What is the best way to take your business to the next level? Depending on who you ask, you’ll probably hear something like “do more marketing,” “invest in
I could keep going on and on with a list of things you should do, but you’ve probably heard them all already.
This article will be sharing some “little known” ways to take your business to the next level. You’ve probably heard most of the things on this list but you’re probably ignoring them because you think they won’t make any real impact. Or would they?
Here are 5 little known, but powerful ways to take your business to the next level.
# 1. Focus on customer marketing
“Customer marketing is a strategy used to capitalize on opportunities by increasing the profitability of each client” – Wisegeek
Trust me, this is not another marketing buzzword but the most powerful secret of the very best companies.
When all other companies are struggling with growing their company by 30% monthly by investing more into marketing, you can keep reducing your budget and still get better results with a 10% growth. The irony of this is that your growth rate keeps increasing as you keep reducing your marketing budget, to the point where you no longer have to spend on marketing any more.
Here’s why:
- Your customers become your best advocate; by investing more into satisfying them and creating a better experience for them, they will start telling their friends about you.
- Each customer spends significantly more with your business: a recent Helpscout infographic has revealed that loyal customers are worth 10 times as much as their first purchase. The same infographic revealed that 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company due to bad customer experience. In other words, focusing on creating a better experience that makes at least half of your customers loyal to you could improve your company’s worth by up to 600% while doing otherwise could reduce it’s worth by up to 86%
One thing is clear though, no marketing tactic is as powerful as having the right customers that trust and are really loyal to you. They keep spending with you and recommending their friends and your business keeps growing without you having to do anything than to invest in customer experience.
# 2. Leverage multimedia content more effectively
When they say that multimedia is the future of marketing, most people start giving excuses like “I can’t make videos,” “I’m not good at multimedia etc. Those are all silly excuses, seriously.
The foremost presentation sharing website online, Slideshare, gets over 60 million unique visitors and over 3 billion slide views every single month. They are just that big; however, very few people are aware of the fact that they could have their slides hosted on Slideshare and capitalize on the exposure they get.
With the right tools – and I’ll be recommending a few – and with all the available data with you, it’ll only take a few hours to create your slide and have them ready to submit to Slideshare. It isn’t a video, you don’t have to talk or record your face and there are tools that make creating slides easy so there’s really no excuse for not benefiting from this.
Another kind of multimedia content you can benefit from is infographics. Of course, you’ve heard a lot about infographics before and how powerful they are for marketing, but how powerful can an infographic really be?
Data from Alltwitter.com has revealed that having infographics in your content can increase social shares by up to 832%; that’s 832% more exposure you could benefit from.
Tools for Creating Slides and Infographics:-
- EWC Presenter: EWC Presenter is a recently-released tool for creating slides, infographics and other forms of multimedia content; it’s still new and in beta but it’s very powerful. I’m recommending it because it’s easy to use and can also be used to create both presentations and infographics. It is also free.
- Piktochart makes it extremely easy for you to create appealing infographics; there are over 100 templates you could choose from and customize to create your own infographics.
# 3. Put more effort into reputation management
When you keep investing more in marketing every day, have you ever thought about the fact that a single blunder that you thought no one will pay attention to can bring your whole company down?
Very few people recommend effectively managing your reputation when you do business online, but it’s important to realize that the barrier to entry to use the internet is literally non-existent. Anyone can set up a blog today and start writing crap about your company. And those little “rants,” especially when they start ranking for your brand terms in Google, could actually be costing you new customers.
Not everyone will be able to hire a reputation management agency, so here are a few tips for you to effectively manage your reputation:
- Prevent a disaster. 99% of the reputation disasters your company can encounter can be prevented – when your hands are clean, it would be difficult for anyone to damage your brand.
- Handle things in a timely manner. When a customer is pissed and you don’t address issues quickly, things can easily get out of control. No one is insignificant and the seemingly small customer you’re ignoring could have the power to cause some real damage. Make sure you handle things in a timely manner.
- Have a blog and social media accounts. Also, make sure people know about them. This way, if there’s a major issue about your company, you can resolve it before things go out of hand by making an announcement on your blog and social media profiles.
- Set up instant Google Alerts for your brand name. This way, you know as soon as something is written about your brand and can step in immediately. This alone could resolve a lot of reputation issues your company could experience.
- Monitor your brand mentions on social media. This can also be done for free by creating Social Mention alerts for free.
- Dedicate a team to reputation management and social media or hire a reputation management agency to help you manage your company reputation.
The best way to manage your reputation is by preventing issues from happening, so don’t be careless when it comes to your brand.
# 4. Automate the little things
The little things matter and you could save hours of your time and days of your sanity by automating them.
What exactly should you automate?
- Blog content and newsletter. Have them written and scheduled in advance so that you don’t have to worry about them or do it in a rush.
- Paying your team in advance. Especially if they are on a payroll, you can save yourself a lot of time by automating payment. If this sounds new to you, then you might want to familiarize yourself with ACH.
- Paying your bills in advance. This includes payment for your hosting, newsletter,
SEO tools etc. You can save yourself significantly more by paying for up to a year in advance. For example, ask yourself how much it’ll cost you if your site goes down for a whole day because you forgot to pay your hosting bill. Depending on how much revenue your company makes, it’ll probably be a lot more than you will have to spend paying for a whole year of hosting.
There are a lot more things you could automate but, hopefully, you realize how powerful automating little things can be.
# 5. Embrace speed in all aspects
Data has revealed that a one second delay in your site speed could cost you 7 percent in conversions; the slower your site is, it also eventually creates a negative experience for your visitors and as a result sends them away.
The faster your site can be, the better; not only does it have
If you have any other suggestions to grow your business please let me know in the comments below.
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