Category Archives: Business Growth

Starting Your Business Strategy for 2020: Quick Tips

As we’ve now enjoyed the festive period, board rooms and managerial meetings will be heating up again over the coming weeks; as we all reflect, strategise and budget for a prosperous 2020 – Let’s look at the new approach that you can take in 2020 to boost your business success and target improvements in your whole company.

This strategising can take weeks and months, but it’s an important moment to take stock before the beginning of a new quarter, a new year and, indeed, a new decade.

As such, in this article you’ll learn how to implement a strategy from conception to execution, helping you grow your business wisely into 2020 and beyond.

Finding Consensus

First, it’s time to look backwards, with your other business leaders, managers and board members to look at what’s been going well for your business.

Where can you target improvements, and where have you been performing particularly strongly? What lessons can you learn from the answers to both of these questions?

Then, as a team, it’s time to turn to the future, and reach a consensus view about where your business needs to focus investment and energy in this year.

Perhaps you’ll invest more heavily in marketing in order to boost visibility and web traffic, or you’ll decide to allocate resources to developing new products: the choice is yours.

External Experts

While internal conversations and consensus-building are important parts of the process of building your new strategy for your business, they’re also going to be able to help you form part of the picture.

Many businesses find it useful – imperative, in fact – to consult with external specialists in order to get a neutral opinion of their business’ successes and failures, and advice and business plans to help them move forwards.

An external expert can:

• Spot the weak spots that you’ve overlooked
• Ask the questions that you’ve failed to ask yourself
• Compare your business processes to those of other businesses they’ve advised
• Advise you based on the industry reports, knowledge and expertise that they’ve gathered
• Give tips about elements of your business in which you may lack human resources

Always remember, you know how the business operates! A true growth expert will understand this and only seek enhance and fill the gaps to build on your past successes and not try and take over, placing the companies future at risk.

Find yourself a business plan writing company in the UK in order to onboard this advice and these tips, and to co-write a new plan for 2020 with knowledgeable experts who are supportive, and passionate to help.

New Leaf

The New Year celebrations may mean that a few members of staff aren’t on the best form for a day or two into 2020, but it is nonetheless the perfect opportunity for you to get every single member of staff into a meeting, or meetings, to talk about the future strategy you’ve been devising.

You need to be up-front about your new plans, and offer insights, the training and the instruction to your staff, so that they know you’re entering a new phase of your business planning.

With your staff clued-up and excited, they’ll pull together in a motivated fashion to get the job done, and to push your business closer to its new objectives as the decade begins.

Make 2020 a successful year of growth for your business with the handy tips outlined in this post.

5 Areas To Grow Your Business Online

Growing your business online is imperative to connecting with a wider audience and establishing a solid internet presence where your brand can be found. Traditional marketing campaigns can be expensive and time-consuming to fulfil whereas many digital marketing tactics are affordable and have a lasting effect that will benefit your company in the long run and they are easy enough to implement. While your current ranking on Google is a great place to start and is extremely important, there are many other avenues that can be looked at when promoting your business online that are vital to focus on when it concerns the growth of your business.

The best way to take advantage of the potential marketing opportunities online is to hire a professional digital marketing agency to do it for you, they’ll have all the knowledge and expertise you need and they’ll enable you to carry on with your other business obligations. A full service marketing agency will analyse all the current marketing channels you use and highlight ways they can be improved. They will also introduce new platforms and media that could be used such as video content and social advertising if required. Highlighted below are 5 digital marketing areas that should not be overlooked:

Search Engine Optimisation

Organic search engine traffic is usually one of the primary sources of brand engagement online, but appearing on the first page of Google takes a lot of time. A digital marketing agency would be able to audit the current content you have shared online and make changes and improvements to increase the chances of being found. Using more keywords and topical blogs will help search engines recognise your brand.

Grow your business online and get ready for take off!

Social Media

Social media is one of the most effective areas of digital marketing and is also very inexpensive to use, think of it as using word of mouth in a digital way, with no geographical restraints. The key to a successful social media post or campaign is creating content that is engaging and worthy of sharing; it’s the best way to increase awareness around your brand. Consistency is key and a digital marketing expert will be able to interpret and navigate the various algorithms that have been put in place.

Mobile Applications

Mobile usage is soaring amongst consumers who look to their phones for web browsing and applications to download, which means it is an area that must be tapped into to connect with your audience when they’re on the move. A mobile business application could be developed to improve user experience and increase brand loyalty.

Email Newsletters

Creating an email subscription campaign is a great way to connect with your audience when they are not actively looking for your brand. Content within newsletter campaigns needs to be informative and beneficial to encourage click-throughs and increase engagement online.

Podcasts

Podcasting is another area that is increasing in popularity and should definitely be tapped into if you have valuable information to share. This is a great way to collaborate with other relevant brands and build loyalty amongst the consumers you currently have.

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7 excellent tips to win new clients

As we know there are loads of ways to generate more business and win new clients however, we’re going to focus on one particular area to help you gain and win new customers.

One of the main focus areas for any company is to evaluate your repeat business strategy. It’s changing the mindset from the ‘1st sale mentality’ into the ‘2nd sale mentality’.

Customers who have already dealt with you in the past would be ready to use you again providing they enjoyed the products, or services you’ve offered. A lot of the hard work and initial sales and marketing campaigns has won them through the door, so the questions now are ‘how can you get them to come back again?’ and ‘how can you get them to bring someone else with them?’

Before we get started on the tips, it’s a really good idea to check your current referral processes with the goal of encouraging previous buyers to recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues.

Example: Local fitness clubs are very good at this by offering free day passes to friends and family, as well as cash incentives to get someone new in the door. These offers are well displayed in the clubs, on their websites or you may receive regular mail shots. Part of your strategy plan with us would be to cover referral areas with you and see what tactics would be best suited for your business. Please contact us for a free SEO chat.

Getting an existing source to give you a contact name and number is classed as a ‘low-grade referral’, however having someone walk in and sign on the dotted line would be classed as a ‘grade A referral’. So, how do we achieve those grade A referrals? These leads can be scored and measured by tracking and calculating the NPS (net promoter score).

Here’s a case history example of a client we’ve helped: They sell loft conversions and extensions. Their focus is on repeat business and win new clients. We recommended that once a satisfied customer had their loft conversion built and were satisfied, then why not offer a cash incentive (£50) for every new client that views their home and goes through to sale. This worked really well as it built confidence with the prospective buyer, but also brought in some weekly cash for the happy new loft homeowner. This boosted their sales by 30% and needless to say the existing customer were double excited to be promoting the loft conversion firm for only 15 minutes work to show someone around. The existing customer became an ‘active promoter’ for the business, and even referred more sales through their local football club.

7 easy steps to win new clients

1. Set up triggers for your referral plan. Some referral business will just happen, however one of the big mistakes is that you can just assume they will just come in. This isn’t always the case! You will need a plan that has triggers events based on events that will attract those referrals to come in. You will also need to get all of your staff onboard to execute the plan. Here’s a tip: don’t ask for referrals as the customer is about to pay, set the triggers in motion either before, or after and make sure you show appreciation to customers who give you a referral.
2. Offer Incentives. Most people like to save money where they can, but coming up with the right incentives will need to be tailored to your business. McDonald’s would be quite happy with 2 for 1 offers, however Mercedes would steer clear of any of these types of offers. So, coming up with the right incentive scheme takes care and evaluation with some clear market research based on your target audience. You can then test these incentives by targeting a small number of customers to help you collect the data for future campaigns.
3. Target the most influential customers. These would be people who represent a group of others and should be discovered when reviewing your process (just like the customer we mentioned who run a football team). These customers may represent others in the community or industry, but finding them would definitely be of great benefit for recommending your services. How many friends do they have on social media networks etc.? These are the people to target first. Do they have a website? If so, bear in mind that links do matter.
4. Target other businesses related to your industry. An example here would be a solicitor who specialises in personal injury claims would want to get local doctors on their side and target some adverts into their waiting rooms. Make sure you contact other organisation’s that could really promote and enhance your services, but not be in competition.
5. Provide marketing materials. Don’t just rely on word of mouth, but give customer’s something that they can pass onto their contacts. This materials could be a link to an online flyer, or an enticing page on your website, recent newsletters detailing offers, products and services with the clear benefit of buying from you. Remember, your prospective clients will be thinking ‘what can you do for me?’, so your message will need to reflect that.
6. Build relationships. Gaining trust is vital to bringing in more referral business and also win new clients. It’s great that someone has trusted you and bought from you, so if you’re going to start contacting these customers you haven’t spoken to for a while, you will need to re-establish that trust.
7. Keep your records up straight. When gaining information such as contact details this may just be a lead, but store this information for evaluation and future communication. You may want to run surveys, checklists or web based programmes to capture more details, BUT, always remember to keep your records up straight. This will really help to chart the success of your referral campaigns to help you measure and fine tune them for the future!

Summary

Aim to save people money, give them a great deal with excellent levels of service and provide clear ongoing communication to keep the relationship alive. This will keep people keep trusting you and spreading the word.