Small Business Growth Strategies: 10 Ways To Win Customers

Create A Growth Strategy Plan For Your Business

Creating small business growth strategies can be the difference between your business winning more customers or spinning its wheels. It’s hard to know what to do, or if you’re on track. What you need is a growth strategy plan that lays out what you will do when, or at least what order you’ll pursue your marketing and growth strategies. Here is a sample plan you can adapt to your business.

1. Conduct Customer Discovery

Customer discovery means asking potential clients or people in your target demographic group about their needs. You particularly are focusing on their “pain points,” or the areas where they’re looking for solutions to problems. You may have already done something like this asking around or seeing a consistent problem that needed solving as you planned your business. If not, it’s still not too late to ask questions.

It’s not a sales pitch. Customer discovery is all about listening and asking people about what their biggest challenges are. They might not know there could be a solution to their problems, so you might need to dig a little. Customer discovery will get you more clients because it teaches you if you’re solving the problems people really need solved in your space.

2. Encourage Customer Feedback

Now you have an idea of what to do with your business, or some ideas to try. You could post a website to test interest via contact form, or you might have gone ahead and formed your business. Your first group of clients are a sort of test group. Listen to customer feedback through surveys, and be sure to ask if they have questions or concerns, or how you might serve them better. This will give you insights into how you could improve your business before you’re locked in to a particular way of doing things. You might just unearth new small business growth strategies for your business that you didn’t know!

3. Cater To Different Marketing Channels

Want to get more customers? Try offering different discounts, loyalty rewards, or other promotions to different marketing channels. You might see a pattern where that succeeds, and you can do more of that. Make sure there is some variety in your marketing channels. Include social media, some advertising or networking at professional events, and any advertising necessary to be visible to potential clients.

Don’t work in a traditional space where a Google ad or an industry advertisement would do much good? Create your own visibility through content marketing: start a blog on topics of industry and client concerns. Start a podcast and invite colleagues and professionals with bigger audiences than you to be interviewed to make your business visible to their viewers.

4. Check Your Pricing & Packaging

One of the best small business growth strategies – simple pricing. Your service might be great, but do customers get confused at what you’re offering or how it’s packaged? Occasionally review whether it might make sense to change your prices, how you package services, or just how they’re displayed on your website so it’s easy for clients to understand.

Look at your most popular services for ideas of what’s working, and cut the offerings that no one goes for. Maybe your bulk discount is too expensive. Maybe you should productize your service so clients understand what the options are.

Check out how we’ve priced our product @ Yottled. One price – can’t get confused – all in one.

5. Offer More Communication Channels

If you only communicate by phone, add email. If you’re on email but clients want a lot of back and forth communication that is time sensitive, consider adding a Slack channel for quick communication. Wherever your communication is backed up, your ability to gain more clients or work with more more efficiently is backed up, too.

6. Under-Promise, Over-Deliver

It’s an old adage, but it’s true for a reason. Under-promise should mean setting reasonable goals for timeline of service, and not over-promising results or metrics you can’t achieve. Over-delivering could look like finishing early, doing extra detail work on a job, or just being delightful to work with. Everyone likes to feel seen, heard, understood, and listened to.

7. Win Clients From Competitors

You don’t have to actively compete to win over clients from other businesses in your space. Matching or lowering your prices, or offering more value for the price you’re charging, can be effective ways to attract more clients to your business. If you’re consistently easier to work with, faster to communicate, more personalized in your service, and offer value targeted to your customers’ needs because you listen to their feedback and encourage positive and negative reviews, you’ll learn a ton and grow more quickly. Competition isn’t always face to face. You’ll simply be one of the best choices out there, and you’ll gain more clients.

8. Find New Sales Channels

Have you been selling through one channel and gotten a bit stagnant? Try putting a toe into other sales channels. Maybe you need an e-commerce website to sell goods and services online. Maybe it would help if you had a physical location for visibility. Affiliate marketing might be a good option if you need a sales team and can leverage other people’s networks and websites to sell your goods and services. Try one at a time, and keep what works.

9. Ask For Referrals

Referrals can be the lifeblood of growing businesses. If you ask for them, you might get more from clients who love you but didn’t think of recommending you until you reminded them. Just don’t be pushy. You want to be the service provider people naturally recommend. If clients need some reminders to send more clients your way, you can create referral bonuses, loyalty programs, or other incentives to naturally remind people that referrals keep your doors open so you can serve them. Seriously – just ask and it’s one of the single best small business growth strategies.

10. Promote Your Expertise

You might be surprised what a difference it makes to have credentials in your bio. This doesn’t have to be a fancy degree. It can be public speaking engagements, articles you’ve written for media, an event you founded, or a book you published. Often, book publishing is the support industry for professionals in other spaces, and just a promotional tool to gain more clients.

Think of a topic you wish you could share with your clients that educates them about your expertise. Write that book to establish your credibility as an expert. Or, if written word isn’t your thing, do the same thing with public speaking. If you literally wrote the book on a topic or have the top video or event, you will naturally gain more clients.