Has your company been maximizing its potential so far this year? If not, don’t stress too much — there is still plenty of time to get on track so that this year turns out to be your most successful years yet. A few simple steps and adjustments can make a huge difference. Check out five of the most effective strategies for growing a business.
1. Virtualize Your Business
Virtual businesses embrace the concept of working remotely. Why limit job candidates to a 5 or 10 miles radius when you hire? In the age of shared drives, video conferencing, and online to-dos, managing employees remotely has never been easier.
This doesn’t mean that your entire staff needs to be remote, but why not broaden your employee talent pool by hiring based on skill set instead of location? For a company to achieve virtual stardom, it must not only hire very self-motivated individuals, but also must work hard at keeping these virtual team members highly interested and involved.
There are lots of free and low-cost internet management tools such as Asana and Trello, which in lieu of meetings and conferences, keep workers in the loop on tasks and deadlines. Skype and Google Hangouts are also inexpensive and streamlined tools for facilitating virtual meetings. The world has indeed become flat.
2. Use Your Socials the Right Way
Nowadays, having an online presence is critical to a company’s branding. One of the easiest and fastest ways to create some immediate online brand legitimacy is by creating social accounts and keeping them consistently updated. Your socials may not become the number one driver of traffic right off the bat, but they can be a very effective tool for giving your company an online voice.
It’s also a good idea to have separate goals and objectives for each social media account so that each one can be leveraged for its individual strengths. For example, Twitter is great for finding and connecting with people that may be interested in your product or service, while Google + is more about engaging in niche communities and getting into topical online discussions. Perhaps you want to use your Facebook page to garner as many “likes” as possible, while at the same time leveraging LinkedIn’s unique ability to introduce and connect you with the top players in your industry.
3. Increase Your Networking Prowess
Have you been archiving emails about industry conferences and workshops? As nerve-wracking it might be to mingle and attend events where you don’t know anyone, these events can be invaluable when it comes to improving your image and meeting new and important contacts. Attending as many of these events as you can should greatly increase your influence within your industry. Alternatively, you can check out networking apps like LetsLunch that sets up lunch dates for you with other like-minded professionals. What’s most important is that you get your name out there!
4. Grow Your Client Base
As mentioned earlier, virtualizing your business is a great way to diversify your employee talent pool by allowing you to hire people in different geographic areas. But what about your client base? Are you doing everything you can to capture all those who would be interested in your service or product?
Some due diligence and research on your own can help determine what demographics and locations your company could better attract. Think of creative and affordable ways you might be able to capture these audiences. If you have a website, try doing some on-page and off-page SEO work to help rank for specific keyword phrases. This might take time, but organic traffic is worth it!
5. ROI is King
Opportunity cost is an art. All successful business owners have to reinvest in growth, and during this process it’s important to keep in mind that every dollar spent in one area is a dollar less spent in another.
Priority should always go towards the investments that will improve the product or service you are offering as well as to the ones that are proven to directly correlate with a positive ROI. Other types of investments, such as certain types of advertising, have ROIs that may be less well defined for your market and should be invested in with greater caution.
It’s now up to you to determine where your company will be at the end of 2015.
Written by: Jon Bachrach Source: www.AllBusiness.com
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THE MARK CONSULTING & MARKETING