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Pushing to grow awareness for small business owners is one of the major drivers behind revenue growth, lead generation, brand engagement, website visits, recruiting top talent, and retention. The key to expansion comes down to being a digital-first business.
Further, tapping into digital channels will provide a much more data-driven approach to all of your marketing and sales efforts without the need for a large budget. In other words, as a small business, you won’t have to worry about overspending in order to yield positive results. Rather, you can spend money where you are seeing more traction that aligns with your overarching goals.
Here are some key reasons why being a digital-first business will amplify growth:
You’re present where your customers are
57% of customers prefer companies who can be reached via mail, chat, video-chat, social media platforms over those using traditional means of voice-based customer support. This means making sure you are available via the social platforms your customers are on and using these channels as a place for interactions to help boost your overall brand image.
When you position your business as providing value over transactional sales, the conversations you have with customers online become much more authentic, further allowing you to receive open feedback around your offerings. You can then use this feedback to make improvements and also leverage them as marketing injection points throughout the buying process.
Proliferate your content assets
From video to blogging, making content a priority will help you position your expertise within the marketplace while also building more trust among your target audience. More specifically, content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. And, companies that prioritize blogging see 67% more leads per month.
Here are some key tips to consider when it comes to distributing your content assets:
- Just as we stated above, share where your customers are digitally.
- Do some keyword research and run search ads driving traffic to specific content pieces.
- Leave relevant comments on LinkedIn updates done by individuals who fit within your ICP (ideal customers profile) with a link to your content assets.
- Create a series of thematic organic social media posts driving traffic back to the relevant content pieces.
Bonus tip: Recall this post where we highlighted specifics on how you can plan your content distribution for maximum reach: “If you're a B2B brand, your target customer may be spending much of their time checking emails and browsing LinkedIn, so you should prioritize content distribution on these channels. If you’re a B2C brand, you may want to consider distributing your content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.”
Develop automated workflows
Take the manual work out of your email marketing efforts where you can. Doing so will help you focus on other tasks that can further foster growth goals. In other words, you can set up automated workflows around the following buckets:
- Subscribers who are interested in educational content and need to be nurtured before becoming paid customers.
- Customers. Your lowest hanging fruit for upsells as well as getting referrals for new business comes down to your customer base. Provide them with content they actually want to consume.
- Onboarding new customers is one of the key ways you can ensure they stick around much longer, increasing your average LTV (lifetime value). Develop a workflow to give new customers the meatiest content that’s going to keep them coming back for more when it comes to your offerings.
Understanding customer needs
From surveys to emails and social, having a consistent feedback loop that creates two-way communication between your customers and your business will only help amplify growth. Being able to deeply understand your customers’ needs will enable you to employ specific campaigns and initiatives that address their pain points as well as their primary requests.
Look to your customers to help fill in specific gaps that are hindering growth. Then create exclusive brand loyalty programs that will reward your customers for their input and insights. Remember, people buy from people so humanize every touch point as much as you possibly can.
Consistently test and measure
In a digital-first world, your ability to track and measure all of your initiatives is much easier and incredibly important to running campaigns that will drive the desired results you’re looking for. To be more specific, 92% of leading marketers believe using first-party data to continuously build an understanding of what people want is critical to growth.
Being able to see ‘where’ in the buyer journey that you’re seeing the most as well as the least amount of engagement will help you make improvements while ensuring that you cut back on wasted marketing dollars. More importantly, instill the practice of pushing your company to ideate, create, execute, fail, learn, improve, and repeat.
Keep growing your small business with help from the BBB
Harnessing the power of the digital world will undoubtedly promote business growth. If you haven't started building your marketing, sales, and product strategies around a digital-first approach, now is the time to begin.
To get more ideas, check out the BBB business news feed for more great resources.