Like most teenagers, I started a small t-shirt business. But after 8 months, my sales stagnated such that I had to do something immediately (a sad tale of how to grow a small business).

I approached one of my peers (with a successful business experience of 10 years) for some tips and how to jump-start my business to a new level.

Luckily, his help landed me a better business model (with 40% MORE Sales, 2x Customers, and Better Opportunities). I find the tips not only suitable for my business but worth sharing with you.

These tips are a way forward for how to grow a small business with limited budgets, reach, and opportunities to reach a higher level of growth.

So, let's check them out!

12 Simple Steps of How to Grow a Small Business

Before I jump to discuss tips. I divide business functions into four essentials:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Strategy
• After Sales

All of these areas shall work in synergy to make the business a great success. Even if one area lacks, the other gets affected.

So, make sure that you follow the tips of each section and optimise your business model.

1. Create a Sales Funnel

Having a sales funnel is an excellent strategy to maximise sales in the initial stages.

Sales funnels help in making purchases automatically. The customer gets hooked into one of the given offers and generates sales.

This is why sales funnels should be carefully designed to gather maximum customers.

Here, a trial and error approach works better to find the best sales funnel for your business.

So, ensure you create an optimum sales funnel in the initial stages of your business.

2. Understand Your Customers

THINK OF A MOMENT: you open a tea cafe in a place where your target market is of 50-year-old individuals in love with coffee. Will you be able to sell there?

No, definitely not. The target market doesn't match the product.

Therefore, understanding the target market and customers is essential for your business. You need to understand the taste and types of your customers. What are their purchasing power and other things? This will help you to adjust your business according to your customers.

For this purpose, you must conduct different feedback loops like direct feedback, customer reviews, and monthly surveys, which keep you aware of your customers.

3. Analyse Your Competitors

In the initial stages, competitors' research yields much. You understand what works for your competitors and how they deal with problems. Also, it leads you to position yourself in the market. This will increase your chances of surviving and growing in the market.

For competitive research, you need to undertake several steps that include: knowing the customers of your competitors, analysing their sales funnels, understanding their strategies, and finding out areas of improvement in their business.

4. Focus on Numbers

Always focus on numbers.

As the famous business 80/20 principle states that 80 percent of all sales come through 20 percent of customers, you need to optimise your business on numbers.

Numbers help you find out what customers you need to focus on and how you can optimise your business for them. Numbers also help you find out where your business lacks and where the new strategy for marketing needs to be implemented.

This way, your business reaches an optimal level and runs better than before.

5. Test Multiple Marketing Techniques

Marketing testing is one of the effective techniques that help grow a business.

In marketing testing, one marketing technique is pitched against another, and the results are compared. The technique which performs better is implemented.

Popularly, brand storytelling, video marketing, digital pr, and surround sound marketing are effective. But there are tons of others that you can follow.

However, you need to ensure that you aggregate enough data to make marketing decisions. Often, the results are inadequate due to fallacies in data collection.

6. Reach Out to New Markets

With the internet, there is a rise of digital selling platforms i.e, Amazon, eBay, and Shopify, that can sell your product to any market.

You must get maximum output from such platforms and offer your product to different markets.

For this, you can hire virtual assistants who manage your business accounts in multiple countries.

Other than this, you can also collaborate with other ventures and directly launch your products in different markets.

Remember that the more you diversify your customers, the more you increase your chances of survival.

7. Leverage Social Media

With billions of people's reach, social media presents itself as an effective medium for low-cost marketing and brand awareness. It creates familiarity with the product with different forms of advertisement, leaving a stark imprint on customers.

How to grow a small business is a matter of how much a business leverages social media through brand strategy. It must incorporate multiple strategies ranging from influence marketing to cultural marketing.

Taking leverage of social media, they can achieve much more without spending much.

8. Develop Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships offer unlimited benefits to new businesses if formed at the right time.

Ensure Personal & Professional Development

With strategic partnerships, a new business gains a competitive edge over other businesses. It reduces risk factors and mitigates loopholes due to shared development. In particular, the strategic partnership results in better off.

The process of entering into a strategic partnership requires the synchronisation of both companies in objectives based on comprehension, communication, and collaboration (3Cs).

Therefore, to attain unlimited benefits, new businesses should develop strategic partnerships.

9. Manage Risks

Risk management is important for the survival of any business -, particularly how to grow a small business.

In any economic environment, there are multiple variables that, in any instant, downturn the whole business and destroy it. These variables include politics, internal risks, interest rates, and sometimes weather as well.

To prevent such risks, businesses should establish risk management systems that not only prevent businesses from collapsing; rather, they function to promote sustainable growth.

10. Don’t Hesitate from Taking Loans

It’s a common conception — rather misconception — that loans should be avoided due to harsh conditions.

However, loans are detrimental in providing working capital to grow a business. With more money, the business can hire more employees, buy more inventory and enhance customer service leading to Its expansion.

Regarding harsh conditions, banks support new businesses and have multiple plans for their growth.

So, think about loans in terms of advancing your business.

11. Ensure Personal & Professional Development

How to grow a small business is about managing budgets for professional and personal development, which is nearly impossible for some. Yet, development is critical for productivity and increasing efficiency and can’t be ignored.

Fortunately, there are tons of opportunities available that offer development in the form of online courses, collective training, and tools at much cheaper prices.

12. Retain Customers to the Last Extent

For new businesses, customer retention holds paramount importance.

Due to loyalty to the business, a customer buys a product and then refers to others. This way, the customer base increases, and so are the revenues.

Without customer retention, the business limits its chances of growth and ultimately falters.

Like, it takes upto 4 times the resources to gain a new customer than to retain the older one.

Thus, the efforts to retain customers shall remain core to business strategy.

But how can you retain your customers?

Well, there are three ways to do that.

• Effective After-Sale Service: After-sale service is very important. You must provide all the after-sale service to your customers, and their concerns should be minimised.

• Develop a CRM(Customer Relation Management System): For customer retention, if there is one central thing, it is the customer relation management system. They help you to track your prospects. You can track other sales opportunities and store data of employees and customers. One of the biggest benefits is that the data gets stored in one place, so your employees and you can access it whenever needed.

• Establish a Customer Loyalty Scheme: Customer loyalty schemes are important, especially if you are running a niche business. In these schemes, you establish certain perks and privileges for existing customers. Bonuses and other privileges that the customer becomes a part of the family. This is a great way to retain customers.

These are the popular ways to retain customers that you can follow. You can also do all three at once.

Conclusion:

How to grow a small business often involves problems in sustaining and expanding. However, there are many ways to GROW your business if you optimise sales, strategy, marketing, and after-sales (as I did).