Growth and profitability are two important factors when it comes to the success of a business. Profit is essential for basic financial survival as a corporate entity, while growth is key to profit and long-term success.
If you want to increase the growth and profitability of your business, consider the following steps:
- Practice automation as much as possible
Business automation is the use of technology to execute recurring tasks or processes in a business where manual effort can be replaced. It minimizes costs, increases efficiency and also streamlines processes. A report titled “The Sorry State of Digital Transformation” in 2018 by Forrester noted that up to 22 percent of businesses still don’t have workflow automation
By introducing automation to your business operations, it allows you and your employees to focus on more strategic projects and also provides accurate data. These statistics are useful for measuring progress and also to make certain decisions. One primary area of automation is your marketing team. You can automate a large percentage of marketing activities including weekly emails to social media posts, campaigns and personalized messages.
Examples of business operations you can decide to automate include:
- Hiring process
- Employee analytics and retention
- Claims processing
- Employee onboarding
- Purchase order requests
- Make data-driven decisions
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is defined as using facts, metrics and data to guide strategic business decisions that align with your goals, objectives and initiatives. Asides from automating your business processes, online tools and software also provide useful suggestions for data collection, storage management and use. By obtaining accurate market data, you can gain up-to-date information about your customers, your market and your competitors.
Various tools help you streamline your sales process by identifying, engaging and closing your potential customers. Others help you manage your email marketing program by updating your email list, creating personalized messages, sending promotional and campaign content to your subscribers. Consider these tips for your next data-driven decisions:
- Define goals
- Don’t be guided by beliefs
- Proper data collection
- Data analysis
4 Steps to Determine the Financial Health of Your Business
- Optimize your website and SEO elements
Optimizing the landing page of your website and the SEO associated with your website will increase the traffic and type of leads coming to your website. Make sure your landing page is simple and it provides a perfect overview of what your brand stands for. Also, use high-quality, web-optimized images that won’t slow down your website loading speed. Here are some important tips on website optimization:
- Remove anything that slows down your site
- Link to other websites with relevant contents
- Write for humans first, search engines second
- Encourage other trustworthy sites to link to you
- Have web analytics in place at the start
- Intensify the focus on your marketing
There is no other way to make massive sales as a start-up except through aggressive marketing. However, in most small businesses, the marketing department always has the smallest budget, while the working expenses have the highest allocation. In this digital world, you can allocate and spend less on marketing and still make more sales due to the ease of these processes. Some marketing ideas for small businesses include:
- Social media marketing
- Advertising
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Contests, coupons and incentives
In this current age of digital transformation, achieving growth and profitability in your business does not have to be through expensive methods. With the vast range of digital tools, cloud capabilities and various software options, you can easily do more with less capital.
