Everyday Marketing Ideas

The Formula For Growing Any Business, Anywhere on the Planet, Every Time, Guaranteed

Whenever I ask the average business owner what they want out of their business, I always get the same reply: “More customers”, “more money”, “more profit”. However, when I ask these same business owners HOW they intend to get results, I always end up getting mixed responses.

For some strange reason, not many people in business have the slightest clue how to grow their business other than to “Advertise”. Well, if advertising was all it took, every business that ever advertised in a newspaper or radio station would grow. Of course, not every business does – in fact most sink in the first few years.

So why is it so many businesses fail and yet a select few businesses seem to grow and thrive, regardless of what the economy is doing?

Well, there are many reasons, but I believe the single, biggest reason is a simple lack of knowledge on how to grow a business.

Understand this. No business on planet earth can get more customers, make more money or more profit. Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple. In order to increase those variables, there are OTHER variables that need to be increased first. You see, growing a business is a process. And you can’t skip parts of the process without affecting your bottom line. If you are REALLY serious about growing your business, you must start at the beginning, and work your way to end.

The formula is broken down into three steps. The first step is the hardest, as it involves ADVERTISING. The second step is still difficult at first, but gets easier as your business grows. The third step is the easiest. Once you understand this formula, and you start putting in some effort to grow your business, you’ll be amazed at just how simple it really is.

So, here’s the formula.

STEP 1. GET MORE CUSTOMERS

a) Increase the number of leads your business gets (ie by marketing)

b) Increase the conversion rate of leads converted into customers (ie by selling)

Before you ever get a single customer, you will first get a “lead” from your advertising efforts. The difference between a lead and a customer is that a lead is interested in your business and a customer has actually bought from you. So, until someone buys from you – even if you spend two hours with them trying to close a sale – they’re a lead, not a customer.

What you have to do in order to get more customers is find cost-effective ways to advertise, to bring in a steady stream of new leads each and every month. Then you need to learn how to SELL to convert as many of those leads as possible into customers.

STEP 2. MAKE MORE MONEY

c) Increase the average transaction value

d) Increase the number of transactions your customers make each year

The first step is by far and away the hardest, most expensive process of growing a business. And when all your sales and marketing efforts finally produce results in the form of customers, it is then very important to keep in contact with those customers because selling to them is easier, cheaper, and more profitable than finding new customers.

So once you are bring in new customers, the next step to growing your business is you need to increase the average value of each transaction a customer makes. The easiest way to do this is to up-sell and add-on sell.

Then you must increase the number of transactions your customers make each year. The easiest way to do this is to keep in contact with your customers. Send them letters when you’re doing new promotions, and get your loyal customers onto a VIP program. Loyal customers will love you for rewarding their loyalty.

STEP 3. INCREASE YOUR BOTTOM LINE

e) Increase profit margins

This is of course the easiest step in growing a business, but unfortunately the least understood. Many business owners – when faced with the reality that their business isn’t growing and instead is dying – try to increase profit margins by “cutting costs”.

There’s nothing wrong with cutting costs, UNTIL it affects the quality of your products and/or services. No business on this planet can expect to last over the long-term simply by competing on price. So, when improving your margins, what you should focus on is stream-lining your cost structure so that every sale doesn’t cost any more than it should. But NEVER sacrifice the quality.

Well, there you have it. Now that you know the formula for growing any business on the planet, you can now put it into use. The hardest part about growing any business is finding more customers. Obviously, selling to new customers is far easier than finding news ones. But to grow – ultimately – every business must find new customers at some point. If you own a business, you should be devoting at least 50% of your time to finding new customers (marketing) if you’re not already.