3 Ways to Expand the Reach of Your Business

Shane A. Ng
Aug 29, 2020
6 min read

In the past decade, there were two markets happening simultaneously; the digital market and the physical market. 2020 is the era of maximal digitalisation for businesses since the necessary trend of #stayathome and #workfromhome became the new norm. Hearing competitors launching online ads because no one reads newspaper ads anymore; seeing 15 years old teenagers successfully making money by operating an online drop-shipping business; watching Godaddy online ads on youtube before proceeding to a Jay Shetty Weekly Wisdom video urges one to consider, how exactly should business owners expand their business during such a limited circumstance?

1. Diversify

Digital Transformation

First of all, diversifying does not mean diluting the focus of your business. In fact, it is crucial that your business is focused on selling within a niche to begin with. To diversify is to create different peripheral ways to sell the value your business offers. For example, an interior design company that only offers in-person consultations could diversify by simultaneously offering online consultations for their clients. Similarly, a business selling physical products like hand-made leather wallets that are usually sold in retail stores can diversify by selling at street fairs as well as an online e-commerce store. If your business does not have a website, it is time to build one! A website is your company's profile, one that will let customers get to know who you are and whether what you do fit what they are looking for.

Skills Repackage

However, one may ask if they are already selling on their e-commerce store online, what more can they do to further diversify their business during this pandemic? One way to do this is to discover what other skills your business could have. This is the time to be innovative! If your business mainly offers services as your main selling point, consider what physical products you can create to add value to your existing offers. On the flip side of the same coin, if your business has been selling physical products for the past ten years, what skills can you extract from all those years of experiences and repackage them into a service you can sell to your clients?

Perhaps this is easier said than done, but what is most important to take away in the process of diversifying your business is to think about what extra value can you pull from your existing knowledge and/or experiences and offer them as an added value. This not only adds depth to your business — meaning you offer more in this particular niche than your competitors, but it also expands your business horizontally — meaning there is more variety in your shop for customers to look at and potentially buy.

2. High Impact Marketing

Marketing is "the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large," according to Google's top answer. This simply means that marketing is to create ways to deliver your value to your audience, and to do that efficiently, the key word here is "high impact".

Small Business vs. Corporation Marketing

"High impact marketing" has different meanings in small businesses than in large corporations. This difference stems from two main aspects: the company's objective for the particular advertisement and their budget for how this advertisement is marketed. For both small businesses and large corporations, the objective could be attracting interest, educating prospects, or converting sales, depending on what the business's marketing strategy is. However, the way the objective is carried out is completely different between small and large businesses due to their budget differences. Large corporations can afford the huge cost of running multiple advertisements across many social media platforms for 6 months, whereas a family business could only spare the price of running one advertisement on Google Ads for 3 months. As you can imagine, as a family business owner, one would want their particular advertisement to be marketed as effectively as possible within the budget available.

Therefore, before you consider paying someone or some platform to carry out your company's marketing, first determine what your budget for marketing is, whether you can afford to cast a wide net into the ocean and capture as many fish as the season will allow for, or if you have only enough to market towards a targeted niche in a specific location to leverage for the highest yield.

Re-evaluate Marketing Plan

The coronavirus pandemic revealed that many businesses aren't as strong as they believed they were. Many international corporations had to close hundreds and thousands of retail stores globally to preclude the possibility of further financial damage caused by the necessary precautional #stayathome trend. Given the economical change, it calls for a re-evaluation of the marketing plan; an adjustment to commensurate the behavioral change within the society.

There are three aspects to look at in a marketing plan, according to Allan Dib, the bestselling author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan. He categorizes them into three different stages: the before, during, and after.

Prospect is the aspect before the marketing effort begins, which is also the first part of the marketing plan. It involves looking at the company's target market, crafting the message for the target market, and identifying the media used to reach them. This is important to define because everyone has different needs, and by defining who your target audience is, you will be able to better understand their specific needs. Subsequently, the company can craft a message directed towards catering the targeted market's need, and perhaps providing them with a unique solution to their problem. And finally, the company can get the message across via the most frequently used media platforms appropriate for the target market in order to yield the maximum awareness.

Leads happen during the process of marketing, which dives into how to nurture leads after capturing their attention, and the strategy to convert leads into actual sales for the company. A lead is referring to the group of people from the target audience who are interested enough in a company's goods/services to potentially buy from them. Allan Dib explains, "lead capture is all about properly handling interest and building your future sales pipeline."

Dib observed that many businesses operates in a hunting style, which he describes as a "constant battle" because it does not guarantee a successful hunt everyday. Instead he urges businesses to transition to a farming style of operation, which is a much more sustainable approach in a higher yielding "harvest", as long as they provide an appropriate amount of nurturing and caring for their customers.

During this stage, leads are given a follow-up path to get to know what the company does, which creates a beneficial relationship between the company and the potential lead. Then, the company nurtures this relationship by providing more value to keep leads motivated and engaged. Through this process, trust building is the key strategy in converting leads into sales.

"[When] a relationship is built on trust...the sales comes as a natural consequence." - Allan Dib

Customer care comes after securing potential leads and converting them into sales. This is where a business aims to turn their new customers into long term customers in order to continue doing business with them, as well as gaining potential referrals. This can be done by providing a world-class purchasing experience through delivering value that exceeds expectations. With the goal of increasing the customer's lifetime value, Dib suggests, companies should view each of their customers as a potential evangelist for their business.

3. Prevention > Remedy

A business is built upon a foundation that works in a society during a certain time. However, as many business owners have all been experiencing during the coronavirus pandemic, a once successful business model could become ineffective overnight. And after many bootless attempts by even the biggest international corporations to come up with remedies that could possibly counter these unforeseen changes, many had to close over a thousand retail stores to avoid filing for bankruptcy. And as a small business owner, how can we learn from this experience and avoid hitting the same road blocks in the future?

More often than not, the prescience and adaptability of a company are the key qualities that helps a business get through a difficult time. During this #stayathome trend, customers' connections with a company are more crucial than ever for the business to continue thriving, especially because sales are to be done through a computer screen. Therefore, by building a veracious relationship with customers, it could become a strong foundation for a company to create brand loyalty, which will be the safety net for the challenges the company may face in the future.