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Learn how to grow your small business in 2023. From boosting organic visibility to improving conversion rate and streamlining the customer experience, discover new ways to stimulate your business growth and reach new heights.

Growing a business is not as easy as most people make it seem,

Study shows that more 20 percent of small businesses fail in their first year, and nearly half within the first five years. About 42 percent of these businesses fail due to a lack of market demand. Other reasons include a lack of finance, getting outcompete, and cost-related issues.

In this article, we covered 10 effective strategies for growing your small business this year. Whether you’re looking to attract new customers, scale your finances, beat the competition, or lower your customer acquisition costs, these tips will work for you.

So, let’s get started.

1. Rank Your Business On Google

Nearly seven in ten people begin their online experience with a search engine.

Google accounts for over 84 percent of the global search market, making it a great place to begin your business growth journey. Ranking your business on Google boosts your online visibility, improves traffic, and generates qualified leads for your business.

The good thing is leads from this channel have a staggering 14.6 percent close rate.

To put it in perspective, the average conversion rate for social media campaigns is three percent. So the SEO conversion rate is insane. It performs about four times better than social media.

You could pull off even better results with SEMrush, an online SEO and search marketing tool. 

How SEMrush Can Help

• Use the software’s keyword research tool to find all profitable keywords in your niche and the keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Perform competitive analysis to learn what your competitors are doing and replicate them.
• SEMrush has a keyword tracking feature. Use it to see how your keywords perform and optimize them for more results.
• Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking signals. Use this tool to profile your backlink and find link-building opportunities.
• SEMrush can analyze your competitors’ content and suggest optimization ideas to outrank them. 

How SEMrush Helped Minty Rank on Google

Minty is a Spain and UK-based SEO agency that helps in-house marketing teams generate more leads for their business by integrating SEO and digital PR into their marketing strategy.

However, the agency needed help with generating leads through organic search results. Minty overcame this challenge by integrating SEMrush into their Google data studio dashboards, thus helping their clients check their keyword ranking in real-time.

This action also helped Minty save more time by focusing on result-driven tasks.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush has three different plans for users to choose from.

• Pro plan ($119.95 monthly and $1,199.4 annually)
• Guru plan ($229.95 monthly and $2,299.4 annually)
• Business plan ($449.95 monthly and $4,499.4 annually)

Read More: How to Rank on the Google First Page In 2023

2. Learn What Customers Want

It’s a huge mistake creating products you think your customers would love.

Amazon learned the hard way when they built the Fire phone without first considering what their customers wanted. Instead of building what their customers wanted, they designed what Jeff Bezos loved. According to a member of the development team:

“We poured surreal amounts of money into developing it (Dynamic Perspective, one of the phone’s features), yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘because Jeff wants it.’” 

The product flopped; nobody wanted it.

Amazon sold less than 35,000 units two months after release, with a 2.6 rating. The company responded by dropping the price to 99 cents from the $650 base price. Also, they took a $170 million loss on the device and had over $83 million left in inventory. 

So, building for your customers can save you a lot of headaches. And our favorite tool for understanding customers’ wants is Interact Quiz Maker. It’s an interactive survey tool that helps you unmask your customers quickly.

How Interact Quiz Maker Can Help

• Create interactive, personalized quizzes to survey your customers.
• Integrate with your email marketing or embed it on your website to generate faster responses.
• Use the quiz results to discover your customers’ preferences and segment them.

Quinn Tempest Discovers Customer Needs With Interact Quiz Maker

Quinn Tempest sought to generate more leads for her new business, Create your purpose, through Interact Quiz Maker.

The results were phenomenal.

Tempest’s “what’s your entrepreneurial purpose” quiz has generated over ten thousand leads for her business.

You can do the same if you want to learn how to serve your clients well and meet their needs appropriately.

Interact Quiz Maker Pricing

• Lite plan ($39 monthly and $324 annually)
• Growth pan ($89 monthly and $636 annually)
• Pro plan ($209 monthly and $1500 annually)

3. Convert Website Traffic to Leads

Marketing is like fighting a war with several battles.

Generating quality website traffic is like winning half the battle, but the real victory starts when you start converting them to leads. In addition to making you competitive, it helps you maximize your ad spends and lower customer acquisition costs.

A common way most marketers do this is to offer lead magnets such as special discounts, product giveaways, and valuable eBooks. Lead magnets work, but they are becoming obsolete.

In its place, we use Collect.Chat to convert nearly 35 percent of our website traffic. Considering that the average lead conversion rate across all industries is 2.35 percent, this number is insane. Not just us; about 25,000 other businesses are using this tool.

Recommended For You: Get Steady Streams Of Organic Leads to Grow Your Business this New Year

How Collect Chat Can Help

• Create a chatbot that interacts with your website visitors.
• Request their contact in the course of the conversation.
• Embed the form on your blog posts and landing pages.
• Use Zapier to move the leads to your email nurturing sequence.
• Also, follow up the leads with phone calls.

It’s that simple. You can outsource your chatbot conversational copy to professionals.

Cigniti Converts Website Traffic to Leads Effortlessly

Cigniti, a software testing company, needed a chatbot to help convey their responses to their prospects for better lead generation. So, the company gave Collect Chat a try and saw outstanding results.

Using Collect Chat, Cigniti created an easy-to-configure chatbot that helped them understand the requirements of each customer that participated.

In no time, the company’s conversion rate rose to 40 percent. Thus, the company enjoyed the benefit of an additional lead magnet—a chatbot that made their automation processes significantly easier.

Collect Chat Pricing

Collect Chat’s pricing depends on the plan you choose:

• Lite plan ($24 and $216 annually)
• Standard plan ($49 and $420 annually)
• Plus plan ($99 monthly and $828 annually)

Recommended Post: Collect Chat Review 2023: How It Helps Me Convert Web Traffic to Leads

4. Nurture Leads with Emails

Now nurture your leads into paying customers.

It’s at this point you win the war. Your best bet is to use email automation. It’s an effective lead nurturing tool for converting leads into sales. Studies show that 72 percent of customers prefer communication with businesses via email.

So, your leads already expect you to reach them via this channel.

Also, nearly half of consumers said they would like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favorite brands. The conversion rate for this channel is also impressive—the return on investment for email marketing is about $40 for every $1 spent. 

We use Sendy for email marketing. It delivers straight to the inbox, and you can send more than 50,000 emails daily at no cost. But you might find it challenging to install the software. 

So, we recommend you use Constant Contact as an alternative.

Recommended For You: How We Made Six Figures In 21 days Just Sending Emails

How Constant Contact Can Help

• Send personalized emails to clients- including your customers’ names and other relevant information, to make it feel more like a one-on-one conversation.
• Segment your email list – create targeted campaigns by grouping your leads based on demographics, preferences, or past interactions.
• Create a compelling subject line – make sure your subject line is attention-grabbing and accurately reflects the content of the email.
• Include a clear call-to-action – direct your leads to take a specific action, such as visiting your website or scheduling a call.
• Create, test, and optimize – use A/B testing to try out different subject lines, email designs, and calls to action to see what your audience resonates best with.
• Track and analyze your results – use  Constant Contact’s reporting and analytics to monitor the performances of your email and make required adjustments.

Pro Tips: Adding videos to emails increases the click rate by about 300%. Use an engaging Youtube thumbnail image to encourage your subscribers to click through.

How Siena Farms Nurtures Leads With Constant Contact

Through a well-timed email, Siena farms, a family-owned vegetable farm, generated a tremendous increase in sales during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The pandemic period made sales difficult, especially with the stay-at-home orders. However, with Constant Contact, Siena Farms’ owner, Chris Kurth, was able to craft a well-timed email that skyrocketed sales in no time.

Constant Contact Pricing

• Core plan ($9.99 monthly)
• Plus plan ($45 monthly).

5. Develop Data-Driven Marketing Campaign Strategy

Data can help you eliminate guesswork from your marketing.

Businesses that employ data-driven strategies generate five to eight times the ROI of companies that do not. Using big data to understand your customers’ interests and what your competitors are doing can put you on the path to easy growth.

But the challenge is getting this data and processing them into actionable insights.

And that’s where Marketing Miner comes in.

With this tool, you can gain valuable customer and competitor insights to improve your search engine optimization and search marketing. Here is how to use it. 

How Marketing Miner Can Help

• Use the tool to discover all the keywords people are searching for and learn how they trend over time.
• Track your keywords ranking and keep an eye on your top 5 competitors to see how they perform in search results, including the pages and keywords bringing the most traffic to them.
• Use content gap analysis to gain insights to leap over the competition.
• Monitor brand and competitor mentions.
• Gain insight on everything your competitors are doing.

How Marketing Miner Helped PROSEO Media Build a Data-Driven Marketing Campaign

Before using Marketing Miner, the PROSEO Media team needed help compiling results due to the many tools they used.

However, with Marketing Miner, the firm has had a well-structured report compilation process for easy sending via email.

Marketing Miner Pricing

• Miner plan ($29 monthly)
• Digger plan ($59 monthly)
• Machine plan ($99 monthly)

Recommended For You: Marketing Miner Review 2023: How It Helps Us Plan Data-Driven Campaigns

6. Leverage Content Marketing

Content marketing helps you answer all your customers’ questions.

It is also an important channel for building trust and nurturing relationships. Content marketing is one of our favorite strategies for targeting customers at every stage of their buying journey—awareness, consideration, and decision, and generating quality leads.

You can learn more about this strategy in this article.

Additionally, creating original content consistently can position your brand as an industry authority and get you tons of quality backlinks. It also improves your chances of ranking for many keywords, boosting your organic online visibility. 

You can use Surfer SEO to write articles that read well and rank high. The tool will provide you with relevant keywords and the number of times you need to use them in your article to outrank competitors. Learn more about how the tool can help you create content that ranks higher on Google.

Recommended for you: how to create compelling content your customers will love

How Surfer SEO Can Help

• Keyword research: Use Surfer SEO to analyze the top-performing content for any given keyword to outrank them.
• Content optimization: Surfer SEO lets you analyze the on-page optimization while writing content and see recommendations for improving it.
• Competitor analysis: Gain powerful insights from your competitors’ content to creating one that stands out.
• Auditing: Surfer SEO has auditing tools to help identify issues in your website’s content.

How ClickUp Uses Surfer SEO for Content Marketing

ClickUp is a relatively new player in project management and competes with several other firms with more authority.

However, with the help of SurferSeo, ClickUp has been able to publish hundreds of articles and increase its blog traffic by 85 percent in just 12 months.

SurferSEO has helped Clickup by providing SEO recommendations, actionable data, and a simple way to optimize content.

Surfer SEO Pricing

• Basic plan ($59 monthly and $588 annually)
• Pro plan ($119 monthly and $1,188 annually)
• Business plan ($239 monthly, $2,388 annually)

You May Like: Surfer SEO Review 2023: How It Helps Us Rank on Google

7. Invest in Quality Backlinks

You’ll need tons of backlinks to grow organically.

Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking signals. Several SEO professionals believe they are the third. Google places so much weight on backlinks because they see them as an endorsement and vote of confidence, especially those from authority websites. 

Getting quality links is not as easy as it sounds. It is probably the most challenging aspect of search engine optimizations and SEO professionals’ nightmare. However, with Links Management, you can source quality backlinks to hit the ground running immediately.

How Links Management Can Help

• Link Management has a huge inventory of thousands of high DA sites for every niche.
• Source high DA backlinks from authoritative domains.
• Use the article backlinks to create a natural, trusted backlink profile.
• Automate your backlink building.

How Links Management Helped Inspire Digital Agency Implement Quality Backlinks

With the help of Links Management, Inspire Digital Agency tripled its leads and experienced increased internet visibility. Since using Links management, the SEO firm has also ranked top 5 in Google and Yahoo searches.

Links Management Pricing

Links Management offers a plethora of quality backlinks at different price rates, depending on the domain authority option you choose. You’ll pay $6.72 monthly or a one-time fee of $47.04 for backlinks with DA 40.

The prices get higher as the domain authority increases.

Additional Reading: Adsy Review 2023: How I Used It to Build Quality Links

8. Have a Browser Abandonment Strategy

A browse abandonment occurs when a shopper visits your website, looks at your goods and services but leaves without adding an item to their cart.

You can reduce this by reigniting your customers’ interest in your offerings when they want to leave. We use exit pop-ups for our browser abandonment strategy. The technology tracks visitors’ mouse movement to detect when they want to leave without adding to the cart.

It then pops an offer to visitors to draw them back to the site.

Recommended Post: Exit Intent Technology: How It works and how it can grow your business

You could use Poptin or OptinMonster to implement this strategy.

How OptinMonster Can Help

• Implement exit intent in your product details or landing pages to minimize abandonment.
• Discover what works best with the A/B test feature. Try different headlines, pop-up designs, and CTAs to see the version that performs best.
• Use a countdown timer to build a sense of urgency and encourage visitors to act now.

How PodBike Reduced Browser Abandonment 

PodBike, a futuristic vehicle manufacturing company, used OptinMonster to increase conversion rates by encouraging website visitors to subscribe to newsletters, thus growing the company’s email list.

After just one OptinMonster campaign, PodBike experienced an increase in conversion rate from 4.46 percent to 13.3 percent and a total conversion rate of 18.22 percent.

OptinMonster Pricing

• Basic plan ($108 annually)
• Plus plan ($228 annually)
• Pro plan ($348 annually)
• Growth plan ($588 annually) 

9. Optimize Your Landing Pages for Conversion

You can generate tens of thousands of traffic without getting enough leads.

If you are experiencing this, then you might want to optimize your landing pages for conversion. The several ways you can do this are by improving your page load speed, reducing texts on the page, providing authentic social proof, and offering one call-to-action to avoid confusing visitors. 

Of course, the best way remains to learn how visitors are interacting with the site to identify all the frictions and streamline navigation to improve their experience. HotJar is our go-to tool for conversion rate optimization. It provides insights that can help you optimize your conversion.

How Hotjar Can Help

• Learn how visitors interact with your website with Hotjar’s heatmap and session recording features.
• Optimize form files and improve form completion rate using Hotjar’s form analytics.
• Design a simplistic and decluttered webpage to avoid overwhelming visitors.
• Use Hotjar’s feedback polls to get direct feedback from visitors on their experience using your website.

How Every.org Converts Leads from Their Landing Page

Every.org, a donation platform aiming to make donations to nonprofits easy, increased donations to charities by 29.5 percent with the help of Hotjar

Using Hotjar’s integration with Slack, Dave Sharp, every org’s product designer, and his team set up an alert system that helped them record donors’ experiences to help them fix issues users encountered and squash bugs in the website.

This method made it easier for users to donate without encountering problems, thus improving donations by 29.5 percent.

Hotjar Pricing

Asides from the basic plan, which is free, Hotjar paid packages to come in two alternatives:

• Plus plan ($39 monthly and $384 annually)
• Business plan $99 monthly and $960 annually)

10. Minimize Cart Abandonment

About 70 percent of shoppers will visit your online store but will not add to the cart.

Cart abandonment is a big issue several eCommerce brands struggle with. Finding ways to address it can scale your revenue effortlessly and reduce customer acquisition costs. 

Of course, you can’t force people to buy from you, but you can nudge them closer to checkout. The best way is constantly engaging them on their favorite social media platform, reminding them of their shopping carts, and incentivizing them. 

In such situations, a tool like ShopMessage can help you.

The tool works great for us. Data from the company shows that ShopMessage generates about 81 percent open rates and 34 percent click rates. It also performs ten times better than email.

Insane!!! 

How ShopMessage Can Help

• Use ShopMessage to send automated messages to customers who abandoned their carts, encouraging them to complete their purchases.
• Create customer review sections on your product pages to build trust and increase the likelihood of purchase.
• Use retargeting ads to remind customers of items left in their carts and encourage them to return to your website to complete their purchases.

How Grunt Style Minimized Cart Abandonment 

Grunt style is an American brand renowned for delivering high-quality patriotic wear. The company and its agency, MuteSix, were seeking ways to convert website visitors to customers and reduce shoppers’ cart abandonment rate.

Grunt Style used Shop Message’s smart prompts to engage customers, and ShopMessage flows to prompts to follow up with product announcements, cart abandonment reminders, and post-purchase messages.

Grunt Style made thousands of dollars in sales on their first day using ShopMessage to turn cart abandoners into lifelong customers.

ShopMessage Pricing

• Professional plan ($9 monthly but increases depending on the number of contacts you’re paying for)
• Enterprise package (available only when you contact the website).

FAQ

What is a business growth strategy?

A business growth strategy is your firm’s plan for overcoming current and future challenges in realizing its expansion goals. Your growth strategies include improving your products and services, acquiring assets, and increasing your market share and revenue.

Which tools do I need to grow my business?

There are several tools you can use to grow your business. They include:

• Google Analytics
• SEMrush
• PitchBox
• Hootsuite
• Constant Contact, etc.

These tools perform lots of invaluable tasks like helping you rank on google, optimize your landing pages, and convert leads to sales, among other functions.

Related Post: 35+ absolutely must-have business tools to grow your online business fast.

How do I create a business growth plan?

An effective business plan provides constant growth for your firm. To do so, you must:

• Set goals
• Ensure your workforce is part of your plan
• Regularly review your targets
• Develop effective report systems for easy dissemination of information.
• Plan for cost control

How can I measure the success of my business growth strategies?

You can measure your business growth strategies’ success by analyzing financial statements, customer satisfaction levels, number of clients, performance review results, etcetera.

A positive result from analyzing these criteria means your business has grown.

However, before doing this, you must determine your growth goals and your business’s previous position before checking for improvements.

Should I conduct a SWOT analysis for my growth strategy?

Yes. Conducting a SWOT analysis is a brilliant idea and should be part of your business planning process because it provides a framework for reviewing your company’s current position and direction.; Thus highlighting your weaknesses and strengths.

A SWOT analysis will help put you on the right track and minimize the problems you might encounter.

How do I scale my small business?

Generating more leads, retaining the existing workforce, and boosting your workforce productivity can help you scale your small business. Luckily, several online resources can put you on the right footing.

However, email us if you need professional lead generation workflow optimization.

Do I need strategic partnerships to support my business growth?

Yes. Strategic partnerships are essential if you want to grow your business at scale. Experts supporting your growth journey enable you to ramp up your capacities to pursue your strategic goals. It also lets you put your workforce to their most productive uses.

Growing Your Business in 2023: Now, What Next?

Growing a small business post-pandemic is not a walk in the park.

But with the strategies outlined here and the recommended tools, you could pull it off effortlessly. However, it’s important you don’t rush things. We recommend taking them one step at a time to enable you to track how they are impacting your growth.

Most of the tools here have a free plan. Begin with them and upgrade only when necessary.

Recommended For You: Free Business Templates to Streamline Your Workflow this New Year

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Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).