Small businesses are always growing and evolving, but riding the wave may not be your best bet for scaling profit. Approaching business growth and development with a smart strategy and even a small budget can shift things in the right direction and boost your bottom line. Check out this advice from The Daily Drum and get to work on overhauling your small business for a bigger impact.

Learn More About Your Customers

Before investing time and money in services to boost customer experiences, it helps to know more about your audience. With a customer data platform (CDP), the data speaks for itself. With

insight into who your customers are, how they behave online, and what they want, you can tailor marketing campaigns for better results.

Understanding your customers better also allows you to develop more products or services, improve training for your team, and even adjust prices. With the help of a CPD, you get real-time feedback that impacts business decisions down to the minute. This can help you avoid costly mistakes and reinvest in specific (higher-return) areas.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction can be simple and free, or it may require more work and money. You likely need to solicit feedback before scoping out ways to improve customer satisfaction. A simple (free) survey form could start important conversations.

Sending your team (or going yourself) on a “customer journey” is another low-output way to determine where to make changes. Walking through your customer’s steps can highlight issues you wouldn’t otherwise see. A regular customer journey map trip also highlights any glitches or technology issues and avoids customer headaches.

Promote Online Engagement

As part of your marketing strategy, online engagement is crucial for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. Getting more users to your website or social media pages means more sales, and there are countless ways to heighten a brand’s online visibility.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one way of increasing online engagement for small businesses that includes a variety of strategies. SEO is a way of getting search engines (namely Google) to recognize your website as an authoritative source of information (or products/services). The more authority you have, the more likely users are to find your site.

Business owners can begin optimizing on their own, but outsourcing SEO services is an option, depending on the budget. Either way, small changes to keywords can help customers find you so that you can solve their problems with a product, service, or information.

A revamped social media strategy can also improve online engagement. Social media can be complicated, especially for a new business owner, but taking time to research, set goals, and create a posting strategy could earn a massive return on your investment.

Social media outsourcing is also possible, but keeping an authentic voice in all your content and offering value to your audience are two must-do steps. Plus, if an existing team member handles social media, it may save you money versus outsourcing (and training someone on your business).

Take Steps Toward Streamlining

Wasted time can cost companies up to $1.7 million per 100 workers, according to Titan Technologies. Saving time saves money, plus frustration on the consumer side (and likely your workers’, too). How you streamline depends on your industry, products, and team, but taking a closer look at tasks and processes could reveal some surprises.

Hive recommends a multi-step process to trim down processes, beginning with a look at best practices for your industry. Figuring out multiple methods for a process highlights which is most effective (and cost-saving). Holding a team vote is a helpful pre-implementation step for new processes, but flexibility over time is equally important.

Developing your business doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, especially with the help of smart tools like a customer data platform and social media. But if you invest time and possibly some cash into improving the customer experience, streamlining operations, and boosting consumer engagement, the payoff can be significant.

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