Growth. Easily said, but hard to do in practice. Scaling up is the goal for most businesses but achieving that goal can take considerable effort; scaling your business more often than not involves investment, onboarding new members of staff, driving sales with new marketing and improving customer retention – all of which can take its toll. Here we will look at some of the best and easiest ways to grow your business to take it to the next level.

Know Your Competition

When you plan on growing your business and expanding into new markets, you will need to keep an eye on what your competition is doing. Research the kind of ad copy, landing pages and email marketing your competition is doing to target your demographic. Knowing what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong will give you a competitive edge. Try to find the ads they have been running for the longest to get insight into what’s working the best for them and incorporate that into your strategy.

Perfecting the Sales Funnel  

Scaling up your marketing is pointless if you don’t have an effective sales funnel in place. An effective sales funnel makes it possible to automate your marketing and scale quickly. What is a sales funnel? Imagine a real funnel and at the top going into that funnel are visitors to your business/website and those coming out at the end of the funnel are converted customers; all along that funnel you should have marketing strategies in place. Having this process solidly in place and working, from retargeting ads to follow emails, will make scaling up your marketing much easier and much more efficient.

Building Your Email List

Email marketing should be an important part of your marketing funnel. You should have a way of collecting potential customers’ email addresses as they land on your site. Now we are living in a GDPR world you want to make sure every potential customer has opted into receiving email marketing. Email marketing is a great way to keep people engaged with your brand, aware of new products and offers and retarget potential customers who have dropped out of the funnel.

Improving Retention with a Loyalty Program

On average it costs 3 times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to encourage existing customers to purchase again. Introducing an effective loyalty program is a great way to quickly boost sales and turnover. Creating an incentive for customers to come back to you and recommend you to friends will not only help growth but will also help you beat out the competition.

Invest in Cloud Technology 

As your business grows so will your IT needs. One of the greatest benefits of investing in cloud technology is it provides flexibility when it comes to IT infrastructure. Using the cloud to store/ back up your data makes scaling up and down for businesses much simpler and much more cost-effective. Also, although cloud computing was once considered a security risk, today it is seen as the answer to security concerns. The likes of Apple and Microsoft have invested millions into the cloud, bringing some of the most advanced encryption methods to the tech. Andre Pienaar, cybersecurity expert and investor, said in a panel interview last year “When cloud was once seen as the blocker to security, now it’s seen as the answer.”