Ideas on Maximizing Small Business Expansion

By Tierra Cookson


If one considers how poorly the economy has been on a global scale, for many small businesses the concept of growth could imply simply doing the same amount of business as before. You can look at your situation in several ways and choose either one or both. You could increase your marketing efforts with new tactics. You could also use new products and special offers to broaden your market. Entering related markets and expanding laterally will give you the most growth when it comes to the second strategy. When you market products that are connected, it offers a wide range of new marketing and advertising possibilities. Instead of focusing on the fact that your market might be shrinking or using the same methods you have until now, you need to concentrate on the exact opposite and adopt a positive attitude.

If your business has been operational, it's time to shake things up and try to find some new methods and places for doing things. What we mean is that it is time to start finding new markets and joining them. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of businesses within the US alone. When your business is mostly local, start learning about methods of expanding beyond your local borderline.

Increasing business on your website should include assessing how well your site converts. All of the different sites could stand to have higher conversions and the path to get to them is typically usability. Your bounce rate is a way to see where you stand currently. Then you need to check out the length of time a visitor spends on your site and whether or not he or she actually leaves the page on which he or she has landed. Each page needs to be easy for traffic to access.

A good example of this is your contact page and whether or not it contains a phone number. You can further optimize this by using links that will call you with a single click by your users and readers. The "click to call" is a smart phone feature that encourages people to call you.

If your business isn't online, then you need to do more offline advertising locally. You want to be a little more precise, though, and take advantage of ad tracking. It's not difficult to do and there are many ways to do it. Featuring one type of special offer per publication is one way to do it. Just about every town and city have the weekly shopper papers mailed free to residents. You simply need to make sure each paper has a different offer and you could even consider a coupon. It makes it easy for you then to discover which avenue is generating most of your calls and leads. You can entice readers to visit your site with the promise of more information on their special deal, which makes it even easier to test.

If you really want to expand your small business, you need to properly leverage each and every marketing arena that is available to you. The most commonly used methods make use of business relationships and alliances. It is possible to find joint venture possibilities within your local area or those that are nearby. Do not place geographic limitations on your business--think larger than you typically do.




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