Five Ways to Grow Your Business without Adding Resources

grow your businessAs a business leader, you know and understand the value of doing more with less: Focusing on productivity and efficiency, while keeping costs down and profits up.

In a recent post, Gregory Kennedy, vice president of marketing at Tapsense and Entrepreneur contributor, provides five tips to help you grow your businesses without piling on additional resources.

Automate Tasks with Software

Automation of social media tasks is a hot topic, and if you do automate, you must keep a close watch on what’s happening around the world during the day. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t schedule your sharing. Kennedy recommends using social management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule content shares to post automatically.

“Set up content to post in advance, which frees you up to focus on generating new materials.” When considering which other tasks to automate, look for those that don’t change much but scale well, like billing, accounting, and email marketing.

Focus on Scalable Channels

For B2B organizations, email is still considered to be the most cost-efficient and scalable marketing channel.

“Instead of adding headcount to sales, focus on giving your sales team more warm leads to follow up on. Make the sales team more efficient rather than larger,” says Kennedy.

Use online marketing tools tactics like display ads, blogging, and landing pages to grow your business, and help deliver more high quality leads and close more sales.

Build Business Through Referrals

Referrals are important to any organization, and they are a simple and effective way to grow your business. Simply asking existing customers for referrals and testimonials is a powerful technique which all businesses should be using, says Kennedy.

“Business to business companies can provide incentives or rewards to customers for referrals or loyalty.”

Be an Efficient Leader and Project Manager

Before you look for outside tactics and tools, look at your own personal productivity. Are you effectively managing your own time, as well as the time of your team?

Kennedy recommends paying close attention to time management, scheduling entire weeks in advance, and adhering to the to-do list at all costs.

“In order to be effective, your calendar must be sacrosanct. If it’s not on your schedule, then the meeting shouldn’t take place.”

By focusing on efficient communications between team members, business leaders can focus on growing their business rather than wading through their inboxes.

Don’t Aim for Perfection

Business leaders trying any of these tactics need to recognize that some require an investment of time before yielding any measurable results. Be patient and invest across multiple areas. The ones that show results should be scaled, but don’t abandoned those that simply require a bit more time for results to appear.

“Aim to improve quality over the long term by making each iteration slightly better,” offers Kennedy. “It’s repeated that the first iPhone shipped without a copy/paste function and that didn’t stop Apple from launching it.”

What growth strategies have you used in your business?