If you own a small business, one thing is for sure, there’s always room to grow! Growth is something you should look to achieve in your business goals, and if you’re not looking to grow, you could be looking at something much worse than just earning a sustainable profit. As the world evolves and the minds of consumers evolve with it, creating a growing business to suit the needs of potential clients is imperative to continued success. Read on to learn some helpful tips for growing your small business now.

Growing Your Small Business

The big thing to remember when you’re asking, “how can I grow my small business?” is that you get out what you put in. In the case of any marketing effort, the more strategy and planning you put in upfront, the more you return you should expect.

Marketing, and especially targeted digital marketing efforts, will work to grow your small business, but you do have to put in the work (or hire someone to do the work for you) to see results.

Each of these 5 tips we’re going to mention today will help you grow your small business according to your unique goals. They’re all manageable tactics you can use on your own. But, it’s important to remember these are all ongoing efforts. The trick with continued business growth is it’s never just a one time thing. Plan and implement a strategy, see how it works, refine, and keep trying. 

1. Define Your Small Business Growth Goals

If you only have time to sit down and do one thing, please let it be this: define your business growth goals. It’s really hard to implement small business growth strategies if you don’t know why you want to achieve those goals and how you’re going to go about it. 

Are you looking to sign with two new big clients? Want to find a distributor in a new region? Hoping to open a new location? Thinking about expanding into another product or service line? Whatever it is, give it a name, and give it a completion timeline. 

When you determine why you’re wanting to market and grow your business, it will be easier to plan an effective marketing strategy of how you’re going to go about it. Just defining your goals can have a massive impact on how you find customers, how your team sells projects, and ultimately how you’re going to grow. Setting goals and determining why and when you want to meet them is the first step in creating a successful future for your business. 

2. Identify Your Ideal Audience or Target Market

Once you know what you want to achieve, it’s a lot easier to figure out who can help you get there. For example, if your small business growth goal was to expand into another product line, you will need to figure out who buys that product. 

Who is your ideal audience for that product or service? What are their shopping habits? Where do they get their information? What is their preferred method of communication? 

When you have identified who you’re marketing to, even when you’re not actively creating an advertising message for them to see, you’ll be making more informed choices about how you’re selling, how you’re doing business, and with whom. 

3. Get Serious About Your Website

Like it or not, when you’re a small business, people will judge you based on your online presence. It’s true large corporations can get away with bad looking sites. But, as a small business, your website is likely the first interaction a potential customer will have with your company.

Even if you have a brick and mortar location, people are likely to look you up online before they actually stop in. So, your website has to look good, and for the purpose of growing your small business, it needs to work well, too. 

There’s a lot to say about how to grow your small business by marketing through your website, but the basics are pretty simple: 

• Make it functional and easy to use.
• Make sure it works on any size screen (especially mobile).
• Highlight your contact information — a visitor should be able to contact you from anywhere on your website with ease.
• Identify and outline your services. What products or services do you offer and in what locations?
• Link back to your social media accounts so customers can see your consistent presence.

Of course, there’s much more that goes into a great website, but those five essentials should get you started in the right direction. 

Once you get your website up and running, you should focus on continuously improving it. This is much less work than other marketing tactics, and when done properly, it can deliver significant results. If your website is well-built and user-friendly, it will rank well on search engines and be shown in search results. So, if you only have time for one thing as far as marketing is concerned, make it your website.

4. Focus On What You Understand and Have Time For

The crux of marketing a small business, as we’ve already mentioned, is making time to put in the work. If you’re like many other small businesses, you’re short-staffed, and most people on your team wear many hats. Maybe you don’t have time to learn how to set up a complex Google Ads campaign, or figure out how Instagram Stories work. Take whatever time you have, whether it’s 5 hours a month or 5 hours a week, and put it to the tactics you understand and know will deliver the best results.  

Think back to your business goals. How did you want to grow your small business? Which marketing tactic will help get you the fastest results? Is it social media marketing? Blogging? Creating a gorgeous email campaign? A TV commercial? When you know who you are marketing to, you can make a decision on how to spend the limited time you may have and come away with a successful campaign for your business.

Identify the tactics that are most aligned with your goals and your audience, and start there. It’s not worth it to spread yourself thin and burn out. Instead, choose one or two tactics you know are aligned with your goals and your audience, and focus your efforts there until you start to see results. 

5. Be Consistent

People think a lot of things about marketing, but the real, sometimes painful truth is that consistency is what gets results. Sure, you can invest in all kinds of flashy ad campaigns, a bright and shiny new website, and cute imagery for your social media accounts, but none of it is going to work if you don’t put in the time, and do it consistently. 

If you’ve decided that all you have time for right now is to focus on your website, that’s great. Now put in a set amount of hours per week, month, or quarter, on your website. Build your keywords into every aspect of your site, run analytics softwares, and work to improve your search engine ranking with every hour you spend optimizing your website.

Some good ways to optimize your website are: 

• Get opinions from your friends and family about what works and what doesn’t flow well on your site. 
• Develop new conversion-focused landing pages. 
• Focus on technical and local SEO. 

Once you’re done with your website (just coming back for updates and changes), put many of those hours into working towards a strong social media presence. If you want to know how to grow your small business with marketing, the best advice we can offer is to pick something, and stick with it. Or, hire an agency to help you achieve more campaign success than you could on your own. 

Conclusion:

Remember, among the many other benefits you have as a small business owner, one of the most important qualities you have is the ability to be agile with your marketing. 

You have a close team who can get things done quickly. You don’t need to get 15 approval signatures to try out a new ad campaign. So, when you’ve got a handle on the basics and your marketing efforts are starting to deliver the growth you’re looking for, don’t be afraid to try out some new things, too. This is the beauty of small business marketing!

Marketing a small business is a lot of work. You’re already busy with your actual job, and now you’re adding on a consistent marketing workload on top of it. If you’re not sure you want to handle marketing, too, talk with Lawrence Media Group. We’d love to help!

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