4 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Accelerate Online Business Growth This Quarter Focus on the right area, the right audience and the right type of advertising.
By Kc Agu
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The internet is growing at an insanely fast rate, and every future-thinking entrepreneur should rightly invest in making sure their brands are maximizing the internet to its fullest. Nearly all aspects of business are being aggressively pushed online. Filing systems have gone online. Offline advertising, or traditional advertising as we know it, has been overshadowed by online advertising. As far as traditional business processes go, you name it, and chances are, it's now online.
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This all points to the positive way the internet has changed how we do business. If the internet is changing things, how would you tune your business to rightly position yourself for more growth and better widespread promotion? Here are a few strategies to help you on your way.
1. Plan for specific growth.
Growth isn't guess work. Every growth goal must be deliberately planned and pinned down before it becomes achieveable. As an entrepreneur, you need to decide which aspect of your business you need growth in.
Narrow down your focus to just an armful of areas. Ask yourself which areas of your business need a thorough makeover in order to bring in more leads? Which areas of your business need to be advertised more? What areas are bringing in the more leads? You cannot answer all these if you don't monitor your numbers. Every serious-minded entrepreneur knows their numbers. And every entrepreneur should be able to use that data to see loopholes. Growth loopholes, however, are sometimes not easily visible.
The best way to know your business growth and numbers throughly is to study your business. Go through each of your online business verticals and jot down how much growth they added in the previous quarters. If you do it well, you'll have in-depth information about your businesses, ranging from which areas are bringing in the most leads to the areas that should be discontinued. From your final findings, I believe you can plot out a well-defined strategy for promoting your business online.
2. Experiment and utilize the right advertisement method.
Online promotion won't work effectively if you don't understand advertising. Almost all content online is created exclusively for marketing purposes. You would have to do some exploring to know which advertising methods best fit your business. Not every business model will flow with every advertising method. The advertising strategy I used for my freelancing startup wasn't the same for my cosmetic startup. Niches affect strategies.
This is where experimentation is highly needed. When I first started on my journey to make money online, I was skeptical about trying out new stuff. But I soon realized that the only way to reach more customers was to keep on experimenting until I found the winners.
It's from experimentating that I found out that hidden advertisement is hyper-effective for niche product launchings; that Mulpix gives me better insight to Instagram advertising and better use of hash tags than others I have seen; and that having the right personas in business will help you narrow down and get targeted customers.
Join the trend and experiment on advertising. Don't just stop there. Go the extra mile, understand how advertising works, and find out what type of advertising will work best for your type of business. The more you experiment with online advertising, the better understanding you will have about which type of advertising will work for your business and which ones won't. And the better you grasp this topic, the more promoted your brand will become online.
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3. Leverage growth automation.
The best growth techniques I know -- and sadly I had to learn the hard way -- is to automate your online business growth. As a freelancer, I keep coming across companies who are seeking to outsource more work in order to focus on the essentials. To them, it's better to spend money giving other people time-wasting tasks to manage than to equally focus on the important and time-wasting tasks, and lose out on potential income.
According to statistics, businesses are rapidly outsourcing more jobs. Do the same. Automate aspects of your online business that you know next to nothing about. Find ways to make sure you're only engaged with tasks you can confidently handle and are your areas of strength.
Business thrive when there is less noise. Fuzzle out the non-essentials. Look for virtual assistants to help with tasks you can't handle.
There are so many verticals to automate. The more you automate your online business promotion, the more time you have to focus on the company's growth and getting more clients on board.
4. Engage your potential audience.
I strongly believe that every business should have a blog (or a vlog). Developing insightful, original and relevant content online positions you as a thought leader within your industry and makes your readers perceive you as a trustworthy voice.
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When trust enters the scene, you automatically begin to get leads from the people who read your business blog. Without mincing words, Hubspot gets almost all their major leads from their business blog, and they have been able to grow their email list to a gigantic 300,000 vibrant marketers. Now, that's a lot of potential clients right there.
All this happened as a result of providing a solution -- which the Hubspot blog was readily doing. When your business starts a blog and focuses on answering every issue a potential visitor will have, you've instantly won a customer.
