​Focus on Expanding Your Business This Year With These 3 Tips

With a new year upon us, many small business owners are sitting down to strategize for future business expansion — and looking for business growth strategies that will propel their LLC to the top of their respective industry. While trying to expand your business is great, you'll also need to execute on any business growth strategies you're looking to put in place. Without execution, nothing will change...and you’ll find your growth year over year is flat. This article will outline the top three business tips to help you grow in the coming year.

1. Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates

A great way to expand your business is by utilizing your current customers as a marketing team. Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful business growth strategies out there, and it’s free. If you want to grow your business, allow your customers to promote your business by giving reviews, talking about your brand on their social media and spreading the good word about your products or services.

To get customers talking about your business, you may need to nudge them a little by starting the conversation to get the ball rolling. Social media, in my opinion, is the best method for this. Start by making a post that says something like, “We’d love for you to share your experience with our brand. Let us know your experience in the comments, and tag someone who you think would love to get to know us better.”

This not only improves your social engagement, but it can also help expand your business due to your loyal fan base tagging their friends and family. This introduces a new group of people to your business and is one of the great tips that can allow you to grow your business.

You could even do a giveaway promotion and tie it into your word-of-mouth referrals. This could be something like: “Give us a review down in the comments, and tag a friend to be entered to win [fill in the blank] simply for being a loyal customer and recommending our product/service.”

2. Expand Your Products and/or Services

It sounds so simple, but very few small business owners are willing to step outside of their current offerings. If you want to grow your business, you may need to expand your products and/or services. Look for holes in the market that you could capitalize on and launch a new product or service that fills this gap and solves a problem.

Unsure of where to start in order to expand your business? Talk to your customers. Use a service such as Survey Monkey to create a custom survey that you can post on your website, social media, or in your email blast to gain insight into what your customers' wants and needs are outside of your current offerings.

Utilizing surveys is one of the best tips to grow your business, because you'll gain valuable information from your customers and can act accordingly based on the feedback you receive.

Once you know what you want to change, Bizee can help by freeing up some of your time and assisting you with managing your company. We can make sure that you have the resources to service your customer's ongoing needs, while we help file your business taxes and keep your licenses up to date, for example.

3. Utilize Social Media to the Fullest

If you aren’t currently squeezing every bit of marking capability out of social media, you are behind the eight ball and missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your business. There has never been a better time to utilize these free platforms to market and expand your company. If you have budgetary constraints, you need to be all over social media building a community and engaging with customers and prospects.

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram are all free platforms to push your products and services. Sure, you could spend some money on Facebook or Instagram ads — but it’s not necessary if you don’t have the funds to do so. Social media is a place where you can get in front of thousands or millions of potential and existing customers to let them know what you have going on with your business. In the past, you would've had to spend thousands of dollars to get the same exposure. Today, it’s absolutely free!

Find which platform(s) your customers are on and double down on the amount of time you invest getting in front of them through social channels. Mention the launch of new products, promote any accolades the business gets, push for reviews of your products, and most of all use it to promote any special sales you have going on. This can be especially beneficial around the holidays.

If you are looking for more tips to grow your company as well as business growth strategies, consider checking out the many other blogs we have in our learning center. You may find many of them useful in helping you expand your business this year.