The year 2020 switched up the way we do business in every possible way. No one had seen it coming, but old services like drive-through movie theaters came back to life while digitization took over the workforce. Telemedicine was widely adopted, and we came to rely on touchless payments and deliveries. With digitalization on the rise, it had never been easier to grow your business.
Even in the face of a global pandemic, we found more efficient ways to operate and succeed. In short, we remembered how we, as humans, have the remarkable ability to adapt, learn, grow, and push through our limits to exceed all expectations.
Having survived the pandemic, it sure feels like there’s nothing we can’t do. In light of the inspiration 2020 has bestowed upon the business world, here are a few innovative ways you can grow your business, even more so, in post-pandemic times.
Join virtual events and webinars
The pandemic did a lot of damage to the way businesses connect with their customers, especially for those that relied on offline events and networking. Although offline activities were taken out of the equation, you could still demonstrate your commitment to interacting with your customers through virtual events like webinars.
Webinars are a great tool to improve your brand awareness, even if you’re a small business or are just getting started. They require fewer overhead expenses than offline events and can be created from the comfort of your home or office. If a webinar sounds too technical for your tastes, you can opt for the Live Chat features using any of your social media platforms.
Try growth hacking
SEO, PPC, social media marketing, ad campaigns; there are a lot of strategies and tactics that go into digital marketing. It’s no wonder that large companies invest millions of dollars in their marketing department to expand their reach and increase their conversions. It’s easy to understand why small businesses may feel overwhelmed at the cost of advertising, however, there are other, more affordable approaches to boosting your client base.
You might be surprised to know that growth hacking marketing often exceeds the performance of traditional marketing. While it requires a field expert to generate results, growth hacking is a strategy that experiments rapidly with different channels and product development tactics to find what works for a specific business. This approach accelerates results and provides the most effective way to grow and scale up a business.
Diversify your content strategy
Even if your online content is performing well, it’s always prudent to experiment with other strategies. So far, your content has been catered to the customer segment you’ve been targeting, but if you want to scale up and reach a wider audience, you need to meet them where they are. That’s why you should spice up your content a bit.
The great thing about digital content is that it can be repurposed, over and over again, into different formats. If you have an established blog, how about turning the highest-performing articles into a podcast? Once you start podcasting, you can branch out into making videos as well. Although the content is more or less the same, each platform will target a new audience segment.
Translate your content
While diversifying your content is a fantastic way to be noticed by more customers, there are only a certain number of people in your target audience in any one area. As you start to reach the limit of how much your business can grow at home, it’s time to expand into the global market.
Which countries you target will depend on your business, but you will almost certainly require translation and localization services. In order for your new audience to engage with your brand, they must be able to understand your content and find it relevant to them. Even in areas where English is widely spoken as a second language, customers will be put off if your content is not available in their mother tongue.
You might be tempted to rely on machine translation or a bilingual colleague to perform these translations, but that would be a mistake. Poorly translated content will leave people with a bad impression of your company and can even lead to costly mistakes. Hiring professional translators that have specialized knowledge in your sector will give your business an advantage and open up a whole new market.
Create a customer loyalty program
Retaining old customers is just as important as targeting new ones. Oftentimes, it’s even more important. Focusing on converting new customers while neglecting your current ones will keep you stuck in an endless loop. Luckily, there are a lot of ways through which you can keep your existing customers intrigued by your services and/or products.
For starters, you should totally launch a customer loyalty program, if you don’t have one in place already. Loyalty programs motivate your customers to keep working with your business in return for the rewards they get for their loyalty: it’s a win-win situation. This will enhance your ability to grow your business, as your existing customers will be more likely to tell their friends and family, helping to spread the word.
Gamify your marketing
Nowadays, you can see businesses everywhere reaping the benefits of incorporating gamification into their marketing, services, and even products. After all, there’s nothing that engages customers than being allowed to have fun while interacting with your brand.
Gamification does wonders to increase customer interaction and loyalty. There are a lot of ways to implement gamification into your business, such as running contests, offering points for using your services (much like a loyalty program), or developing a direct real game.
Leverage data analytics
Leveraging data analytics will give you a competitive edge over the competition in a myriad of ways. By delving into the insights about your customers’ behavior patterns and interests, you’ll be able to cater to your marketing strategies more efficiently.
However, marketing isn’t the only area of your business that will benefit from the data you obtain: it will help you improve your services and products as well, ultimately helping to grow your business and take it to a new level.
The takeaway
Although 2020 posed seemingly endless challenges, by facing them head-on with innovative thinking, many businesses have come out the other side stronger. The years post-pandemic offer the ideal opportunity to stretch your comfort zone even further and find groundbreaking ways to grow your business.
If this is the year that you decide to take your business global, give yourself an advantage by working with BeTranslated’s team of skilled professional translators. Our linguists have a wide range of expertise, including marketing translation. We also offer a broad spectrum of language pairs, from European languages like English to French to Asian languages such as English to Chinese.
For more information or a free, no-obligation quote, get in touch today.
