6 Growth Tactics To Make your Small/Medium Enterprise Thrive
If you are an entrepreneur, if you just decided that you need to find a way to help your business thrive, or think to go forward with your business idea but don’t know how or where to start, this post is for you.
We’ve gathered some of the most effective and low-cost ideas to help you take your enterprise to the next level, using growth marketing tactics.
Let me explain what growth marketing is first, though: Growth marketing includes tactics and strategies that go beyond the “Build it, and they will come” approach. It’s a non-stop effort to innovate and improve, in an attempt to lead your audience further down the sales funnel by making data-driven decisions.
Now, without further ado, here’s a list with some tried-and-true techniques.
Sales funnel: What is it, and how can you build one?
Let’s first define the term “sales funnel”: it’s what occurs from the point of awareness, right down to the very last person a customer would refer, thus becoming an ambassador and bringing more and more people to your brand.
So, what is the philosophy behind building one?
- Think about who your customers will be, age, job, and location-wise.
What can your brand offer that others can’t? What kind of questions does your product answer? More importantly, why would someone pick you to be loyal to, instead of any other brand?
Study your target audience and your data, and after you do that, segment and create buyer personas.
Personas and segmentation will help you get to the second point smoothly, all the while minimizing the chances of making mistakes and losing money.
- Make data-driven decisions.
Set your goals and see how and where you’ll need to begin to reach your goals. Your KPIs are essential when it comes to that, and these can’t be all set and ready if you don’t study your data and create buyer personas.
- Be creative and original.
You’ll need strong copy, content and CTAs and even stronger offers. But this is not where your work is done. Creativity and originality will have to express your brand’s tone of voice while being enticing enough.
And if you want to boost customer retention and keep loyal customers and repeaters, then you’ll need to use all arrows in your quiver: loyalty programs, referrals, discounts, gift vouchers, and so on. It doesn’t have to be something that will break the bank, either. A free sample would do.
Remember to research and figure out what your audience loves before moving on with your marketing tactics.
What about the competition in your niche?
Do your research:
- What do you have that they don’t?
- What is your market share?
- What is theirs?
Once you’ve got the answers to these questions, you can go about and create your strategy. If, for example, your competitors are too expensive, lower your prices.
If they can’t offer discounts, creating a loyalty program and offering free shipping could be considered a power move.
Think of special offers and sales. Perhaps something interactive will drive traffic to your page. If your competitors send bland emails, be original and creative.
Consider conducting a survey and creating a questionnaire – it’ll help you know your customer base and target group better – for something small in return. It’s cost-effective, and customers will be quite happy about it. You can also try and ask users to rate your services, thus nailing your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and engaging customers.
Keep your brand tone, always.
The brand tone is the brand’s personality and how that personality shines through. And to stand out in this day and age, when people have billions of options for anything they may need, you’ll need a strong and consistent brand voice.
A consistent brand voice will help with all aspects of your marketing efforts, from creating an email marketing strategy to improving your SEO by using the proper SEO tools. Your brand’s tone will make you recognizable by your audience and will give you the right idea about the keywords they use to access more information about your niche on search engines.
A brand’s voice includes the way it “speaks,” and the way it “looks.” So, gather your team, study your data, and get to work.
For example, if your product or service appeals to a younger audience, go ahead and follow trends, be fun, use plenty of colors, videos, and interactive elements in your emails to increase click-through rates and, ultimately, conversion.
Don’t try and make it alone.
It’s not that you’ll fail. You probably won’t. But it still is better to form partnerships.
Try and contact companies that are not competitors but complement your product. That way, you can benefit from a ‘quid-pro-quo’ deal: you’ll give them something, they’ll give you something back.
And don’t be above referral programs. Just use your customers as brand ambassadors. This will appeal to them and you, seeing as they will get to reap the benefits of that tactic, and you will get to increase your customer base effectively.
Consider creating a loyalty program.
I cannot stress this enough: Customer retention is more critical and cheaper than customer acquisition.
It’s way better to have repeaters than one-offs. Repeaters already know and trust your brand, know why they need your product, and, in the end, will come back again and again.
That kind of consistency should be rewarded with extra benefits and discounts. This is mainly the reason why loyalty programs were invented.
Loyalty programs aim to sell to existing customers, showing them at the same time that they are valued, they are considered brand ambassadors and that they should have the best the company has to offer.
They also serve as proof that the brand is and will remain of value in the long run, seeing as it’s more than willing to give repeaters back a portion of what they’ve spent through their lifetime as customers, in the form of discounts, free samples, and benefits.
Top-notch customer service is mandatory!
We’ve already established that you’ll need to make use of your existing customers first.
If a valued customer thinks that they’re not respected anymore, then you’ve lost both them and their referrals – and you can’t afford that.
growth (Source)
The graph above shows the number of Millenials in the US that stopped doing business with a brand due to poor customer service. And even though the number is lower for 2018, 50% is too high.
Try and invest in your customer service because, in the end, the after-sales service is what keeps customers coming back for more!
Conclusion
Of course, an honorable mention should go to building your business’ email list and to creating content that will promote your own by writing for other blogs or reaching out to influencers.
What are the tactics you think are most useful for growing your business?
Please let us know in the comments!
