The enthusiasm and positivity of entrepreneurship are vital for taking a business startup off the ground and keeping it growing. But without a well-thought growth strategy, your enterprise can plateau faster than expected. The catch is, you can’t afford to maintain the status quo in business. If you stop growing, you start dying!
With the advent of the internet and cutting-edge tech, the battlefield for businesses is now online. Thus, you need to develop an online growth strategy to keep your business growing in the face of competition.
Of course, it takes money to develop and implement a compelling online growth strategy. That’s why including fintech lenders into your online game is a big win. Online lenders like Camino Financial offer small business financing in five simple steps.
5 strategies to grow your business online
Build and optimize your website
Every online growth strategy debate begins with a website. That’s because a website is the basic digital tool you need to take your business operations to the cloud. A Google study shows that over 50% of shoppers use Google to discover new businesses. These are people looking for businesses like yours, and having a website is a great way to net them and direct them to your store.
Once you have your site running, make sure it’s optimized for mobile and speed. According to a Hitwise report, about 60% of searches are from mobile devices. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, and loads slowly, you’ll lose customers to the competition. The upfront cost of building a top-speed, mobile-friendly site can easily be met with a loan for small business financing.
Use content marketing
One of the long-lasting digital growth strategies is to take advantage of organic SEO. That simply means writing key-word focused articles, product descriptions, or guides to answer questions that potential customers are asking on search engines.
Create a blog section on your website where you post high-quality, solution-driven articles and offer your products or services as the best solutions to your customer’s pain points. Per DemandMetric, brands that blog realizes 67% more leads per month! You can DIY your own content, or obtain small business financing to fund your business blog.
Use social media
A great growth strategy is to meet your customers where they hang out online and engage them. Nearly 4 billion people, which is about 51% of the world’s population, use social media. The average social media user in the US spends 2 hours and 3 minutes on social media. According to the Global Web Index, 54% of social browsers use social media to research products.
That presents a growth opportunity for small businesses. You can use social media to build brand awareness, increase web traffic, get customer feedback, engage your business followers to build customer loyalty, and drive conversions.
If you don’t engage your customers, they’ll be snatched by the competition. So make sure you establish a strong social media presence as part of your growth strategy.
Retain customers with email marketing
According to Invesp, it costs 5x to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Email marketing offers a great way to retain and market to your existing customer base. People who subscribe to your email newsletter do so because they are interested in your products or services and want to hear from you from time to time. Plus, email campaigns have the highest ROI. Out of every $1 spent in an email campaign, you can expect an average ROI of $44!
Take advantage of your email list to engage and retain customers with informational content, personalized deals, retargeting emails, and discounted sale promotions.
Obtain growth capital from fintech lenders
Finally, you’ll need growth capital to develop and implement a winning online growth strategy. For a long time, it’s been a pain in the neck for small business owners to obtain capital from traditional lenders. Things have changed! A crop of fintech lenders has sprouted that employ financial technology to offer better small business financing services online to small business owners.
Unlike traditional lenders who entangle you with bureaucratic, paper-laden application processes, and lengthy approval periods, fintech lenders like caminofinancial.com have a simple application process and you can get your loan approved within 1-10 business days.
