns on search engines, social media, or buy an ad’s placement on popular sites/blogs.
This is quicker because you may start seen the result immediately. But the flow stops as soon as you stop your campaign.
Look at it this way, would you grow all the vegetables and rice you eat in your back yard, or would you buy all of that in the supermarket? For most of us, it is the later.
Produce content: We live in an era where customers are more educated than ever before. But it is also worth pointing out how much information every single person is bombarded with. Therefore, you must produce great quality content in order to win over your customers. Remember you are not in this race all alone by yourself.
But what kind of content? Great question. You may start with the list below:
- Blog articles: If you are a good writer, you are not only going to enjoy writing, but your articles could also bring you a lot of traffic, which you could convert into buying customers. Yeay!
If you don’t like to write or are not a good writer, you may find other people do it for you. Even if you are a good one, I will still recommend you find decent bloggers, plus you to publish on your blog from time to time. And you do the same for them. This will expand your panel of sources of readership.
Share these articles on social media, make it worth sharing and shareable, thus your reader will be able to share them as well.
- Videos Content: You may have heard this one, video marketing is the future of marketing. According to RenderForest, by 2019, 80% of global Internet consumption will be video content. Just like blog articles, share them in as many places as possible, starting by video sharing sites like Youtube, etc. Have your link in the description on youtube. Embed the video on your site, or share it directly on social media.
- Photography: This is even more important if you are selling physical products. Take great images of your products features, unicity, in use. Your images should convey simplicity of use, for example, a happy and satisfied user, share these images on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, for example.
- An Opt-in on your site: For this, I will recommend MailChimp which offers all the features a small business will need. Give them a real reason to opt-in, not just “signup for our newsletter”, because that doesn’t work anymore.
Before we dive into the next step, there is something critical I want you to know and take into consideration. That is to define your customer profile before you do any of the above.
Who is your ideal customer, where does he/she live, how old is he, what is his goals and values, what is his current challenges, where does he go for information, what are the possible objections he may bring up?
Once you have this clearly laid out, then you have a higher probability of conveying the right message to the right person, otherwise your ideal customer.
Now, let assume you’ve started to enroll new customers, although I suggest you put up a strategy in place, that connects all steps once step 1 one is achieved.
What I mean is, you shouldn’t wait until you have new customers before you start figuring out how you increase the average transaction. Now, let’s talk about that…
More on lead generation here
Step 2: Increase the average transaction, get each client to buy more at each purchase
Once you have a stream of prospects getting converted in paying customers, you are already well on your way to success. To make more money next, you will need to find a way to get more money out of these new customers.
You can do it in various ways. First, you could increase the price by increasing the value of your product or service, by either putting up a bundle or add more features or add-ons to the product or service they are originally buying from you.
However you decide to go about it, I suggest you create something of more value in order to ask for a higher price.
Other ways to do this is by upselling and cross-selling.
Upselling is offering a product or service of a higher price than the customer wants to buy. For example, a customer wants to buy a laptop that has 4 GB RAM, 500 GB Hard-drive; you could suggest one that comes with 8GB RAM and 1TB of Hard-drive with only £100 difference.
If the customer buys what you recommended, that’s an upsell, and you just made £100 more and what you were originally going to get from that particular customer.
I am sure you’ve experienced something similar.
Cross-sell… Amazon is a champion in this. When did you look at a product where Amazon did not tell you: “Frequently bought together”? well, fashion online stores do that as well, and I suggest you do start doing the same thing.
Step 3: Increase the frequency that the average customer buys from you
By the time you get to this stage, you may have achieved, a high rate of lead generation, and hopefully, high conversion as well. You will also high customer retention, and you will be increasing the size of each transaction.
The third step is ensuring that you get your customers to buy from you more frequently than they usually might.
How do you do that? You have to give them a good solid reason to come back. R\emember you are not the only person doing what you are doing, or selling what your selling.
Nonetheless, it is not so complicated to that. Here are a few ways…
Offer some maintenance, or other similar incentives, even if that means you give them a discounted rate if they commit to a lengthier contract with you.
Offer a monthly or yearly membership where you can offer them some valuable content, education, mastermind. Build a community, feed them great information, tools, and resources that will help them grow. Everyone will be happy to pay you to be part of such a great community.
And of course, it goes without saying you need to keep your customers happy. Nurture and treat them well, if you build a loyal fan base, you have ambassadors for life.
By now, you understand how crucial it is to have a strategy, from the beginning, one that makes this whole process run seamlessly.
The process of growing any business is really simple in theory, but you have to ensure that you follow each step accurately. Once you’ve mastered the process, then it will be time to rinse and repeat!
