sales4u's smb growth tips #1-15
TRANSCRIPT
’s SMB Growth Tip #1Create a Lead Magnet to Attract and Educate
Your ProspectsA lead magnet is a bribe that offers a chunk of value for free in exchange for their contact information. It can be a guide/report/ebook, cheat sheet, handout, resource list, checklist, webinar, video training, free trial for your product or service, free consultation, free sample, case study, discount, survey, assessment, sales material, infographic, free tickets to an event, access to a membership site, or contest.
’s SMB Growth Tip #2Find Product-Market Fit
Keep iterating your business model until at least 40% of your customers say that they would be very disappointed to not have your product or service. Pivot your value proposition or target customers, or both, and keep surveying your customers. Once you have identified a market that truly needs the value you provide, focus on those customers and scale.
Use the Business Model Canvas
’s SMB Growth Tip #3Blogging & Guest BloggingA quality blog naturally increases your search engine ranking, attracts visitors, and positions you as a thought leader. By guest blogging on other people’s sites you leverage their existing audience. Writing for your own blog gives you more control, but requires more effort to build an audience. You can and should do both.
Write content that is relevant to your audience, and know who your audience is. It shouldn’t only be a pitch for your product or service, it needs to be something that your readers find valuable. Aim for at least one blog post and/or guest post a week.
’s SMB Growth Tip #4
Agile Gr wthFirst build a list of growth tests touching every level of your business’ customer AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral). Keep brainstorming test ideas over time. These tests are things you can try to bring in new leads, convert them to paying customers, and so on. Use a Google Spreadsheet.
Then, every week, choose one or more tests (the more the better) to implement and keep track of metrics. At the end of the week, meet with your growth team and evaluate the results.
’s SMB Growth Tip #5Build Your Growth Team &
ProcessAt the weekly growth team meeting, prioritize the ideas by Importance, Capacity and Effort, out of 10 points each. Discuss lessons learned and optimize the next testing’s sprint to ensure targets are reached. Ultimately, what you want is having a growth culture - and the CEO must be on board.
Start with a growth manager, and hire freelancers as needed to implement the tests. Over time, if you have enough need for certain skills, you can hire employees for those needs. During each week, invite everyone in your company to contribute ideas to the backlog of growth tests.
’s SMB Growth Tip #6Make Good Use of
AnalyticsGetting good data is crucial to growing your business. Google Analytics (GA) is entirely free. The simple stuff such as traffic, sessions, and pages per sessions is easy to see. The more powerful metrics such as goals are more difficult to produce. And getting help is expensive, GA gurus are in high demand.
A good alternatives to GA is Kissmetrics. To track visitors and visits, bounce rates, time on page and exists, use GA. To analyze funnels, for A/B Testing and for cohort reports, use Kissmetrics. The best option is to use both tools in conjunction.
’s SMB Growth Tip #7Follow-Up With and Upsell
to ClientsResearch done by the authors of the book Marketing Metrics clearly reveals that selling to existing customers has a much higher probability of success. Keep in touch with your customers regularly.
Offer them upsells that make them feel it’s helping them win. Each upsell can increase the lifetime value of your loyal customers.
’s SMB Growth Tip #8Unlock Your Growth
a) Ask them how they would feel if they could no longer use this product
b) Ask them what your product’s key benefit is, and why that benefit is important
c) Ask them what they were hoping your product would do for them when they originally tried it
d) If they recommended your product, ask them how they described it
1. Survey Your Users – In-App or on Your Website 2. Apply Your Findings to Your Homepage
3. Onboard Users to Your “Must Have” Experience with a Reverse Funnel or Vignette Sneak Peak
’s SMB Growth Tip #9Demonstrate Social Proof
1. Customer testimonials
2. Logos of your biggest clients
3. Logos of the biggest media sources that talked about you
4. Case studies
6. Customer statistics
• # of customers that used your business this month,
• # of people who just signed up • # of Twitter followers• # of email subscribers• # of Facebook fans
Social proof should be placed “everywhere” on your site: on your home page, on landing pages, on thank you pages, etc.
’s SMB Growth Tip #10Add Social Sharing to Your
BlogBelow is a list of free social sharing plugins that combine several popular social sharing options into a single interface, for Wordpress:
• SumoMe• Simple Share Buttons Adder• Image Sharer• Shareaholic• WP Social sharing• Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar• AddToAny
Start with a free option (see the list to the right). Include the social networks where your audience hangs out. So for example, if your readers use mostly Twitter and you only have a Facebook share button, then they won’t share your content much. Also make sure that people can share your product in places that can bring you more inbound visitors.
’s SMB Growth Tip #11
Your best strategy to optimize for SEO is to keep producing quality content.
Then, there are a couple of low-hanging fruits that you can get on a technical level:
1. Make good use of H1 to H6 HTML tags for your content’s section headers.
<H1> … <H6>
2. Submit your sitemap to Google. If you’re using Wordpress, a good plugin is Google XML Sitemaps.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
’s SMB Growth Tip #12
Distribution Hacking Framework:
1. Implement analytics & testing tools
2. Define your target customer
3. Define your conversion goal & funnel
4. Hypothesize acquisition channel
5. Setup ads + execute the experiment
6. Optimize if good result, or return to Step 4
Do Data-Driven Paid Advertising
Keep track of these metrics:
• CPA: Cost Per Acquisition• LTV: Lifetime Value
The customer’s LTV must be higher than the cost of acquisition of that customer.
’s SMB Growth Tip #13Deliver Outstanding Value
The best way to maximize your lead conversion, repeat business and number of referrals is by delivering exceptional value to your customers. Growth hacks might be sexy, but nothing will replace great value. It requires a lot of work, but you’ll get rewarded ten-fold by your satisfied customers.
Always keep thinking of ways of helping your customers more. Keep iterating on your value proposition. Be very responsive to their communications with you (reply in minutes or hours, not days). Be passionate about their business, and love your customers. They will feel it and love you back.
’s SMB Growth Tip #14Desire – Friction = Conversion Rate
Build Desire Reduce Friction
How? Surveys can be very effective. First, figure out users’ intent. Survey them by asking them what they were looking for when they came to your product.
How? Do user testing with UserTesting.com. External panels of people will sign up for your product and look for points of confusion.
’s SMB Growth Tip #15Raise Capital Successfully1. Business
ModelWho are your targeting? What are your competitive advantages? Your value proposition? Use the Business Model Canvas (or similar canvas) and include in your pitch and handout.
3. Teaser 4. Pitch Support 5. Handout2. Competitive Matrix
Find your competitors, and position them and yourself on a matrix, on two dimensions.
First send your potential investors a 5-10 page PDF with just enough information to capture their interest. Make sure it is professionally designed.
During your pitch, your visual support (your slides) should be mostly images and diagrams, with just a few keywords here and there. Keep it minimal, because it only serves to support you as the presenter.
The handout, sent to the investor after the pitch, should be more verbose and include what you said in your pitch, added to the visuals from your pitch support slides.
2. FORWHOM?
Small & Medium Businesses in the construction, IT, business services, retail, legal, and real estate industries
1. WHY?SMBs are too busy with running their operation, and typically do not have a growth team dedicated to the company’s growth
3. WHAT?We analyze your business model (its strengths and its flaws), your competitors and your goals, and devise a growth plan tailored to you. We help you improve your assets (brand, website, content, and sales funnels), and generate qualified leads.
4. HOW?
Our team is comprised of strategists, creatives, programmers, video designers and growth experts. Our approach is based on a new methodology that we call AGILE Growth, using a prioritized backlog of growth tests.
www.Sales4U.co