7 Ways to Grow Your Online Business and Succeed in the Market

In due time, SME owners ask themselves: “Where to expand?” You can take your business to the next level by scaling. This is an adaptation to a growing workload. How do you know that your project is ready for a change? Will this expansion be profitable? Read the article to find out how to grow an online business thanks to marketing.

Growing your online business: how do you know you are ready to scale?

Scaling means restructuring your online business to adapt to a growing workload, improve internal processes, reduce costs, and increase revenue.

How do you know you are ready to expand? And how to make your online business grow? Besides the wish to reach the next level, you must spot the following signs:

— There are too many applications and not enough hands to process them;

— Auxiliary services and platforms become uncomfortable and imperfect: they lack the necessary functionality (a CMS, for instance);

— You do not have time to package the product for different audience segments;

— Your company has a stable income. Each month, you have enough money left after you have paid salaries and taxes and purchased goods/production materials. You can use it for expansion.

Mind that scaling will not pay off right away. You will need time to figure out the budget, get into the legal and accounting issues of the project, hire employees, modify the mobile or web app, or create a new one from scratch. 

The speed of expansion and the sequence of actions depend on a company and its goals of growth. For example, an online store can extend its assortment and add new items. It can “conquer” new markets, open branches in neighboring countries, and adapt its website for a multilingual audience. Changes demand thorough planning and step-by-step implementation of marketing actions. There are at least seven ways to grow your online business.

Way 1. Develop a marketing strategy for expanding business

To grow your online business, make potential customers learn about it and the products you offer. To achieve this, think of a winning digital marketing strategy for small businesses. As a rule, it includes paid and organic promotion in search engines and social networks.

The goal of paid marketing is to tell about a business to as many people as possible. This will attract customers’ attention to the brand and the company's products. To do this, you need to choose social platforms to advertise on (Facebook, Instagram, or others) and websites to place advertising banners. Buy ads from Google on a pay-per-click basis.

It's not just paid tools that allow you to get more brand awareness. Take care of site optimization in advance, so that users can find it by relevant keywords. SEO promotion allows your brand to rise above competitors, attracting more traffic. The more potential customers you have, the better the chance to sell more products. This is vital to growing an online business.

Try to bring back users who once visited your site or abandoned the shopping cart. If you use a simple retargeting mechanism – targeted advertising and email campaigns – you will prepare a solid ground for scaling. The “forgotten” segment of your potential audience can help you with this.

Way 2. Automate certain operations

If the managers at your company have not learned how to handle the flow of tasks during the expansion phase, you won't be able to grow your online business. How can you keep a double or triple operating load if your team can't handle primary tasks? 

One cannot scale without decent productivity. Automate everything you can in the first phase of growth – feedback gathering, emailing, or customer support. Thus, you'll enhance the team’s performance. This means that as your business, staff, and number of tasks grow, your employees will cope with the workload. What’s more, automation will require hiring fewer people. Your employees will have more time to perform tasks related to business development.

Way 3. Set up a customer support mechanism

As your business grows, the number of customer service calls will noticeably increase. So, if you had problems with interaction with your target audience at the first stage of business development, you need to solve them before you scale. 

Even if you know how to sell a product, but your managers cannot resolve disputes and solve customer problems, consumers will abandon you for a more attentive and helpful competitor. Try to provide clients with an excellent experience. If you do so, they will buy more, stay loyal to your company, and tell their friends about your brand. 

It seems a trifle but looks at the statistics. Even 59% of the most loyal brand followers will leave a company after a few failed sales, and 17% will leave after one failure. That's why your customer service department must perform flawlessly for successful scaling. It must provide consumers with important CX elements: speed, convenience, professional help, and friendliness. Customer service agents should constantly hone their skills, and you should invest in information technology that keeps CX at a high level and allows you to grow your online business.

Way 4. Improve your website or mobile app

As the major action in online business unfolds on digital platforms (sites, mobile apps), you need to make sure they are ready to include more products/services and deal with a growing audience. eCommerce platforms must not be obsolete to attract the attention of consumers. Shopping platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Magento might have become small for you. So, it’s time to create your own, isn’t it?

Whether you're optimizing an old or building a new version of an online business website, pay attention to:

— the information on your site because it attracts users and motivates them to buy a product;

— informational, navigational, and visual design, which, if improperly created, can become a barrier to buying goods;

— usability of the site: its accessibility, easy navigation, search, seamless transactions, and self-service technologies;

— personalization – the ability to provide content/items relevant to individual users;

— technical characteristics (site loading speed, performance, adaptation for mobile devices, and other essential SEO indicators).

The current state of the site determines the scope of its transformation. Some companies need to move from a single page to a CMS to grow an online business. Others need a custom software development project or localization of the existing platform for multilingual markets.

Way 5. Track vital business metrics

Each business is unique, but there are common indicators to follow. You should experiment and control the results. Care for the effect of your actions and assess their success to adjust your business development marketing strategy.

Metrics like these will highlight what you are doing well or poorly while scaling your online business.

There are three groups of metrics:

— quantitative metrics (audience coverage to track advertising; site visitors, registrations, and purchases to monitor applications);

— monetary indicators (income, the cost of attracting customers, the average receipt);

— relative metrics (conversion/retention and churn/recurring purchase percentages, ROI).

Choose the minimum metrics to track business growth and scaling success. They will become a reference point in this complex process and help avoid global mistakes.

Way 6. Ask customers what they want and suggest services they can't even imagine

Focusing on customers' needs is the right vector for development. But an even more successful tactic is to predict consumers’ wishes and offer services that they will find unbelievable. People didn't know they needed a touch-screen phone until Steve Jobs suggested the iPhone. Follow his advice: “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

Offer an interesting product delivery option, introduce gamification or AR/VR elements, a new method of payment, and so on. Listen to your audience and try to understand your customers. Offer options that will simplify their buying journey and make your online business stand out in the market. Perhaps, this kind of innovation will help to grow your online business successfully.

Way 7. “Localize” correctly

Competent site localization is the seventh way to grow your online business. If you aim to expand into overseas markets, you need the support of localization specialists, enterprise website developers, and designers. Respect the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic features of the target countries. The preferences and needs of people in China, Germany, and Peru are significantly different. The Chinese, Germans, and Peruvians have different lifestyles, religions, laws, currencies, and principles for building a business. 

Therefore, translating a site into English or a local language is not sufficient. Take into account critical issues for trade and sales and adapt each site or version to the cultural code of a particular country. Research the new market and the audience, plan the advertising budget and consider legal restrictions. Assess the market capacity, potential ROI, competition, and your technical and financial strengths.

If your business consultant gives the green light to open a branch in a certain country, contact the experts who will help you adapt your site to the right locations.

Conclusion

It takes more than just a day to grow an online business. You need to be financially and mentally ready for the upcoming changes and possess relevant information. Engage a team of experts, conduct market research, thoughtfully plan a digital marketing strategy for small businesses, and evaluate the results of growth according to particular metrics. As the American businessperson, James Cash Penney stated, “Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together”