There are hundreds of techniques for ramping up revenue numbers if you own a small business. In fact, it’s much easier to manipulate income when your organization is small. Once you reach a certain size, it’s nearly impossible to obtain the kinds of percentage gains you can get while you’re new and still growing. It’s simple math. If company XYZ, a new, micro-business, posts first-year revenue of $45,000 and second-year revenue of $90,000, there’s been a 100 percent increase in the dollar amount. No Fortune 500 firm could ever dream of pulling off something like that. A five or ten percent revenue growth figure is considered pretty amazing, but 100 percent? It just doesn’t happen.
All these great possibilities are the result of being new, not to mention small. When you’re a tiny entity and add 20 new customers, it’s relatively easy to double or even triple first-year financial figures. This same phenomenon is the reason so many startups try multiple approaches for building revenue, profits, and sales volume. The potential is virtually unlimited. Here are some of the most effective strategies for bumping up all the numbers that matter.
Give Speeches and Hold Webinars
When you put yourself out there in the community and offer to do unpaid presentations on topics you know about, you’re turning yourself into an accepted expert in the field. It’s easy enough to do the exact same thing in an online environment by offering free webinars to interested parties. Consider using your email list or buying a list and sending out invitations. Once the accept rate is where you want it to be (30 attendees for a webinar is about the minimum to make your time investment worth it), give an excellent presentation, take questions, and collect contact data from walk-ins. After you do a few of these, especially the in-person ones, you’ll get the hang of it and will find your voice, as acting coaches say.
Understand Search Intent
Any entrepreneur can multiply revenue with intent SEO methods. What are those? Most everyone knows about search engine optimization (SEO), but few comprehend the power of intent SEO methods. Of course, both approaches are about bringing traffic to your site. That’s a given. But what happens to those elusive visitors once they arrive? Unless they make a purchase and add to overall revenue growth, they’re just warm bodies who appear and quickly disappear.
SEO is not only about putting your content at the top of search results. You need to be able to convert some of those visitors into paying clients. Intent SEO from Granwehr.com does just that, and it does so by studying the intentions of visitors. When you understand why someone came to your home page, it’s much easier to convert the visit into revenue. People are usually either looking for information, wanting to make a purchase, researching a product, or trying to find a particular website. When you tailor landing page content for one or more of those specific groups, your SEO efforts are much more likely to pay off.
Build a Network
Never stop networking. From the day you make the decision to open the doors, begin creating a relevant, useful network. Include anyone who has a passing interest in what you do or offer. Also include vendors, financial contacts, local business owners who might make good long-term partners, personal contacts, and more. If you are an active marketer, you’ll always be adding names to your network master file. Every so often, go through all the contacts in the file an categorize them in a meaningful way.
Give Items Away
Free samples are one if the most effective ways of bringing new clients to your door. It can also be one of the costliest ways, so be careful how much you give away and whom you give it to. Always carefully target special offers, discounts, and freebies. If, for example, you sell electric bicycles, think about using a promotional tie-in event in which you donate one or two bikes to needy local organizations to use in raffles or fund-raisers.
Use Email Campaigns
One of the oldest and most reliable ways of attracting business is an email campaign. Even more than two full decades after the first large-scale e-campaigns took off, companies of all sizes continue to use this common way to contact and bring in fresh customers. The beauty of this technique is that it’s both simple and free. Base your efforts on an address database, being careful to categorize names and not overlap promotional content. Send free offers and discounts to some, informational newsletters to others, and redeemable coupons to another group. There are hundreds of ways to slice and dice an email list for marketing purposes, so don’t ignore the potential of this low-cost approach to boosting the bottom line.
Write or Buy Content
Good content is the engine behind most marketing strategies. Whether its short-form ad copy, blog posts, articles, guest posts, reports, product reviews, or e-books, creating or purchasing excellent content will drive your profits higher. If writing is not your thing, hire someone to do the job for you. Compare prices, give try-outs to several writers, and then decide on one to use for long-term work.
Pay for Referrals
Make it clear to every one of your current customers, vendors, and key contacts that you are willing to pay for referrals. There are many ways to structure the payment. Some owners offer a flat fee to anyone who refers a new customer. Others take a more frugal approach by rewarding not with cash but with a percentage-off coupon on future services or products. It’s up to you, but just remember to be clear about how the payment works and what has to happen for it to kick in.
Be Smart with Business Cards
Avoid the temptation to overuse business cards. Instead, give them to people who have potential to drive customers to your door. Cards are relatively inexpensive, but it’s worth paying more for high-quality pieces that are memorable, look professional, and display your contact information prominently.