Business advice can often be extremely complicated, but when you break it all down the basics remain the same, whether you run a cafe, retail outlet or do most of your marketing online. If you want to grow your business there are 5 essential activities you should focus on.
1. Properly identify your niche, customers and USP: Very few businesses succeed these days without having a demonstrable point of difference. “Me too” is not a recipe for success. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, you should focus on solving the biggest problem your potential customers encounter and then market that solution to them aggressively.
Creating a process, system or product that addresses this solution can become your Unique Selling Proposition, providing customers with a great reason to buy from you and give you a competitive advantage.
2. Increase traffic: Business growth relies on more of the right people being exposed to your marketing message. Whether it be your signage in a busy location, advertising or great online marketing, you need more of your ideal potential customers to learn about your USP/solution.
3. Improve your traffic conversion rate: Of course, all the visitors in the world won’t help if you aren’t converting a healthy percentage of them into enquiries or buyers. Study your traffic and see what people are reacting or not reacting to. Quite often a few small changes in your process or the wording of your calls-to-action can lead to a significant improvement in conversion.
4. Improve sales conversion rate: Do you measure your sales conversion rate? What can you do to to improve your conversion rate by 5 or 10 percent? If you’ll start focusing more on your genuine USP and solution and keep the discussions centred around this, there is a real opportunity to convert more enquiries into sales in 2018.
5. Increase average sale or lifetime value: The final piece of the business growth puzzle is to make sure you capitalise upon your increased traffic and conversion rates by making sure you increase the average sale or lifetime value of each customer. What can you do to add value to the sale or relationship to ensure your customers spend more or more often?
Addressing just one of these five basic aspects of your business can lead to substantial growth. Improving all five aspects could result in your best year ever.
—
If you’re ready to grow your business then let’s talk about our new Growth Marketing Accelerator Program which addresses these 5 areas whilst creating and implementing a proven marketing plan in just 10 days. Click here to learn more…
Craig Wilson is the managing director of Sticky.Digital
(This article was first published in the Newcastle Herald on 2 January, 2018)
