Small Business Growth Strategies: 13 Tips to Grow Small Businesses

Small business owners have different growth strategies than big brands. Some are trying to rise to the top of their marketplaces; others are just looking to pay next month’s rent. At the end of the day, though, everyone wants to grow their business – it’s just a matter of how.

Here’s the good news: there are dozens of ways to increase revenue. You can launch marketing campaigns, fine-tune your sales playbook, and invest in technology that creates a better customer experience.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the best small business growth strategies to help you expand your business. We’ll also look at factors affecting small business growth and review tips for overcoming potential roadblocks. You’ll have everything you need to position your business for success this year and beyond.

Small Business Growth Strategies

Here are 13 small business growth strategies to help you improve your business. Some will encourage you to explore new marketing campaigns, while others will help you increase your productivity. Start with one or two, then add more strategies once you continue to see success.

1. Establish an online presence for your business.

If you don’t have a website, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity for your business. Websites are digital storefronts where you can promote products, teach people about your services, and attract new customers. They’re also how you get discovered by search engines. If you want people to find you through Google, you need to have a website and invest in SEO (more on this later).

Aside from a website, you should also claim and update your local listings. Local listings are profiles on sites like Yelp, Angi, and Google Reviews. When people search for new businesses in their area, these sites help them find reputable brands based on customer reviews.

The best way to manage these accounts is to use reputation management software. These tools connect your listings to one account so that you can read and respond to reviews in one place. You can also update your listings without having to switch between apps. That keeps your information fresh, which makes it easier to find online.

Tip: Use this online presence scanner to see how easy it is to find your brand online.

2. Explore new marketing channels.

To reach customers in new ways, you should start by exploring marketing channels you haven’t tried before. For example, if you don’t have a LinkedIn page, you could create one to connect with other business owners in your area. If you own a B2B company, that could be a great way to expand your professional network and find new clients.

Here’s where it helps to know your audience and identify the communication channels they prefer to use. Don’t try to convince them to adopt a new website or app – you’ll waste resources and time trying. Instead, look for emerging and overlooked channels you haven’t considered before, and slowly experiment to see how effective they are with your customer base.

3. Automate repetitive and mundane tasks.

Another way to grow your business is to make it more efficient. Automating tasks saves you time and frees up resources to use elsewhere at your company.

For example, email is a great place for automation. When someone schedules an appointment or purchases a product, they should receive an email confirming their action. With email marketing tools, you just have to write the email once, and the program will automatically personalize your messages and send them to your customers. It uses information from your CRM, so each email looks and feels like it came from you.

Other than email, here are a few other tasks you can automate:

• Collecting customer information on your website
• Posting to social media
• Reading and responding to customer reviews
• Creating and sending invoices

4. Tap into a new target audience.

When you manage a small business, most of your marketing campaigns are local. You advertise to people in your area because that’s where you sell your products and services.

Growing businesses need to think bigger. If you’ve tapped out of customers in your area, maybe it’s time to expand to a new location or look at other groups of people who are interested in your business.

For example, let’s say we owned a landscaping company that usually markets to residential neighborhoods. We could promote our brand in bigger cities, or move into a B2B market and provide our services to local businesses. Depending on your location and resources, both options are effective strategies for growing your business.

5. Launch a new product or service.

You can also grow your business by launching a new product or service. This strategy will attract new customers who want to try your brand and motivate existing customers to return to your business. They’ll hear about your new offer and want to learn more about it – especially if they’ve had a good experience with you.

Keep this customer segmentation in mind when you create your marketing campaigns. Customer segmentation involves organizing your customers into groups and delivering different messages to each one.

Let’s go back to our landscaping example. Instead of advertising in a new location, we could expand our services and provide snow removal and plowing. We could send mailers and emails to our existing customers and let them know about this new offer. Then, we could update our website and online listings so new buyers know that we offer both summer and winter services.

6. Create a customer loyalty program.

Loyalty programs are a great way to incentivize existing customers to buy from your brand. They keep people interested in your company and offer perks that differentiate you from other businesses.

You can reward customers with discounts, freebies, giveaways, or any other offer that will make them return to your business. The trick is understanding your audience and providing them with something they want to work toward. For example, I have the Dunkin app, which gives me points for every purchase. I am always working toward a free coffee, which incentivizes me to buy from Dunkin.

You don’t need an app to do something similar at your business. A punch card system will also do just fine. You can also use your CRM to track loyalty points and visits to your business.

7. Improve your business reputation.

Did you know that 97% of people read online reviews? Reviews are also a ranking factor that Google uses to determine which search results to show. They’re incredibly important to your online reputation and for getting discovered by search engines (and ChatGPT), too.

Here are a few ways you can improve your online reputation:

• Ask customers to write reviews.
• Respond to positive and negative reviews.
• Start a customer referral program.
• Share customer testimonials on your website.
• Collect customer feedback.

To execute these growth strategies, you’ll need a few tools. First, review management software can help you solicit new reviews. It also responds to comments on different review sites using AI, saving you time and providing a professional, speedy response to each customer.

You should also consider adopting a CRM to manage your customer referral program. CRMs are like digital contact books, where each customer gets a profile in your database, and you can record information like notes, interactions, website activity, and more. This data is incredibly useful for creating effective marketing campaigns that re-engage existing customers.

8. Partner with other brands.

Brand partnerships connect your company with other reputable businesses. By endorsing another brand, you signal to customers that both your businesses are trustworthy. It increases brand awareness and makes people more interested in each company.

The best partnerships are formed between brands that don’t compete directly but share a similar customer base. Uber and Spotify are good examples. These brands created a campaign where passengers could select music during rides rather than listening to the driver’s playlist. This campaign was effective because it solved a problem for Uber customers while incentivizing them to download Spotify.

Small business owners should look to partner with other brands in their area. For example, you could sponsor a local sports team or participate in a charity event. You’ll get your name out there and build a positive reputation within your community.

9. Scale up your content marketing.

Content marketing is a timeless growth strategy for attracting new customers. Content is any material that promotes your business and teaches people about your brand. It can be digital, like video, audio, and interactive web pages, or it can be physical, like print ads, magazines, and pamphlets for your business.

Try to experiment with both types of content marketing. Here are a few strategies you can try with online channels:

• Website: Create a blog, share business updates, announce new products or deals
• Social Media: Entertain or inform your followers, advertise to new audiences
• Email: Start an email newsletter, share seasonal offers
• Audio: Record a radio ad, start a podcast
• Video: Create a YouTube channel, record customer testimonials

Here’s what you can do offline:

• Advertisements: Rent billboards, buy TV ad space, create newspaper ads
• Events: Host a contest, throw a celebration or networking occassion, attend a trade show
• Word-of-Mouth: Use direct mail, share business cards

Marketing tools are really helpful for this. They identify the channels that are most effective for attracting and retaining customers. They also help you create attention-grabbing content that resonates with your audience. For example, this social media tool uses AI to create captions and comments for you:

10. Advertise on social media.

Social media is one of the most effective marketing channels for small businesses. It can engage existing customers and help you attract new clients.

Most brands take advantage of unpaid or “organic” social media strategies. These posts entertain your followers and keep them engaged with your brand. While it’s not impossible to grow your business solely through these efforts, they usually take time, and they’re better at retaining followers than attracting new ones.

If you want to quickly advertise to a larger audience, you should consider social media ads. Sites like Facebook and Instagram offer built-in ad platforms where you can market your business to new customers. These systems will help you set a budget and target a specific group of people based on location, age, interests, etc.

11. Improve your local SEO.

Most people use Google to find new businesses in their area. We pull out our smartphones, we Google, “best [insert business] near me,” then we look at something like this that shows us our top options:

The big question is: How do you get your business to appear in these top results? The answer is local SEO.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your site for local searches. Local searches are searches made on Google that target a specific location (think, “near me”). Your website and online listings need to show where you provide your services if you want to appear in these results.

Adding service area pages to your website is the best way to do that. These pages explain where you operate and the products and services you provide in those areas. Here’s an example from an HVAC company in California:

12. Invest in search engine marketing.

If you want to take a traditional approach to online advertising, you can invest in search engine marketing. One of the ways that Google makes money is by selling ad space to businesses via Google Ads. This program helps you create ads and share them as well.

Here’s how it works. First, you build your ad, then select your advertising channels (Google, YouTube, Gmail, etc.). After that, you’ll set a budget for how much you’ll bid on each keyword. Keywords are words and phrases that people search for on Google. If someone searches for a keyword you bid on (and won), they’ll see your ad in your search results.

Let’s look at a quick example. Here are some keywords that I bid on for a Google Ads campaign.

If someone typed in “mountain biking,” I would automatically submit a bid to have my ad appear in those search results. If I won, that person would see something like this at the top of their page: 

That’s the quick version of how Google Ads works. If you’re looking for a deeper dive, you can check out this guide here.

What impacts the growth of small businesses?

Growing your business is easier said than done. While these strategies are effective, there’s no guarantee your marketing campaign will succeed. Marketing doesn’t mean “set it and forget it,” so you need to monitor your campaigns closely and make adjustments in real-time based on challenges, roadblocks, and emerging trends that influence customer behavior.

Factors Affecting Small Business Growth

Here are a few factors, roadblocks, and challenges that affect small business growth:

• Time: Most small business owners are busy. Nearly half wish they could spend more time with friends and family, and over a third regularly miss get-togethers with loved ones. Time is a huge factor in business growth because most businesses are racing to keep up with the clock.
• Resources: Small businesses don’t have the same resources as larger businesses. They don’t have big teams to manage their marketing campaigns or endless budgets to promote their brands. They need to be strategic and efficiently utilize their resources.
• Experience: Sometimes, small businesses fail to grow because they don’t know how. Hopefully, these strategies and other resources on our blog can help you achieve your business goals.
• Competition: In some cases, small brands have to compete directly against bigger brands to stay in business. That can be challenging since bigger companies have larger budgets and more people to work with.
• External Factors: Sometimes, unforeseen circumstances set back your business. A machine breaks down, your car gets a flat, or a supplier changes their prices — these are things that are out of your control but still affect your bottom line.

Here’s the catch: this average changes every month. In September, it was -1.41%, and it was up to almost 4% last year. Don’t be alarmed if your business is under this growth rate, especially if it’s just a month or two.

Small Business Growth Chart

Here’s a chart showing the average revenue growth rate for small businesses. Notice how the average fluctuates between -6 % and 6%.

Source

Tips for Small Business Growth

Before we wrap up, here are some quick tips for small business growth:

• Your business should solve a customer problem. Lean into marketing campaigns that promote this solution.
• Segment your customers. Organize them into groups, then create campaigns that target different customers.
• Don’t follow marketing trends just because other brands are doing it. Think about what will actually resonate with your audience.
• Invest in business technology. It will help you be more efficient and scale successful campaigns.
• Ask customers for feedback. Use that data to inform your small business growth strategies.

Effective Growth Strategies for Small Businesses

If you want to grow your business, you need to assess your company’s performance and take steps to improve your customer experience. These small business growth strategies will help you attract new customers and generate repeat purchases at your business. Start with one or two and see how things go. Then, add more strategies over time and continue to feed your success.