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          BBB Business Tip: Creative ways small businesses can expand their offerings

          By Better Business Bureau. March 19, 2021.

          (Getty Images)

          Being a successful small business owner means constantly pushing for growth and new opportunities. One of the smartest ways to grow your business quickly is to expand what you offer to your customers.

          It can feel like a huge hurdle to find creative ways to expand your product and service offerings. You may have way too many ideas, lack the strategic direction to execute, or worry about yielding positive results. 

          When starting this process, it’s essential to think of your target customer and narrow it down by their exact persona. You will then understand what triggers them to buy, how best to meet them with different offerings during their buying journey, and how to retain them as loyal customers. 

          Get creative to ensure that your business stands out. Keep reading for four tips that will help you innovate as you expand your business.

          Look for existing gaps and the buyer journey

          One of the quickest ways to figure out how you can expand your offerings is to look at current customer needs. Look at where you’re generating the most revenue, gaining the most engagement among customers, and receiving requests that you haven’t been able to fulfill because they fall slightly outside of what you were able to offer at the time.

          Once you know what’s already working and what your customers are asking for, you can then build a specific buyer journey to support it. Doing so will help you see the bigger picture and understand exactly where you can test out expansion opportunities. 

          From there, you can start developing a roadmap to expand these requests while also ensuring that your revenue model aligns. Having a clear roadmap backed by a solid financial model will help make sure you have a higher potential of moving the needle and that you don’t waste time building out offerings no one wants.

          Don’t be afraid to get social

          Rather than venturing down familiar grounds with Facebook, Twitter, or even LinkedIn, start looking at other social platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Clubhouse to see how you can connect with your target customers. Don’t solely focus on selling, but build out your brand to showcase your expertise and how you can help. Doing so will push you to focus on the following:

          • Humanize your brand while also pushing to grow your business.
          • Develop content that will trigger engagement.
          • Be interactive so that you can be intentional with how you drive engagement back to your website.
          • Approach your social media initiatives as more of an iterative growth hacking process that quickly collects data to help you make better decisions.

           

          Once you build out a following on your social platforms, you can then intermix pitching your offerings. By doing this, you not only position yourself as an authority with the content you produce and publish, but you have a way to generate revenue, especially from your trusted followers.

          Look at consulting opportunities

          Consulting might seem a bit uncomfortable, but nothing grows within your comfort zone. Don’t be afraid of putting in the time to do some research on sites that post jobs related to what you do and then see how you can have a presence there. You can even look at other like-minded companies and communities to see their challenges and how you can help.

          For example, let’s say you run a hair salon and you’ve successfully grown it. You can join forums, Facebook Groups, etc., to participate in conversations around your industry. Get a feel for what people are voicing as their most significant challenges, and then offer a consulting fee to help them navigate these challenges. 

          Once you have a few successful consultative customers, you can develop other programs to foster your efforts, such as courses, boot camps, and referral programs. These can then be used as case studies to scale this specific aspect of your business further. Plus, considering that referred customers’ lifetime value (LTV) is 16% higher than that of non-referred customers, your chances for success are looking good.

          Create a subscriber-only email newsletter

          There is something to be said for content developed exclusively for subscribers who are deeply interested in what you are offering and writing about. Consider creating an email newsletter to draw in the masses and push to get as many subscribers as possible. Once you grow your subscribers to a certain number, you can start offering advertising opportunities within your newsletters to other business owners. 

          Take Morning Brew as an example. They quickly grew their subscriber base to over 1.5M and generated $13M in just one year from 2018-2019.  Their newsletter quickly became 95% of their total revenue.

          By creating valuable content for your subscribers, you build brand awareness while potentially allowing your business to gain another revenue stream.

          Looking ahead 

          Expanding your offerings doesn’t need to be an elaborate plan, but you have to be crystal clear about what problems you are solving, what your target customers want, and how you can further monetize that engagement. Also, it will be to your advantage to push for a growth hacking approach that allows you to make small iterations but then pivot quickly. 

          Finally, make sure that you continue to focus on where your expertise lies. Prioritizing your strengths will help build trust and credibility, further increasing your small business brand to be seen by prospective customers.

          Visit BBB.org/get-accredited to learn more about BBB Accreditation and how it can help your business.

          Check out BBB's BizHQ for more business tips to help you grow.

          BBB of Southern Piedmont and Western N.C. contributed this article.