Growth Lessons: Impress Your Customers and Take Your Business to the Next Level

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In a few instances, your business may gain customers because of proximity or if a service or product you offer is completely unique and relevant. Generally, though, it’s rare for consumers to just happen to become your customers. Growing your business by gaining customers relies in large part on your business impressing consumers. This is especially important in today’s age of the empowered consumer.

Impressing, wooing, and earning the favor of consumers is the key to developing brand awareness and loyalty. These qualities, in turn, are essential for taking your business to the next level. That means higher profits, expansion, and greater success.

Learn from these growth lessons about impressing your customers into growing your business:

Growth Lesson #1: Be Where Your Customers Already Are

Window shopping has largely turned into internet browsing. You can’t talk about growing as a business without focusing on digital marketing. Consumers work, live, communicate, and shop online. Internet resources are relied on for everything from checking store hours to comparing product reviews to looking up what different services do.

If you want your business to grow, you need to reach customers where they already are online. Start by determining who your target audience is and how they use the internet. This will help you determine where your audience is and how to reach them there. For example, if your target audience is over 55, the social media platform Twitter probably won’t be effective. Facebook, on the other hand, is widely used by adults, even those past retirement age. If your business offers services to the elderly, reach them where they are on Facebook.

Growth Lesson #2: Focus on Customer Convenience

Since empowered consumers basically have the world- including your competitors’- at their fingertips, don’t make them do any extra work. The current market values efficiency and convenience. Minimize the number of clicks required for consumers to find products or make purchases. Keep all of your information up to date. Optimize web content for mobile devices. The more convenient your business is for customers, the more satisfied your customers will be.

Growth Lesson #3: Multi-Pronged Approaches Have a Longer Reach

Building one website may help keep your business afloat, but it won’t help growth. For a business to grow, it has to extend its reach as far as possible. Multi-pronged marketing approaches reach the farthest, gaining the attention of target audience, catching the eye of potential consumers, and drawing in new markets.

Your multi-pronged marketing approach should include a mix of web platforms and web media. You should also try out multiple e-commerce sales channels that tend to fuel your business growth. Try marketing with a video on social media, a link to your company blog through email, and optimizing for different types of search engine results.

Growth Lesson #4: Develop a Relational Brand Personality

One of the fastest growing, most appealing trends in consumerism today is personalization. Consumers now receive ads tailored to their interests on their social media. They can choose from custom packages for many projects and services. Brands like Apple use “i” in front of products to signify the personal quality of what they sell.

If you want to impress customers, offering personalized services and products will be helpful. Likewise, creating a brand that is personable and has a distinct personality will resonate with consumers who highly value identity and character. Be consistent across your marketing, using one select tone, design scheme, and overarching “personality type” to represent your brand. This will make your brand more memorable, relatable, and impressive for consumers.

Growth Lesson #5: Utilize Web Tools for Visibility

It’s hard to grow as a company when nobody knows you exist. Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential in all marketing to make your company easy for customers to find- even if they’ve never heard of your business before.

Basically, SEO uses keywords that customers are likely to search for online, like “dentist in LA” or “best cold weather gear,” in a company’s content. This increases the likelihood of customers finding your business in search engine results when looking up relevant topics. Customers discover companies and brands daily using search engines, so being SEO-friendly is important. SEO and other web tools like Google Maps marketing can introduce your business to new customers daily.

Growth Lesson #6: Expand Your Definition of Customer Service

You may not be surprised to learn that businesses known for having terrible customer service don’t tend to grow. What is surprising is that consumers consider it “bad customer service” when they have difficulty interacting with brands online.

The Los Angeles Attorney and Citywide Law Group CEO Sherwin Arzani explains customer service in the digital millennium in such words “The meaning of the customer service is to enhance the customer knowledge with the support of CRM (customer relationship management). The challenge is that support has the info but it’s not easy to get on and deliver. This is especially true for a law firm, where client communication is critical.”

Customers are impressed and appeased when they can easily find “help” or “support” options on your company website. They like to be able to text chat or call numbers found on websites to receive customer service whenever they need it. Make customer service as convenient for consumers as possible to win them over.

Growth Lesson #7: Showcase a Purpose besides Profit

Consumers, especially those in the millennial and Gen X generation, favor brands that have a purpose besides profit. In fact, 85% of consumers are more likely to buy a product when the company is linked to a charity. To impress consumers with your company’s concern for the well-being of society, showcase your business’ support of local or global charities.

Growth Lesson #8: Trusted Guides Improve Brand Credibility

Just selling a product or service is rarely enough to earn your business brownie points with empowered consumers. Offer them more to gain credibility. Offer advice and guidelines that consumers will actually use.

Customers always love content that provides them with comparisons, reviews, guides, and reasons to do something. For example, BestAdvisor provides detailed reviews and helpful guides about best products and services in order to help online customers to make wise decisions. Sometimes considering a form of native advertising, offer trusted guides to consumers impresses them with your business’ knowledge, reputation, and helpfulness.

Whether you write online guides, share across multiple media channels, or simply make your customers’ lives easier with conveniences, impressing them should be your top priority if you want to fuel business growth.

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

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