13 Tips and Tactics to Propel Your Small Business Growth
What does it mean to “grow your business”? Is it the same thing as increasing profits, the bottom line? Or does it mean increasing sales, the top line? It’s important to understand the relationship between these two approaches to business “growth” and how they fit into the evolution of your business. For example, if you’re approaching the day when you want to sell your business, improving your bottom line via efficiencies and other strategies might be the best way of “growing” your business. I say this because a concerted effort to increase overall sales in the short term could make you look less profitable to potential buyers and your selling price would be pushed down. However, if you’re younger and eager to see your piece of the pie grow substantially, you might be totally comfortable living with a dip in profits while you develop new territories and/or new products. With those points in mind, you’ll be better able to consider the following 13 tips and tactics as you plot out the ideal game plan for the growth of your small business. Near-term small business growth tips: Analyze the performance of your sales team. If they aren’t meeting your expectations, or they are showing signs of ambivalence, shake things up. Bring in new blood working on commission only. Write down everything you do and categorize these tasks. Find tasks that you can delegate to others or outsource. Re-examine purchasing and see if you can improve the deals you are getting from your vendors. Improve your accounts receivable ratio. Look at repetitive tasks you and your team perform. Do they all have procedures written for them? See how they can be accomplished more quickly and be sure you have procedures that capture the most productive ways of accomplishing repetitive tasks. Be sure that you allow these procedures to be improved on over time; don’t fall victim to the “We’ve never done it like that here” mentality. Audit your small business listings on the Internet. See if there are any places where you should be listed but aren’t. Be sure listings are accurate. Check your Google reviews. Encourage customers to review your business on Google. Launch a customer referral program. Reward existing customers for bringing you new business. Launch a customer loyalty program. Medium-term small business growth tips: Research your local competitors and similar businesses in other areas. Find out if any owners may be approaching retirement age or there are other reasons they might want to sell. Talk to mutual suppliers to see if any might be in financial trouble. Survey your customers and find out what other products or services they need. See if there are any of your suppliers that might be ripe for a buyout. Long-term small business growth tips: Talk to city and regional planners to discover the areas that are slated for new development. Should you prepare to expand to any of these areas, or perhaps relocate to a bigger facility? Talk to real estate professionals to find neighborhoods in transition. For example, if a low-income area is beginning to be “gentrified,” it often means that young families with children will soon become the prominent demographic. Also, check out aging neighborhoods, they can “turn over” to younger, affluent families. As you can see, some of these points...
read moreHow to bring your product or service to market
Books and entire business school masters classes have been built on the topic of how to bring your product to market, but my purpose here is a little different. These extensive courses and lengthy books start from the point of having an idea, dealing with patents, getting it manufactured, and all the other steps before it gets into the hands of consumers. I’m going to assume that you already have your product or service and just need to get it out there in the marketplace. Even this modest slice of getting a product to market can be a huge subject, so my goal is to give you a big enough picture and sufficient directions to get you started in what will be the most productive and shortest route to commercial success. Your first step is to put your product or service in the right “bucket.” In other words, categorize it properly. The categories I’m going to focus on here are: Digital products, Boutique products, and Mass market, high volume, products. There are some strategies when marketing products in these general categories that cross over and I’ll point those out as we go along and mention a few more at the end. Taking digital products to market There are many kinds of digital products. Some are simple, like e-books. Others can be more involved, such as membership websites and online courses. Here are marketing approaches you can take, as well as some specific strategies, tactics, and tools you can use. Build community. I’m using this phrase in both a general and specific sense. You could consider your email list your community. However, many successful digital products have an actual online community supporting them. Facebook and the WarriorForum would be prime examples. Building a community could be accomplished through getting people to “like” your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter or other social media platforms, opt-in your email list, or join your forum. Non-digital products can also make good use of many of these community-building strategies. Display advertising. I’m using the term “display advertising” to differentiate it from search engine marketing. If you subscribe to any digital newsletters that have a big circulation, you have probably seen third party advertisements included in the newsletter. A company like Launchbit specializes in connecting advertisers to newsletters that would be a good fit. Search engine marketing. There are two branches here: organic search and paid search advertising. Organic search strategies are simply website tactics that push your website(s) to the top of search results pages. Important concepts to understand to be successful at organic SEM include search engine optimization (SEO), landing pages, website structure, and microsites. Even if you don’t sell digital products, you want your website to rank highly, therefore you must understand and implement SEO. The paid side of search engine marketing is characterized by programs such as Google’s AdWords, where you bid on keywords. If you have a winning bid, your small text ad is featured prominently at the top of the search results page. Retargeting is another important strategy. This is when someone shows interest in your product or service via sites visited on the Internet and then an ad for your product or service pops up on other sites that the prospect visits. The prospect who showed interest in...
read more4 Times You Should Drop a Product or Service
Simon and Garfunkle’s song “Kodachrome” gets played on the radio every day, but the iconic film itself is now a just a footnote in history. The last 35mm cartridge of the film rolled off the Kodak assembly line in 2009. As you can probably imagine, dropping the production of Kodachrome in the age of digital cameras was a fairly easy – and obvious – decision to make at Kodak. Yet, the Kodachrome story captures a Kodak moment that teaches a good lesson for all small business owners: Move quickly when markets change and products cease to contribute to the bottom line. I say this because within three years of Kodachrome’s demise, Kodak itself declared bankruptcy. With that lesson as a backdrop, let’s examine four cases when you should drop a product or service from your offerings. 1. When the product is losing money. Although this seems obvious, the situation needs to be carefully considered. The entire cost of a product includes the cost of goods sold (the raw materials or inventory), the variable direct costs incurred producing and selling it (for example the salaries of account executives or product managers) and the indirect costs, such as the product’s portion of rent, utilities, insurance, and other costs of doing business. If you add all of these up and they amount to more than you’re making via selling the product or service, you’re losing money, on paper at least. However, two things need to be considered: Are you correctly assigning variable direct costs and indirect costs? Will indirect costs actually decrease if you drop the product? I’ve seen business owners fool themselves about the profitability of business ventures or products because they haven’t properly assigned costs. They may have a “pet” area of their business that they want to believe is more profitable than it is, so they dump costs on a part of the business that they aren’t so fond of. This error always comes home to roost! Secondly, if indirect costs will not go down, then those costs will end up being assigned to the surviving products or services, lowering their profitability or pushing them into loss territory. This could cause a “death spiral” for your company. 2. When opportunity costs are significant. This point is related to many of the other points listed here. For example, in the cost scenario outlined above, you could avoid the “death spiral” if you had a new product or service that would take on the indirect costs and show a real profit. In other words, if a product isn’t performing well, on some level it’s keeping you from pursuing other opportunities. Lost opportunities are a real cost, as the demise of Kodak proved. Frankly, in the very first days of digital cameras, Kodak made a good product. However, other makers were soon leaving Kodak in their dust. Had Kodak been able to focus on and develop its digital cameras more quickly, perhaps it would be an industry leader today. Did continuing to allocate resources to film products weaken Kodak’s position? I think the answer has to be yes. As a small business owner, you must always be weighing the potential of new products and services against your legacy products and services. 3. When a segment of your business becomes a distraction. I’ve...
read moreWhat We Can Learn from Emoticons and Use in Our Marketing, Management
The popularity of emoticons and emojis is no accident. Further, Facebook’s desire to cash in on emojis is no accident either. All of these phenomena are testimony to the fact that we are hard-wired to be emotional beings. Let me ask you a simple question: Have you ever had an argument in your life and afterward said something like, “I can’t even remember what we were fighting about”? Nonetheless, you were able to remember the feelings of anger and frustration, right? Or how about this: Have you ever said “I’m sorry” to someone to have your apology rejected because the other person didn’t like the tone of your voice? When this happens the emotion expressed by the tone of your voice far outweighs the “logical” message of the words you have spoken as they would be defined in the dictionary. If you are selling something that can be generally categorized as a commodity, one of the best ways to separate yourself from other sellers is by making an emotional connection to your customers. I made this point with regards to writing a tagline for your business in a recent post, but I want you to see the importance of playing to emotions in the bigger picture. I’ve seen the basic emotions broken down into five groups: Fear, Disgust, Sadness, Anger, and Enjoyment. Emoticons, however, break down much further. Here are just a few of the names, emotions, feelings, and gestures of some of the most-used emoticons (you’ve probably sent or received these many times yourself): laughing very happy frown sad angry crying surprise kissing winking tongue sticking out skeptical indecision embarrassed blushing devilish cool bored These, and more, all symbolize emotions and feelings that you can leverage in your business – if you think creatively. Let me give you some examples. I bet that there’s a furniture, mattress outlet, or car dealership in your area that does or did crazy things in its television commercials. In a memorable episode of Seinfeld, they spoof these kinds of promotions with a character who does TV commercials for a local electronics store who is crowned like a king and spouts, “Nobody beats the Wiz!” That kind of over-the-top advertising will always generate some kind of emotion. The writers on Seinfeld knew that it would make people laugh (enjoyment) but I’m sure it stirs disgust or anger in others. But, I think few would be emotionally neutral and everybody remembers these kinds of commercials. Have you eaten at a Dick’s Last Resort? They make a living by insulting their customers. Don’t go, by the way, if you have a thin skin. But your experience at Dick’s Last Resort is tame compared to the verbal drubbing and cursing out you’ll get at The Weiners Circle in Chicago. Of course, many local, family-owned diners have lasted for generations for exactly the opposite reason; when you eat there you are relaxed and welcomed like you’re part of the family – you’ll hear nothing but a kind word. You can add an emotional element to every facet of your business. It can be in the atmosphere you set, the marketing materials you produce, the events you hold, the way you answer the phone, the relationship you have with your employees, and every other little slice of your...
read moreEasy alternatives to a crystal ball (that actually work)
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” famously said Steve Jobs. In some cases, that is certainly true, and when it’s true, the results can be phenomenally profitable, as Jobs proved several times over. However, not every product you offer, or every service you provide can be totally new and unknown to the buying public. Further, lots of times people, in fact, do know what they want and are willing to tell you about it. Companies have made themselves very profitable over the last several decades by conducting market research. Yet as we know, most small business owners don’t have the money to conduct extensive market research. Fortunately, the Internet has somewhat democratized research. With a few of the tools and a couple of the tactics described here, you can throw your ideas against the wall and begin to get a decent understanding of which will stick. Conduct polls or surveys One of the best ways of finding out something is to ask and that’s what polls and surveys are all about. You simply ask questions to gauge what your customers are thinking about with regards to your products or services. If you run a house cleaning service, you might want to know if your clients would be interested in “all natural” products even if it cost a little more. A pet shop owner might want to see if there is a demand for engraved dog collars. Here are some free or low-cost survey tools a local business or online business could easily employ: Facebook polling app Twitter polls Google doc survey Survey monkey SurveyGizmo Checkbox There are a range of WordPress survey plugins if your website runs on that platform. By the way, if you use an online survey app and have a local business, you could have a computer in your location and ask customers to complete your survey. You could offer a small incentive to reimburse them for their time. Also, your email service provider may have a survey function built into its system. I use Constant Contact and they give me the ability to conduct surveys, for example. Present an online early offer If you do online sales, another way to gauge interest in a new product or service is to promote it like it’s an existing product. You can do this in a variety of ways, two of the most popular strategies are to create an eBay page or a website landing page. You need to be clear that the product isn’t yet shipping. Your goal is to collect email addresses so interested individuals will be notified when the product is in stock or you launch your new service. Of course, you do not collect any money. If you do a landing page, couple it with an inexpensive AdWords campaign. Not only will you quickly see if there is any consumer interest in your new idea, but you’ll also be able to estimate some of your future marketing costs. One final word: These market research strategies reinforce the importance of having an extensive email list of your customers or clients. We often discuss using email to sell, but I think you’ll find email surveys equally valuable. I also think you’ll discover that the people on your email list appreciate...
read moreThis week in small business: A shark goes after Trump’s economic plan
Learn from email marketing heat maps, liven up your brand, and find out what Shark Kevin O’Leary thinks of Trump’s economic ideas. Those are just three of the important (and interesting) topics covered in this week’s collection of curated content. Politics, government, and the economy The Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary weighs in on Donald Trump’s economy plan, startups and a lot more in this article. Leadership, management, and productivity With small business depending more and more on freelancers, many of you will appreciate these four tips for hiring and keeping the best of the best. In case you need more convincing, here are seven reasons you need a mentor for entrepreneurial and small business success. This infographic gives small business owners 10 powerful ways to network. Marketing and sales Need video marketing guidelines for social media success? Here they are. Neil Patel shares five content marketing tactics for picking topics and setting goals. Unless you want to end up like the Titanic, steer clear of these five Facebook marketing mistakes. It has taken a while, but more small business owners are moving to a mobile-first marketing strategy. Not getting noticed? Check out these seven surefire signs that you need to rev up your PR program. Is it time for you to act on some of these 15 tips for livening things up when your brand is getting stale? Leaders work hard to stay ahead of the curve. That’s why you need to look over these six social media marketing trends. If you do email marketing, you need the information revealed by heat maps. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation After studying the lives of Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, Luis E. Romero came up with seven success secrets every entrepreneur must eventually learn. When you need a quick fix of entrepreneurial inspiration, turn to these 10 quotes. What do startups need most that they don’t have? Answer: Customers. Here’s how to create a customer acquisition plan. Amazon is after women entrepreneurs to sell through its marketplace and in that effort just held its first Women’s Entrepreneur Conference. Here are the signs that it’s the right time for you to become an entrepreneur. Need a push to start your own business? Scan these 10 benefits of becoming a small business owner....
read more