4 of The Most Common Business Growth Challenges and How to Overcome Them
1. Relying Too Heavily Upon Paid Advertising
Most business owners feel the only way to consistently grow their business is through paid advertising and managed SEO.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
New customer acquisition comes at great expense to your business. It requires a lot of testing to get results and constant adjustment to maintain them. It’s not getting any easier and CPA costs continue to rise.
On the other hand . . .
Each of your existing customers is essentially their own platform, each with their own network. Customers as a Platform™(CaaP) is an entirely new way to generate business and more profitable business at that.
In the past, it was very difficult to tap into your customers’ personal networks. But not anymore.
So, why do most businesses still rely so heavily on paid advertising?
The vast majority of business owners gain experience working in an established business before venturing into business on their own. When venturing out on their own, they tend to replicate what they’ve learned in the previous business.
As a result, many businesses simply do what others have done before them. Advertise!
Google has replaced the Yellow Pages and social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have replaced newspaper and print ads, but reliance upon advertising remains remarkably the same.
Isn’t it time to break the mold?
2. Not Driving Sales Through Customer Communication
If you’re like most businesses, you’re overlooking the value of your customers’ emails and phone numbers.
Most business only use email and SMS for appointments, order receipts and confirmations. Far fewer provide a monthly email newsletter.
That’s just scratching the surface.
You should be communicating with your customer on a personal level on a regular basis. Not doing so is costing your business every month.
Why?
Frequent and Consistent Customer Communication Drives More Revenue.
You need to be communicating with your customers on a regular basis. There’s no better communication channel than email. Email marketing produces a higher return on investment than any other form of marketing, producing $36 for every $1 spent (according to Litmus.)
Your communication needs to be aligned with content your existing customers, clients, patients and members can digest on social media. Why social media? Because social platforms are built for sharing. And unlike writing blog posts, social media content is best delivered in short snippets which make them easier to produce.
The emails and occasional SMS text messages you send should reference one or a group of these posts and encourage your existing customers to share them. You’ll want to highlight a piece of content that links to an opt in form or order page that delivers a coupon.
In other emails, you’ll encourage referrals, make special offers and recommendations.
3. Not Correlating Online Reviews To Revenue
They don’t have a system to generate online reviews consistently and lose business as a result.
Beyond the direct impact your existing customers have upon your revenue, one of the ways they contribute to it indirectly is the influence they have over other customers. Traditionally, that meant personal introductions to your business. Today, their influence is much greater.
People look to online reviews. They tend to trust them as much as those personal referrals.
Online reviews carry a lot of weight. People act upon them.
That’s why you need a constant flow of online reviews coming in. 85% of consumers think that local reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant (according to Search Engine Journal).
The Customer Revivification Method includes done-for-you review generation. We implement outreach campaigns that ask your existing customers for reviews. We send them Google’s “magic link” and ask them to leave an honest review. These requests become an integral part of our Customer Revivification Method communication.
Does it matter?
One of our self storage businesses was able to raise their Google My Business review star rating from 3.8 stars to 4.7 stars within 120 days. That was a result of becoming more responsive to reviews, posting more frequently to their GMB page and establishing a process for requesting reviews as part of their new customer onboarding. This resulted in moving from the bottom of the Google 3 pack to the top of it. And that helped lower their ad cost, which ultimately helped them generate more customers.
4. Not Generating Revenue From Social and Content
Social media isn’t as difficult as it may seem. To maximize your efforts, you need to post content consistently. You’ll want to post at least once in the morning and again in the afternoon. That provides an opportunity for customers on different schedules to see your posts and engage with them.
Here’s the formula that’s helped other businesses reduce their dependency upon paid advertising to generate business. . .
When you consistently post a mix of social content (following the INFOFAQ™ formula) to Facebook, Instagram and to your Google Business Profile, you’re sending signals to each of the social networks that your accounts are active and that helps boost your site’s organic search result as well.
Connecting with local influencers in your area.
There are hundreds of thousands of local influencers around the world, each with a significant following in their local town or city. Some have tens of thousands of engaged followers, but the vast majority have hundreds or a few thousand.
They’re easy to find.
Creating and posting content about your salon, your involvement in the community and providing helpful suggestions and advice can lead to new influencer generated customers.
One business owner we’ve worked with was able to establish a new line of products and services that became so successful over a 12 month period that the owner was able to sell his business for 7 figures. As a result, he was able devote his full attention to the product and service business and replace his income without a single patient visit.
That may not be your goal, in this practitioner’s case he was offered an opportunity to partner with another practitioner to expand their locations. But he decided to cash out and pursue his product and service business.
