For a lot of business owners, even though they’ve seen their company grow to a successful small enterprise – they still can’t seem to get it moving past its current potential. While you may want to grow your business, you may not understand how you should go about it. If you’re feeling like your business is stuck in a rut, you might not realize that there’s more to growth than just selling harder. In the article, we’ll take a look at how you can “think outside the box” when growing your business, and why it will make a difference – see for yourself!
Products Outside the Box
Whatever your industry, chances are if you want to grow your sales, and can’t, you’re probably just trying to sell more of the same products. If you can extrapolate on the products and services you currently offer, and expand into some new areas – growing you customer base won’t be as difficult as you might think. For example, if you are currently selling lawn care equipment and gardening tools to your local community, why not consider expanding into some light carpentry tools as well? Your customers don’ only work on their lawns, and they already buy from your store because your customer service is good, and they trust you. Don’t limit yourself by limiting your product line – it’s an easy way to stay stuck in the rut. It is important not to soil your brand image by making people think you’re a whole new business now, with a different set of expertise. Just start small, and include advertising that features both families of product line.
Marketing Outside the Box
For business owners who don’t love marketing, they tend to stick with what works. Instead of always trying new things, and expanding the marketing that brings them business, they’re more likely to just use the same channels over and over again. Well, if this accurately describes your marketing approach, than perhaps you shouldn’t expect to grow beyond your current potential. Consider trying some new mediums, or experimenting with new technologies in your current marketing medium. For example, if you’ve been sending mass direct mailers to your community, consider using variable data digital printing to personalize each piece – and make it unique to the individual customer, you can include their name – or even a picture of the unique last product they bought on each piece. This will bring them back faster, and more effectively for more order revenue in your pocket.
Customers Outside the Box
Beyond your products, you might be limiting your business by limiting the type of customers your targeting for your store – without even realizing it. What are you asking people to do when you advertise your products? If you aren’t asking the right people to take the right actions, they won’t respond. For example, if you sell tools, and all of your advertising says things like “you want to buy tools, but you don’t want to tell your wife about the money your spending on tools – get our payment plan card.” This completely ignores that women buy tools as well, and they certainly are not about to buy them from your store, since you deliberately ignored them in your advertising. Whether that means running a different set of ads to your different and unique demographics, or simply cutting the limiting advertising altogether – you’re seriously pigeonholing your customer base with marketing like that. Think outside the box on your customer base, and grow your business out of the rut.
Accept Change
What all of this is really amounting to, is that you can’t expect your business to grow, and to make a substantially larger amount of money if you don’t want to accept the change that’s going to come along with that growth. You’re going to need to see your marketing, your products, your customers, and ultimately your brand image change and evolve in order to get the increased revenue you obviously want. Accept the change in advance, embrace its potential – and then invest the energy of truly growing your business. This is the attitude that’s going to take your small local business to the national scale. This is the attitude that’s going to make your small child of a company, into the well rounded adult it deserves to be.
