If you’ve just started a business, you’re likely going to want to secure your clients for a steady stream of profit and returns. After all, more clients means more chances of being able to conduct better business and grow. However, being a small business can put you in quite a tricky spot, as not all small businesses get a lot of clients immediately. Of course, “immediately,” being the operative term. It might be challenging to get clients now as a small business, but not entirely impossible. Below are key tips on growing your small business client faster.
The Power of Small Businesses
First, here are a few numbers. Did you know that there are actually nearly 30-million small businesses situated
in the United States? Small businesses, despite the name, actually have a huge role to play in the economy – having employed 47.8-percent of nea
rly all workers in the country. Most small businesses have fewer than 100 employees, but these businesses are lucrative enough to create almost as much as 1.4-million new jobs in the country by 2014.
In fact, predictions state that perhaps more than half of the workforce in the country will be comprised of small business workers and freelancers due to demand to bigger control over their employment. Average startup capital to have a small business operate smoothly is $10,000 – which is no small amount to spend, which may also explain the desire to get new clients. And with such a potentially small staff, getting “big” isn’t exactly going to happen fast. So here are key tips on growing your small business clients faster:
- Improve your advertisement game: Perhaps the sign of a successful advertising campaign is to get the right kind of leads based on the kind of money you spend. Excellent advertising, however, is securing leads that will eventually always come back to your brand. Advertising is in itself costly because various channels can spread the word about your company to a lot of people real fast – but tap into these channels efficiently, and you’ll be getting clients for your small business much faster.
- For instance, if you’ve decided to franchise your business, advertising can be a good way for you to spread word around about your brand. Aside from needing tips on how to franchise your business, you’ll need better ways of tapping into channels where your customers will most likely be located.
- In this regard, you have to assess your resources and decide which channels for you are worth investing in or not. Try to make sure the kind of channel you’re tapping is actually something your target is viewing. For instance, if you’re franchising a restaurant, you might find more clients advertising for a cooking show than advertising in a cooking network.
- Newspaper advertisements still work, although depending on the kind of business you have. If your target demographic is people that are 55 years old and older, perhaps you should consider putting up ads in newspapers.
- Tap into the internet by ensuring you have a good website and various social media networks. Try to get brand appeal from your market by exploring various means of interaction, be it through posts, articles, or other forms of communication.
- Referrals and networking work: If you have a small team working with you in your business, it’s likely all of you would have some form ofassociation with past businesses or a network of contacts within the industry. You can actually tap into them to get more clients for your small business, as you’re going to be able to bank on their knowledge of how you work as “proof” of sorts that you’ll be able to conduct good business.
- Finding referrals is just beyond having a service that is “on demand,” but you need to be able to picture what kind of customer for you is “perfect” or “ideal.” This allows you to communicate to your network the kind of customer you’re looking for.
- Referral customers, should you get them, are valuable assets to maintain. They tend to purchase more over a span of time and may even become a good source of additional referrals.
- Team up with other businesses: This might be quite the unconventional method, but you actually very much have the option to team up with other businesses. You may have seen this happen a couple of times when big brands team up together to give unique offerings to their respective demographics. You can actually do the same type of collaboration with other companies to have better reach compared to just working alone.
- For instance, you can leverage your resources with another company’s through a host-beneficiary arrangement. In this type of transaction, another business with the same market will use their own database so they can push your business forward. In return, they may have some discounts or vouchers attached to your offering.
- Another potential part of the transaction is for you to offer commission or to pay for certain expenses while collaborating with the particular company.
- Strategic alliances help: Unlike teaming up, which was explained above, strategic alliances tend to be long-term partnerships that are built to last for a long period of time because of the mutual benefits it can bring to either party. This can be in the form of resources, the target market, or even the service offerings – one party’s assets can be another’s without compromising legal and business dealings.
- Alliances like these are far more long-term than host-beneficiary or short-term commitments. Good examples of these are ad agencies and web designers teaming up to send each other referrals for various clients that may need services.
Conclusion: Patience, Exploration, Innovation
If there’s anything the above could share about growing your small business clients, it’s that it’s important to first acknowledge the limitations of your current small business status and work your way towards improving your conditions first. Pursuing a ton of clients immediately as a small business can be challenging given your position as a small business, and as such you have to start yourself slow and at the same time leave openings for opportunities of expansion along the way. Hopefully the above tips have given you some rough ideas on how to go about this plan.
Cedric Errol
