Getting your business off the ground is no doubt challenging, and once it's established, you have to double your efforts to grow your business. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, things have become much harder for business owners.

If your sales have hit a plateau because of the pandemic, there are some tips to help your business grow in 2021, and these are as follows:

1. Choose The Best Marketing Tools

An effective and successful campaign needs a specific message and approach, which are relevant to the problems you want to solve. As part of this process, you need to decide about your target markets and choose appropriate marketing tools, like predictive dialer systems.

Remember to not settle with a single marketing tool only. If you're running several campaigns, you need to use different tactics and tools. These should be relevant, and must they convey your message properly and appeal to your target markets.

2. Understand Your Target Customers And Prospects

Once you get frustrated with following up, the best thing that you should do is to take a deep breath and consider the buying personas of your prospects, which could be:

• The Interactive – These are the prospects who want to shape events and enjoy getting their way in terms of buying or negotiating something. Typically, they make buying decisions quickly if they feel a sense of connection with your brand or offerings.
• The Decisive – These are the buyers with a clear picture in their minds of which results they like. They often value rapid action so they'll usually make quick decisions if they feel your solutions are right.
• The Conscientious – These are the buyers who are introverted and passive. They also take an accuracy-based and more detailed approach to their purchasing habits. Without enough data to prove statements made to them, you'll fail to achieve their buy-in.
• The Stabilizer – Stabilizers are the buyers who are introverted, more passive, and interested in the why and how of a solution. Their main interests are in maintaining stability, so they prefer taking their time and weighing out every option available before making any decision.

3. Offer A Personalized Experience Through Automation

Most consumers tend to purchase from businesses that provide a personalized experience, which invokes trust and authenticity. However, establishing this is easier said than done. For instance, once you have a lot of leads, how do you make every person feel special?  Also, how do you stay connected with them?  Well, the solution is marketing automation.

At present, there is a variety of automation software that you can avail of from providers like Call Cowboy that allow both your marketing and sales team to look at your customer's journey and determine the ways to customize and streamline your marketing campaigns.

Automation software can also let you automate some tasks, like the following:

• Lead Scoring – It's one of the ways marketing automation enables you to level up your personalization game. You set up a lead scoring model, which assigns a value to all of your contacts. The values prioritize them, which allows you to invest your effort and time in the folks who matter the most. This tactic can bring a boost to your lead generation game and increase your leads.
• Segmentation – If you're using the right automation software, you can group them easily based on key characteristics. This way, you can send out a personalized message to every group to nurture your leads better. Once you use a segmented email campaign, you'll see an increase in your revenues.

4. Plan And Budget Accordingly

While it's great to have ideas on strategies you'd want to pursue, you also have to be realistic and determine if they're feasible with your allotted budget for 2021.

To budget well, take a look at your revenues this 2020 to see how aggressive you'd want to invest this coming year. If you don't know how to plan your budget, consider using a marketing budget calculator to sort out your budget. From there, you can determine the ways to allocate the money into various marketing channels, such as PPC, social media, and SEO.

While you're still deciding about your budget, never hesitate to tap into industry research. This will help you ensure that you're on the right track to grow and invest in the proper places. And, who knows?  The findings could also give ideas on how to build better strategies for 2021.

5. Make Sure To Pay Attention To Your SEO

With today's digital market, an agile approach means investing more in different online channels. It can provide your business an extra boost it requires to stay connected with your customers, regardless of the circumstances.

The best place to start is SEO. Think of it as the fuel to your company's engine. You'll need it to attract the right customers and stay ahead of your competition.

Below are some of the ways to maximize your SEO efforts:

• Pay Attention To Your Local Searchers/Audience – If your business offers services or products in certain geographical areas, local SEO is necessary. Otherwise, your business would pop up in Google for the wrong audience. Therefore, ensure that your local citations are in good shape and the information is consistent across all listings.
• Consider Voice Search – More Google searches are done this way. In fact, some users perform local searches every week. Rather than simple search words, consider full question phrases in your SEO practices. It may also help you capture the answer box snippets.
• Think Of Search Intent – Search intent is one of the most crucial marketing trends. Google gets smarter and better. Even if keywords still play a role in search rankings, the search engines are searching for the intent. Concentrate on this as you create your content.

Those are just some of the things you can consider to level up your SEO. If you don't know what to improve or change with your SEO practices, it's best to consult your SEO team or experts in the field. This way, you'll know which SEO changes you should take into consideration to make your business grow, as well as to ensure the success of your SEO efforts.

6. Focus On Your Customer Service

Another important tip to help your business grow in 2021 is to focus on your customer service. It should be the best that it could be. It's another point that's essential for a fledgling business. Consumers expect good customer service from small businesses. They have high expectations because they know the stakes are high. It's true that you simply don't have the resources that a more established business has. You need to fight to hold on to your customers.

With that said, it's not always the case of just providing listening ears. There are instances wherein customer service has the most impact, which provides unexpected solutions. If possible, train all your customer service representatives to think outside the box. Make customers' happiness your company policy and not just aim for customer satisfaction.

Even though you're not putting out the fires from disgruntled customers, reach out to provide incentives, bonuses, and rewards to your customers. Never miss any opportunities to show your loyal customers how you value them. Remember that your customers are your company's building blocks to success. Therefore, they're important to make your business grow.

7. Diversify

Diversification is an exceptional technique to stay relevant and adjust your business, while staying ahead of the competition. It may sound simple, but this process demands careful consideration and thought.

When diversifying your business, it's crucial to seek customer feedback to discover services and products that would interest them the most. Diversification may be achieved through different media, including email surveys, social media polling, and feedback via your business website. By responding to your customer needs in this way, it's more effective to dive into a new market.

8. Leverage Social Media

It can be daunting to dive into social media; however, it doesn't have to be. You can leverage social media by opening business profiles and starting to grow a community of customers.

You don't have to post daily or create good-looking videos and images, but consider establishing a consistent schedule your customers and followers can expect. You must also try to engage with your followers by answering their messages, reading comments, and building your social brand. It's a good way to determine insights and trends about your customers.

If you want, you may even use the insights you gain and run social ads. It's easier and can be an inexpensive way to run digital campaigns, test promotions, and gauge the interests of your new customer base.

9. Expand Your Service Or Product Range

Expansion is a good way to move your business quickly. It could be that you may have more services or products to add to your inventory, venture into a new niche, or set up a new shop elsewhere.

Taking the plunge might make your business witness opportunities for growth, as well as an increasing profit margin in the coming years. You might also like to be extra cautious, which is understandable.

Besides, you don't want to just sit back if you think you have a service or product that might be pushed next year. You might have diversified this year and hopped on to another path that you've never intended. However, be certain, it might open up some new options for your business in the future.

10. Establish The Right Connections

Aside from investing time in every employee, you also have to think of the big picture. This could involve looking for ways to bridge the gaps between your teams and searching for some resources outside your business.

You can establish connections through the following:

• Connect With Thought Leaders In Your Industry: These could be influencers or individuals you look up to within your industry. Don't hesitate to reach out to them and be proactive.

For instance, once you come across a video or an article that resonates with you, leave comments for the writers or connect with them via social media. This can result in backlinks or guest blogging opportunities. Not only will you gain a connection, but you'll also get an opportunity to elevate your authority online.

• Keep In Touch With Your Colleagues -Your teams on web design, development, content, and sales play a big role in your marketing efforts. Take note that an effective marketing strategy is a collaborative one, which involves the expertise and skills of different teams.

So, determine how your teams work and reach out to all of your colleagues. Give them the chance to share their strategies with others. From here, look for ways your teams can work together to drive great results and manage your business growth.

11. Have A Well-Designed And Responsive Website

Your website is the key to establishing an online presence and making good first impressions in the digital market. This is the reason why you must have a responsive and well-designed website.

If you're not confident with your website's user experience and user interface, get professional help to redesign and rebuild it for you. Through this, you can be assured that your website would do everything that you want when it comes to delivering information about your offerings and brand.

This 2020, many businesses experimented with their website's UX and UI. So, you might want to find inspiration online to add value to your website. However, if there's one thing you can't ignore, it's your website's technical optimization, which includes setting up search engine schemas, suppressing down the unnecessary queries, and more than what your IT experts can suggest.

Bottom Line

Your business will transition consistently between points of stagnation and points of growth. The key is to keep looking for new growth opportunities, be courageous to experiment, as well as to be creative. However, make sure to have measurable goals and attainable results in mind so you can avoid missteps along the way.

It also pays to consider revisiting and updating your business forecasts and plan. It could help you determine if your initiatives are viable or if your business can manage negative cash flow or potential costs in the long run.