Running a small business today is probably more difficult than at any point in many years. Issues like inflation, labor shortages, the pandemic, and more have caused many small business owners to look for new ways to do more with less. Overall, what you need as a small business owner in this climate is a way to increase your sales. Below are a few strategies for doing so to consider.
Expand Into Ecommerce
Many small business owners focus on the geographic areas surrounding their own brick-and-mortar stores. However, if you want to reach your full potential as a business, you should consider expanding your horizons. With access to the internet, nearly any business of any size can reach a national or even global market.
Consider expanding your company into eCommerce sales. You have many options for doing so. In certain cases, you don’t even need your own online store. You can use websites like Amazon, eBay, and more to list your products for sale.
Social Media Outreach
You should also experiment with new marketing strategies that can extend your reach into your given market and give you access to more customers. One of the best choices for nearly any small business is social media.
According to statistics, 82 percent of the US population uses social media. This can be a very large group of consumers to market to indeed. Even better, using social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more is completely free.
Try to build up a large following on your social media accounts. You can then directly market to these individuals, and they are likely to respond by buying your products and spreading the message to their followers.
Integrate Direct Marketing
If you are only selling your products in retail stores and are looking to increase your revenue, a direct marketing plan may help you to achieve that goal. In regards to direct marketing, you have many options. The most popular include telemarketing, email marketing, and direct mail.
One of the best things about direct mail marketing, for example, is you can directly target a given area by sending people neighborhood-specific postcards, fliers, or other print ads informing them of your business. Consider including coupons to help elicit a strong response so you convert more of those homeowners into paying customers.
It’s a cheap strategy that produces strong returns. These days, you can even customize direct mail advertisements to mention customers by name or mention products they have already shown interest in through other platforms.
Research Your Customer Base
If you feel like your marketing efforts have been ineffective in drawing in the consumers you need, you may want to rethink your approach. Do this by performing some serious market research to obtain the data you need to make the proper adjustments. This may even go as far as rethinking your original assumptions regarding who your customers should be.
For example, if you launched focus groups, surveys, and pilot programs as part of this research, you may discover that your target customer base skews younger than you first assumed. This information can then be adapted directly into your marketing to reach younger customers on the platforms they use online through digital advertisements as opposed to the print ads you were using before to target older consumers.
Integrate Customer Feedback
Part of successfully increasing sales for the long term is being able to create loyalty among the new customers you do bring in. Otherwise, that boost in revenue could end up being rather fleeting.
One way to do this is by trying to learn more about what your customers really think about your products and service. You can try to do more of the positive things you learn from this feedback. However, the negative things you learn should be corrected immediately.
This should include correcting issues experienced by customers on a one-on-one basis. Reach out to them directly and try to help. It also means fixing such issues for the entire company so those failures are not repeated. Keep in mind that you will not hear from most dissatisfied customers.
Wrapping Up
Just because your revenues are low now does not mean you can’t turn that trend around and increase your profits. Look for different ways to increase your sales. The strategies listed above are only a starting point for all the possible avenues you can use to increase your customer base. Try to think outside the current box you have created for yourself and keep reassessing your marketing efforts and the ways you get your products out to consumers.
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