Want To Grow Your Business? Here Are Eight Way To Do It

Caring for a business is a multi-faceted endeavor that never seems to end. The more you learn, the more you can learn. The more growth you experience, the greater the possibility for further growth. That being said, businesses can sometimes feel stagnant. Putting in a ton of time and effort (and often money) and then hearing nothing but crickets can be disheartening. Sometimes even when growth is present, it's so slow that you find yourself wondering if the work you're doing is actually making a difference in your business or in the world at large. With that in mind, the following will explore a few things you can do to help grow your business. The focus here is on things that can help all businesses, not just those within a particular industry or field.

Differentiation

One of the most vital components of growing any business is taking the time to analyze and improve your differentiation. Almost certainly, you're not the only person in your industry or niche providing the services that you're offering. You need to have an intimate understanding of how your business is different from your competitors. Quality isn't an acceptable answer as quality is something that is very hard to measure and often isn't enough to convince someone to switch brands or providers unless their current provider is truly abhorrent when it comes to quality. If you don't know what differentiates you, take the time to figure it out. You need to be able to succinctly explain why your product or service is different and better than other options in the market. If you don't figure this out first, you might discover that all your efforts in marketing and branding are missing the mark.

Practice Your Pitch

Owning a business involves pitching your business constantly. Even in non-work settings, one of the first questions people typically ask others is: what do you do? You need to have a concise response to this question in your back-pocket always, as you never know when you're going to run into someone looking to invest in a business or trying to find a product exactly like yours. You should be able to explain: what your business is called, who it helps, what it helps people do, and how it helps them with this. You should be able to explain all of this in two to three sentences. It sounds scary, but once you take the time to fiddle around with your phrasings (maybe type out your pitch and run it through the free online editor HemingwayApp which helps you cut out unnecessary words for punchier, more straightforward wording), you'll find the right phrasing.

Knowing exactly what you're going to say about your business can also help eliminate some of the nerves that come along with finally being able to talk to people about what you love. It's incredibly common to freeze up when people ask you to talk about the thing you most want to talk about.

Networking Isn't A Verb; It's A Way Of Life

The two points above both involve being able to talk to people about your business. Combining them with looking at the entire world as a networking opportunity can produce some pretty magical results. You never know who has an uncle looking to purchase 800 of something for their business. You never know who has a connection to the local newspaper which is looking to write stories about local businesses. You can't judge by how a person looks, speaks, or acts what kind of money they have hidden in their mattress at home. Part of owning a thriving business is understanding that you're always networking. Any person you meet could be the next fairy godmother for your business. If you know how to explain why your work is different and how to pitch it in a succinct way, you'll be prepared for these meetings.

The two final components of this networking mindset are good manners and a clean appearance. You don't need to run out and buy all new clothes, but your clothes, hair, teeth, and skin need to be clean every time you leave the house. Again, you don't know who you're going to end up meeting. Likewise, manners are a beautiful thing that has fallen by the wayside a little as people begin interacting online more and more. Read up on manners if you need to, but figure out how to be polite. People remember people with good manners.

Focus Your Marketing Efforts On Measurable Actual Results

It's really easy to get swallowed up by the chaos of valuing your work based on useless metrics. In some industries, it doesn't matter how many likes your photo got; what matters is the sales you've made or the leads generated. Marketing gurus at https://wedgewoodmarketing.com/ emphasize the importance of metrics that truly grow your business. Of course, what these metrics are is going to vary depending on your business. It might be appointments booked or actual revenue made by the end of the day. You can drive yourself crazy if you're focused on all the new age metrics available, like page views and followers. Figure out what metrics actually make a difference in the growth of your business and focus on improving those.

Embrace Technology

Yes, not all new tech is going to revolutionize the business. Sometimes, new tech is a trend—everyone hops on a given platform and then hops off when they figure out it's not really anything different than the accounts they already have from other providers (again, differentiation is key). This being said, not opening your work up to new technology and new platforms can limit your potential reach.

If you take a moment to figure it out, you'll quickly discover that most content can be repackaged; this means you can often simply parse through your old content and pop it up on a new platform. If you've got a thick backlog, you can even set things up so that you're posting older content in the new space twice per day, winning you lots of favor from the algorithm.

If you discover a particular platform or technology doesn't really work for you, that's cool. End your relationship with it. But almost always, it's worth trying. You might have an entirely new audience waiting for you in this new space that you couldn't have discovered otherwise. Also, when applications are new, they often have increased visibility as they know that gaining followers, engagement, and connection encourages people to regularly use their application. This means that massive audience growth is often easier on newer apps compared to older ones.

Make Changes Individually

When you're feeling motivated to grow your business, it's tempting to apply six or seven new improvements at one time. This is almost always a bad idea. If you apply several changes at once, it's often impossible to determine which outcomes are the result of which inputs. It can easily lead to a misunderstanding about what is positively influencing growth and can even result in you being unaware that one of the things you're doing is actually turning customers away. If you make your changes one at a time, it's a lot easier to study the results and decide whether that action is worth your time or not. It also gives you the space to fiddle with the change until you've struck an optimal balance with it.

Get To Know Your Customers

The more time and effort you put into understanding your customers, the more likely you are to be able to make products or services that they want to tell everyone they know about. Of course, data collection can be a part of this, but humans are nuanced beings. The best way to get to know your customers is to interact with them. Speak to them without a standardized form of robotic questions; conduct Livestream videos where you answer people's questions in real-time and build a community discussion around the problems that people who buy your products or services are facing. Always come back to the questions:

• What are my customers' pain points? As in, what do they struggle with? What parts of their lives are difficult?

• Is there a way I can help with that?

Don't Be Fooled By Time-Sensitive Developments

It's easy to get caught up in trends as a business owner. But not all trends turn into profit; many actually just suck up your time. If you ever find yourself thinking: I have to do this task right now, or I'm going to miss out on the buzz that is happening, the task is almost certainly one that can be skipped. If you only have a few days to take advantage of development, the development is not long-running and so almost certainly isn't going to produce long-running effects. Dropping everything you're in the middle of and devoting all your energy to something so trend-dependent almost never results in actual, long-term growth. Often, it can cause a few losses as you're neglecting other aspects of your business in order to participate.

The above information should help you grow your business. Of course, businesses don't grow overnight (and in the few cases where they do, they often collapse overnight as well). The average business takes about three to five years to get into a stable position and much longer than that to reach its full growth potential. Business management is a marathon, not a sprint. Be sure to check in with your energy levels and get the rest and nutrition you need to keep up your efforts for the next seven years. If you can't do what you're doing for seven years straight, what you're doing isn't sustainable, and you need to make adjustments.