Every year about 20% of small businesses fail. There are various reasons for this. Sometimes it’s due to poor management. In other circumstances, it can be a lack of finances. In essence, these businesses don’t know how to grow. This shouldn’t happen to you no matter if it’s your first or fifth year. There are always new opportunities to help increase your client base and your profits. You simply need to know what they are. To help, here are some unique ways to grow your small business this year.
Affiliate Marketing
Partnerships are a primary way to increase your customer base. This is particularly true in connections made with affiliate marketers. These individuals go beyond the standard advertising campaign. They are influencers that you reward for their service. Affiliate marketers generate content based on your products and services. By providing them with a URL, they can redirect readers of their blogs or viewers of their videos to your site. Their goal is to convert visitors to consumers. In turn, they receive a royalty for their services.
The best way to maintain a top-notch group of affiliate marketers is to reward them for more than conversions. Provide bonuses at many levels. For instance, they can be for the volume of products customers add to their virtual carts. It can also be for a certain item. The more rewards given the better the chance the affiliate marketers will increase their influence.
Introduce New Products
Ingenuity drives progress. Though you have existing products that are still popular there are still ways to improve on them. In fact, there might be something in an existing application that can be drawn out and made into a separate package. Don’t introduce a new item because it’s the thing to do. Research is needed to determine if it serves your current customer base or a new set of consumers. Once that’s done it needs to be successfully tested to ensure it works the first time.
Maintain Top-Notch Security
Proper security is critical to a growing business. With cyber extortion a daily experience it’s important to protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of your clients and employees. On top of this, you need to consider old ways of collecting data and how to minimize their effects. For instance, you might have recorded information via online purchase forms. Today, protocols like ITP 2.0 stop that from happening. Thus, you might have to work with organizations like Impact that can store this information without compromising security.
For a true understanding of your security you must conduct a risk management audit. This allows you to see the holes in your environment and implement tools that minimize the risk of cyber extortion. Though it isn’t 100% effective, it can greatly reduce the types of hacks that attempt to break through.
Create A Mobile Application
More people rely on their mobile devices these days for a variety of operations. Purchasing products and services is one of these. Hence, it’s imperative to develop a new application for your service. This is more than a space to sell products. You can create an application that promotes customer reviews. In turn, these can be used to fix errors or enhance features.
You can also use a mobile app to introduce customer incentives. For example, if they download it to their device they receive a free item or a heavily discounted purchase. It can also be used to reward consumers after they make a certain number of purchases.
Guest Blog
Blogs are still a useful form of communication in the online world. If researched well and written in an entertaining way it draws in regular readers as well as influencers. Along with a blog on your own website you might want to consider doing a guest stint at another site. Normally, this is a site that promotes your industry or certain elements of a business. For this to be a success you want to write about matters where you’re a subject matter expert. By doing so you bring out the best in yourself. As a result, readers see your strengths.
Final Thoughts
These are only a few of the unique ways to grow your small business this year. Try them out to see which ones are a success.
