Whether you are the head of a small, family-run business with an emphasis on a genuinely strong provision of personal customer service, or else you manage a larger company, expansion will naturally and entirely understandably always be at the forefront of your mind.
With that being said, here are five tried, tested, and proven-to-be effective methods of growing your business. Enjoy!
1. Increase Your Levels of Customer Retention
Obviously, part and parcel of business expansion attracting new customers or clients to your company and ensuring your products and the services you offer appeal to the widest and most inclusive group possible.
In addition, you also want to ensure, as much as you can, of course, that once a satisfied customer invests in one or more items you sell, they will then go on to make your business their first proverbial port of call for the same thing and similar in the future.
There are numerous methods of endeavoring to boost your levels of customer satisfaction and subsequently, your levels of customer retention, including ensuring that your products are consistently the very best you can possibly produce and standards never slip across your supply chain, as well as always exceeding expectations.
Other fundamental ways to endeavor to increase your levels of customer retention include keeping in touch with your customers after the transaction has been completed and making sure each and every one of your employees represent the brand and the brand values accurately and consistently.
One way of doing this is by sending business greeting cards to clients. This is a powerful way to build and nurture strong connections, ensuring continued collaboration and mutual success.
2. Focus on Eco-Friendly Practices
In the past, you would have been hard-pressed to find a business that actively sought to be as environmentally friendly, across their entire supply chain, as they possibly could be, and if you did, they would be exceedingly few and far between.
Now, however, and frankly, not before time, more and more people, both those involved in the world of business as well as the general public, are fully aware of the absolute necessity of ethical business practice in terms of taking care of the environment. Customers and clients are far more likely to want to deal with your company over an industry competitor if you demonstrate an eco-friendly attitude and more importantly, put it into practice.
Fortunately, there is a wide plethora of ways to transform your business into an environmentally friendly one, including the following:
- Only use sustainable and biodegradable packaging
- Offer benefits and cost reductions for public transport
- Look into remote and hybrid working options for relevant employees
- Reduce, Reuse & Recycle
- Use sustainable products wherever and whenever possible
- Upgrade to more energy-efficient equipment and technologies
3. Launch New & Exciting Advertising Strategies
Another incredibly important component of growing and expanding a business, regardless of the industry in which the company is based, is to turn your attention to drastically improving your advertising and marketing strategies and ‘branching out’.
From encouraging members of your advertising and marketing team to earn a certification in Agile online or in-person to vastly improve their network of resources when it comes to designing new advertising campaigns, to analyzing your industry competitors to take note of their own effective campaigns, there are many ways to improve.
These days, utilizing the official social media platforms of a company is not only advisable when wanting to both reach target audiences and expand reach, but has quickly become almost mandatory.
It is for this reason that more and more businesses are turning towards outsourcing parts, or indeed the entirety of, their social media management, which affords companies access to innovative software programs and packages and serves to make such platforms a viable tool for increasing both sales and brand awareness.
4. Implement a Customer Rewards Program
Loyalty and reward cards for places such as superstores have been around for a number of years, but only recently have companies dealing in everything from business-to-business trading to cakes and sweet treats jumped on board.
The essential purpose of a customer rewards and loyalty program is to turn one-off customers into regular and brand-loyal consumers, who not only make your business their first choice, but also encourage others to do the same.
The primary benefit of a customer rewards program, therefore, is in the context of customer retention as understandably, if you yourself were offered money off, or a deal on a larger purchase, you are much more likely to shop there than with another company.
A prolific and established American advisory firm, Bain & Company, conducted a recent study that found that increasing the level of customer retention in a company by just five percent boosted profits by at least a quarter and sometimes up to over three quarters.
Aside from a heightened level of customer retention, the other primary advantages of launching such a program include the following:
- The ability to analyze purchasing trends and consumer data
- Improved levels of communication with customers and clients
- Higher value in the online cart
- A reduction in the more unprofitable customers
5. Create a Detailed Business Map
The fifth and final tried and tested method of expanding and growing a company is to take a thorough and wholly objective look at the entire business, in terms of where you have come from, the current situation and where you hope to be.
As with a ‘five-year plan’ when looking at home renovation, for example, your detailed business map should be broken down into steps, so as to ascertain what can be done to achieve your goals and conversely, what mistakes were made previously and why.
Business mapping is widely considered to be a foolproof and practical approach and always supersedes the monotony of meeting upon meeting, all of which never seem to ever amount to anything concrete or even remotely helpful.
Concentrate, too, within your business map, on how you intend to motivate and engage your employees, whether or not additional training options in specific sectors are possible and most importantly of all, your core brand values and beliefs.
