11 Tips On How To Grow Your Business

You’ve incorporated your business, hired an accountant, and opened your business checking and savings accounts. 

Now, you’re on the hunt for an assistant and a digital marketer, but you’re not sure who else you’ll need to hire.

You’re motivated to learn how to grow your business, but you’re in doubt about which business growth strategy to focus on first.

Luckily, we’ve got you covered and prepared a guide that can help set you on the right track. Let’s take a look at 11 tips on how to grow your business that you can start implementing immediately. 

1. Hire the right people, not the best person

It’s tempting to hire an experienced growth hacker to catapult your business growth and then forget about hiring anyone else. But the truth is, a growing business needs a team of skilled employees to keep it moving forward. 

Here are some dos and don’ts to help you hire the right people:

Do invest in a team of professionals with specific skill sets

Depending on the industry you’re in, you’ll need to hire a team of professionals, each with specific skill sets. Having a dependable team means not wasting time on repetitive day-to-day tasks. In other words, having the right team ensures you’ll have ample time to focus on growing your business.

For instance, if you own a content production company, you’ll most likely need:

• Writers
• Editors
• Graphic designers
• Account managers
• Quality control experts
• Operational managers
• Digital marketers
• Sales outreach experts
• Public relations managers
• And of course, growth hackers

It may take some time to set up processes for each team member. But when you do, you’ll get to witness your business run like a well-oiled machine.

Don’t jump to hire a jack-of-all-trades that promises they can grow your business

A one-person show isn’t enough to help you get your business on the right track. When you come across a resume that promises you the world, take a step back. While the individual could be a useful addition to your business, they shouldn’t be the only person helping you grow it.

Do vet growth hackers before hiring them

Growth hackers use creative (sometimes low-cost) strategies to help businesses find and keep new customers. The beauty of growth hackers is that they focus solely on business growth — you won’t have to worry about them juggling several roles. 

But sometimes, they over promise and under deliver, leaving you to wonder why you hired them in the first place. 

The key to hiring the best growth hackers is to vet them out before hiring them. Look for:

• Positive reviews, testimonials, and references
• An established client portfolio
• Metrics, strategies, and plans they use — and why they work
• Proof that breaks down the exact growth they achieved with each company they worked for (and how they grew each one)

2. Implement an omnichannel strategy

With an omnichannel strategy, businesses can meet customers where they are and deliver the right message at the right time. It helps you create a unified customer experience that supports clients during each stage of their customer journey. 

When creating your omnichannel strategy, keep the following tips in mind:

• Start with data collection. Collect accurate, timely data that reflects where your customers are and at what times.
• Analyze the data to discover when your target audience prefers to interact with brands and which devices they’re on.
• Conduct customer behavior research to see what type of messaging customers are more likely to engage with (and what products and features they’re looking for).
• Find your clients’ preferred touchpoints. Do they prefer to engage in brand-specific apps, social media, email marketing, etc.? Consider launching your own app if your research supports it.

Next, meet with your marketing team to create a customer journey map for each audience segment. Every map should evaluate the steps your business will take from the time your prospect discovers you to their first purchase. 

Then, meet with your marketing manager and growth hackers to discuss targeted campaigns that complement each journey map.

You’ll also need to create brand guidelines for your team that include:

• Clear description of your brand identity
• Clear guidelines for messaging
• Clear guidelines for creative

Finally, always remember to continuously test how effective your omnichannel strategy is. This helps your team determine how to optimize messaging, campaign spending, and creative outputs for each campaign. 

3. Build and leverage strong cybersecurity

Imagine working hard on your new customer relationship management list, only to have it destroyed by malware. Or supplying your new team with computers only to find that a virus has infected the hardware. 

Building and leveraging strong cybersecurity means preventing cybersecurity scares like these that can wreak havoc on business growth.

To prevent these scares from happening, consider:

• Implementing an SSL certificate in your organization. No need to spend extra money as you can gain both the lowest priced single domain or a cheap wildcard SSL or multi-domain SSL in the market.
• Hiring a cybersecurity expert to come up with a cybersecurity plan and perform a cybersecurity health checkup on all devices.
• Giving your employees access to a VPN so all information stays in a protective tunnel. A VPN creates a secure environment by encrypting data, protecting it from potential cyber threats. This safeguards sensitive information during remote work, ensuring confidentiality and data integrity.
• Using a password manager like LastPass to secure and create strong passwords.
• Supplying work computers to your employees that have been fully vetted and secured by IT professionals. This is done to provide these PCs with the necessary protection against viruses and malware and to quickly fix problems in case a Mac or Windows computer has been hacked.
• Supplying all team members with virtual desktops (desktops separated from the physical devices used to access them).
• Using biometric security technology — think face recognition and thumbprint recognition features.
• Implementing Robust Antivirus Software. Installing reputable antivirus software is essential to defending the phones, PCs, and other work-related devices in your company against online threats. Choose a reputable antivirus solution that offers real-time scanning, automatic updates, and advanced threat detection capabilities
• Running penetration testing on your computer system to identify exploitable vulnerabilities and fixing them.

4. Boost your customer experience

The way your clients feel about your business determines how loyal they’ll be toward your brand. 

Picture how you feel when you walk into your favorite store or peruse your favorite blog. You might feel energized, giddy, and excited to see what new products came in. You might feel inspired, motivated, and touched by the brand’s latest blog posts. Or you might feel eager to engage with the brand’s latest poll or post on social media. 

These positive feelings affect every part of your customer experience with your favorite brands. The same is true for your own customers when they’re around your brand. 

To enhance customer experience and skyrocket business growth, consider:

• Learning a new language to help you communicate with a wider audience. This opens up new markets for your business so you can reach customers all over the world.
• Offering a free plan or trial to your product or service like Snov.io does.
• Hosting events you know your customers will love (more on this in the next section).
• Using AI and machine learning tools designed for experience management. Examples include chatbots, social listening tools, and brand-specific apps.
• Creating VIP, rewards, and loyalty programs.
• Personalizing as many customer interactions as possible — use geolocation technology to personalize based on location, use the client’s name when speaking to them, offer recommendations based on past purchases.
• Adapting your website and landing pages to offer dynamic content based on user preferences.

5. Host events locally and online

Hosting events you know your target audience will love is a powerful way to attract new leads. 

The key to knowing which events to host? Doing market research to discover the kinds of events your target audience prefers. For instance, if your target audience consistently shows up to webinars and coffee chats, start with hosting those first. 

It’s also important to research what kinds of topics your audience is interested in. If you learn they love cooking and baking events, it might not make sense to host a murder mystery party. On the other hand, a Halloween-themed baking party might be just what your audience is looking for.

6. Invest in the right tools

Every growing business needs the right tools to support daily operations and growth strategies.  

Investing in the right tools doesn’t just save your business time and money, it also reduces the likelihood of human error, helps employees perform their roles as efficiently as possible, and allows you to design workflows and processes that remove unnecessary employee output.

Let’s take a look at a few tools you can use to grow your business:

• Email Finder tool by Snov.io: Say, you’ve found new leads but don’t know their email addresses. This Email Finder tool lets you search for them by company, name, or domain. Besides, it comes with a free CRM, Email Verifier tool, and Email Drip Campaigns offered on the same platform.

• HubSpot lead scoring tool: Sync HubSpot’s lead scoring tool with Breadcrumbs’ advanced scoring tool to uncover revenue opportunities throughout the customer journey.
• Rippling HR platform: Quickly onboard new hires and easily manage payroll, benefits, HR, and IT on one platform. (PS: need a team to manage your human resources? Consider hiring a Professional Employer Organization, or PEO company, to do it for you). You can also find several other resource management platforms that can help you perform all of your HR duties.
• Productivity platform by ClickUp: Receive work orders, assign and automate tasks, manage daily tasks, and see a high-level view of your business’s current projects.
• Events and Webinars platform by InEvent: If you are looking for a video first solution, InEvent is best for virtual or hybrid events and webinars with video experiences. Also, the platform makes TV-like experiences accessible to all users with an easy drag-and-drop interface, provides marketing and analytics features to give an all in one solution to the clients and is the only platform which allows for collaborative real time video editing while streaming.

7. Leverage the use of social media

There were over 3.6 billion social media users in the year 2020. This number is projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. 

In other words, growing businesses can’t afford to not leverage social media. 

When coming up with a social media branding plan, meet with your marketing manager and growth hackers to develop growth strategies. Your team can consistently plan, track, and measure all social media efforts by getting on the same page. 

Here are some quick tips to keep in mind when leveraging social media:

• Focus on building a tight-knit social media community.
• Know your audience like you know your best friends.
• Speak to your audience in their preferred communication styles.
• Use storytelling techniques to create relatable, personalized, and engaging posts.
• Use the Stories feature to show how your business works behind the scenes.
• Post short videos to show off your business’s personality and humanize your brand.
• Engage with users daily by asking relatable questions, responding to all comments, and supporting their favorite causes.

8. Measure what works and polish up as you go

As you work with your growth hackers and marketing team, you’ll run into kinks, solutions, and successes along the way. Learn from these ups and downs by measuring what works and polishing up as you go. 

For instance, you might realize that TikTok is failing you because your audience doesn’t frequent the app enough. Or you might realize that email marketing and virtual events are consistently bringing in new customers. 

Learn from each attempt by documenting:

• What went wrong
• What went right
• What you learned
• How you can use the lesson to benefit from future business growth strategies (add this to your brand guidelines)

9. Reinvest in your brand

Reinvesting in your brand means putting a percentage of your business’s profits back into your company. When you reinvest in your brand, you have more funds to help it grow and you can increase your business’s valuation. A win-win in the business world. 

Here are some ways you can reinvest in your brand to grow it:

• Invest in yourself as a business owner — hire a business coach, attend masterminds, or enroll in a course, and use learning resources like StuDocu.
• Put reinvestment in a business emergency account for unforeseen expenses, like paying onboarding fees for a last-minute hire.
• Invest in a larger marketing team to boost your marketing efforts.
• Meet with an advisor to create a business investment portfolio for long-term business expenses.
• Hire career coaches to implement an employee training and development program.

10. Practice corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is a business model that helps companies become socially accountable to the public and its stakeholders. In other words, it’s a self-regulating business model that encourages businesses to do the right thing. 

From starting a sustainability initiative to promising parental leave, corporate social responsibility always considers the impact the business has on society.  

Here are some ways to practice corporate social responsibility:

• Find out which priorities are important to your audience, team, stakeholders, and yourself.
• Create initiatives that support the priorities in the above point.
• Create or support a charity your team is passionate about.
• Ensure all employees are being paid based on fair pay practices.
• Improve your company benefits to support your employees’ unique needs.
• Ensure all practices at your company are considered ethically responsible.
• Create sustainable practices that support each part of your business.

11. Acquire other businesses strategically

Acquiring businesses equipped with effective employees, loyal customers, and promising leads can grow your business like nothing else can.

Here are some pointers to set you on the right path to business acquisition:

1. Decide what kinds of businesses you’d like to buy and why they’re important to you.
2. Build a business acquisition team to help you vet businesses, set meetings, and draw proposals.
3. Research every business from top to bottom. Look out for risks that may not seem obvious at first.
4. Hire a lawyer to check each company for litigation risks and current lawsuit battles before drawing up proposals.
5. Make a list of the top businesses you’d like to acquire and make your first offer.
6. If the business agrees to be acquired, have your lawyer negotiate terms and write up a contract.
7. Sign the contract and buy the company.
8. Repeat as needed.

Wrapping up

From hiring the right people to investing in the right tools, you can’t go wrong with these 11 tips on growing your business. 

Ready to implement them? Leave a comment below and let us know how it goes.