Growth and profitability aren’t nearly as mysterious as many believe. The key, as many will tell you, is to work smarter, not harder.
Running a business is an exhilarating and exciting endeavor, but it also comes bundled with its challenges. Ensuring your company is constantly growing and expanding is certainly one of the key challenges for any business owner. In many cases, business growth can seem painfully slow.
However, there are some tried-and-true ways business owners can begin a continuous and steady scaling of their business. If you want to speed up growth and profitability, make sure you’ve considered these four categories.
1. For growth and profitability, automate as much as possible.
The digital world and technological landscape have evolved rapidly. It’s exploded to such a degree that many businesses can now automate a majority of company activities and operations. This offers an opportunity for you to get the process done right once, with no need to go back over the results. You can then automate more processes and move on to growing your business further in other avenues.
Everything from financial management to inventory management and marketing activities can be automated to reduce the time and cost involved. Financial management is usually high on the list of many business owner’s most disliked and challenging functions. Today there are some great, affordable tools that you can use to streamline this function.
For instance, investing in expense report software allows paperless, automated solutions to streamline expense reimbursement in your company. Tools such as these are not only cost-efficient, but they also save time that could be spent on more important tasks.
Your marketing activities can be automated, too. From weekly emails to social media posts, various online platforms allow you to create, schedule, and automate your posts so they can be sent and tracked automatically. You merely set up a template and then monitor what works and what doesn’t for your campaigns.
2. Make data-driven decisions.
In addition to automating the time-intensive operations of your business, online tools and software also provide useful solutions for data collection, storage, management, and use. By collecting and converting raw data, you can gain valuable information about your customers, your market, and your competitors. All of these will help you make informed decisions.
There are various tools that allow you to streamline your sales process by identifying, engaging, and closing your potential customers with business intelligence tools. ZoomInfo, for example, is a great B2B database that manages business leads and contacts. Of course, there are a number of ZoomInfo alternatives on the market to choose from. All of these solutions allow you to collate and effectively manage your marketing campaigns, sales prospecting, email address acquisition, and background information gathering.
The automated acquisition of this kind of information is a game-changer. It will allow you to take hours out of prospecting and searching for potential leads. Ensure that your website allows for you to legally collect the email addresses of prospects by adding a “Subscribe Now” pop-up. This allows you to convert traffic already on your website to potential customers. You only need to harvest enough information about them and contact details to engage meaningfully.
3. Optimize your website and SEO elements.
Staying on the topic of your website, optimizing both your landing page layout and the SEO associated with your website will go a very long way toward increasing the traffic and quality of leads coming to your site.
Keep your landing pages as simple and as informative as possible. Use high-quality, web-optimized images that won’t slow down your website’s loading speed. Not only will this put your customer off and increase your bounce rate, but Google will penalize you for poor site speed. Make sure each page has rich keyword content that educates and informs your customer about your brand and your products. Not only will this catch their attention, it will also ensure that Google knows how to categorize your site and where to rank you.
Pay close attention to your call-to-action mechanisms and pop-ups. Keep the CTA’s above the fold and 100% in line with your branding. Choose a color that stands out a bit from the rest of the site. Doing so will encourage a heightened rate of conversion.
4. Intensify the focus on your marketing.
For most start-ups and small businesses, marketing is usually the department in the business with the smallest budget. Most businesses put their working capital toward day-to-day expenses and operations.
In today’s world of online and digital transformation, however, you actually can get away with spending less on marketing and allocating more toward operating costs.
We’ve already covered the importance of developing a database and weekly emails. Emails, apart from organic traffic, are one of the biggest sources of traffic to websites. If you’ve made effective use of the correct tools, you should have a healthy database of qualified leads. Weekly emails could include any specials and promotions. You could also highlight product launches and new additions as well as educational information that you have included in your blog.
Content, especially in a blog, is a great way to reach and attract prospective leads and traffic. It also creates a sense of trust and authority. If you are an agency, for example, providing educational information to your potential and existing clients will show them that you are an expert in the industry. It will also heighten your SEO as you will be including relevant keywords in the articles and blog posts.
Parting Shot
The old adage “You’ve got to spend money to make money” might still hold some truth in it. But with today’s vast range of digital tools, cloud capabilities, and various software options, you might not need to spend as much as you did historically to increase the reach of your brand.
Growth and profitability are valuable, but they need not be expensive. Not only are there a selection of options for each one of your requirements, but you can also make use of smart ideas and techniques to get your business in front of the right decision-makers with the right information they need to convert to paying customers.
