Last Updated on February 28, 2019 by Jessica Adams
Doing things to improve your business is great, but doing things that have been proven to help you grow your business is even better. By trying even a few of these twelve ways to grow your business, each one backed by research, you’ll be able to expand your business like never before. So grab a cup of coffee and read over these twelve proven ways to help you grow your business.
12 Proven Ways To Help You
Grow Your Business
Emotional Marketing Is Key
Marketing is one of the most crucial aspects of growing any business but even more important, is emotional marketing. Emotional marketing can trigger powerful memories and intense emotional experiences in your audience, which in turn can encourage them to act on what you are advertising.
You want your marketing efforts to get access to your audience’s most powerful emotions. Whether the memories that evoke those emotions are happy, sad, exciting, or something else altogether, you’ll be in a unique position to open up to your audience.
You can introduce your product or service at the exact moment your target audience is primed to hear about who and what you and your company are. Emotional marketing tells a story that connects with an audience in a personal way.
With consumers increasingly making buying decisions driven by feelings and not logic, emotional marketing creates meaningful relationships that result in brand fans, replacing the loyalty marketing approach of years past.
By triggering ‘feel good emotions’ within your audience, you will increase a customer’s positive impression of your product. Using emotional messages also feels more genuine to your audience. Make sure you tap into a message that resonates with your audience in a positive way so that you can have a big impact on them.
Remember; hearing from an expert on a subject makes a claim more believable and carries more weight with consumers. By bringing an expert fact, stat, or quote into it, you can further appeal to your audience. There are many examples of this online, such as Trident’s 4 out of 5 dentists campaign.
Take A Break Every 90 Minutes
It isn’t just marketing that’s going to help you to grow your business. It’s how you work and the hacks that you use to make sure you’re getting things done. There’s a lot to do in a day. Responding to emails, answering the phone, chatting with your employees, meeting with potential clients – and then there’s the real work that you need to do!
However, just because you have a lot to do doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking breaks. You might think that you’re getting more done by avoiding breaks when in actual fact, you’re slowing yourself down and making your job harder on yourself. People were simply not designed to work non-stop.
Ever heard of your circadian rhythm? You may have read about it in the context of your sleep cycle. This means that each sleep cycle we go through lasts around 90 minutes – and studies suggest that this is also how long we can concentrate on something before needing a break.
I have sworn by the 90-minute sleep cycle method of napping and sleeping, for years. This means that I only ever sleep in increments of 90 minutes because with any amount of time more or less than that, and I’ll feel like a zombie who hasn’t slept at all.
If I get exactly eight hours of sleep, I’m really bitchy the next day! But 7 hrs and 30 min, I’m an angel. That’s because 7.5 hrs = 450 minutes and 450/5 = 90 minutes. Just 5 sweet, wonderful sleep cycles and I’m good to go! As for napping, nothing other than 90-180 minutes. Some people do power naps, I do circadian naps 😉
Take A Nap
Don’t underestimate the power of a nap – many of the world’s most successful people, past and present, loved taking naps. A 20 minute afternoon nap could actually make you more productive (unless you’re like me and opt for 90 min!), according to studies.
By taking a nap, you will recharge, refresh and reinvigorate both the body and the brain. If you want to grow your business most efficiently, taking a nap each day could be the key.
Work In Natural Light
Studies have shown a strong correlation between employees who work indoors, under fluorescent lighting, and those workers’ sleep, activity, and quality of life. Another study suggested that workers who did their work in natural light slept around 46 minutes longer each night.
These workers tend to sleep more efficiently and peacefully and reported a higher quality of life than those who did not work in natural light. People who do not work in or near daylight had lower quality sleep and more issues overall.
See if you can let as much natural light in as possible, into your office. Get outside for your breaks, and invest in a light that mimics natural light if you need one. The benefits of working in natural light are many, including improved quality of life. Thus, giving you a better mindset for growing your business.
Don’t Get Sucked Into The News
We’re constantly bombarded with different messages 24/7. The news on TV, the news on Facebook, the news on the radio – it’s pretty much impossible to turn anywhere and not be bombarded with information!
The ratio of bad news to good news is around 17:1. When you take into account that happiness influences productivity, being careful of what you consume could help you to get more done and feel better about it… I’m just saying!
Declutter Your Work Environment
Researchers at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute the link between clutter and productivity. They found that too much clutter causes brain activity to decrease.
With a cluttered life, you’ll also have a messy mind. You’ll feel distracted by the clutter and unable to accomplish what you need to.
You’ll save time and feel better prepared to tackle whatever your business throws at you when you keep clutter at bay. Besides, everyone else in the world right now is decluttering their homes and offices, thanks to Marie Kondo. What’s the harm in joining such a productive and worthwhile cause?
Do Your Own Research
Make sure you regularly do your own research so that you can grow your business as effectively as possible. You must research your own audience so that you know them inside and out.
You should know their age, family situation, job, hobbies and any other relevant information that will allow you to effectively advertise to them. However, there are many ways to do your research, depending on what type of business you have.
You could use a chip assay kit or simply go out onto the street and do market research. Doing your own surveys, studies, and various other kinds of research are key to growing your business.
Know Where To Focus Your Efforts
It can be tempting to go off and water down your efforts in an attempt to master many different directions. However, there are a few key things you should focus on for success.
Make sure you look at multi-channel traffic tactics to make sure you aren’t at too much risk from one change in one channel.
You should also focus on creating compelling content and monitoring things like sharing and engagement so you can improve on your content offerings in the future. Then, there’s measuring, testing and improving the conversion rates in your entire sales funnel from engagement to sale.
Create An Online Quiz
We’ve all been guilty of being distracted by an online quiz at one time or another. Whether we want to find out what pizza topping matches up with our personality (really?!) or which Hogwarts house we’d be in (although, that is a fun one!).
These quizzes may seem fun and superficial, but they can actually encourage serious growth. People may actually recommend a useful online quiz to their peers, and it’ll get more shares on social media.
You can also use it to build an email list by asking for an email address before providing the quiz taker with their results.
Streamline Your Payment Cart Page
Constant optimization is a must if you want to make the most of the traffic you get. It isn’t just about gaining more traffic; it’s about knowing what to do with that traffic once you get it.
Fine-tuning your efforts can help you to improve things in incredible ways. By taking a look at your payment cart page, you may be able to find a few areas to optimize.
If you check out the link I just posted above, you can read about 40 different checkout page strategies! The main categories cover design & layout, optimizing product details, payment & shipping, rewards & special offers, and “tests tests tests”!
Get More Social With Your Followers
Social media has been the online space where everyone’s audience is hanging out, for over a decade now. Business owners like yourself are on any/all social media platforms, in order to increase engagement, boost brand awareness and grow their industry influence.
By posting useful, interesting information, you might just be able to establish yourself as an expert in your niche too. Using social media to build relationships with your followers also helps to build more brand loyalty.
Use Call-To-Action Pop-Ups On Your Website
Using pop-ups that have a compelling call-to-action is practically a requirement these days for most digital or online entrepreneurs.
By using pop-ups, you can potentially double your current email list and can convert more than 3% of all your visitors into email subscribers.
For those of you on WordPress, you can install plugins that allow you to build your own pop-up box.
Then link it directly to your email service provider in order to grab those email sign ups! You can customize the pop-ups’ background, add gifs, videos and change the colors.
Website’s like Neil Patel’s HELLO BAR allows you to customize a pop-up box and place it on your a site by just connecting your FREE account. No need to copy any code to your site. Also, the pop-ups are already both mobile and web optimized.
Jessica Rose Adams
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