For small business owners, it can be really difficult to grow your business and try to nurture new connections.

So we have shared our top five ways you can grow your reach and ensure you nurture your business in 2021.

This doesn’t cost too much or take too much time, if done correctly.

Nurture with reviews

As busy business owners, we can often forget to ask for reviews from people we have worked with.

Did you know that 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase?

That’s crazy, isn’t it?!

So, why aren’t you doing it?

By recommending 10 businesses yourself, this may also prompt that person to recommend others themselves.

These reviews can be on any platform; Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, they can be for anything; if you have used their products or services.

Nurture new connections

Make personal connections; either by booking in meetings/1-2-1’s with people you have recently met, joining groups on Facebook and by being genuinely being interested in them.

As business owners, we may often forget about building relationships with other business owners because we are always trying to find our next customer or sell.

By simply talking to other business owners, you will build those relationships and you may even be able to help each other in other business related ways ie; marketing, finding new clients or finding reliable suppliers.

Talk about your business

This may seem like an easy challenge to do but we come across so many people who struggle to do both.

Many people don’t like talking about their business on their personal page as they either:

Feel like they will be judged by the friends/family

Don’t want to spam their friends/family news feed

But, you need to stop thinking like this!

Your business is a part of you and your life so why wouldn’t you post about it on your personal page.

It doesn’t have to be ‘Buy my products/services’.

It can just be a simple ‘please like my page or share it with people you think would be interested’.

This goes with posting about your personal life on your business page.

There are 2 things for us that get the most likes; when the girls are included or when the dog is included.

This doesn’t even need to be business related!

People buy from people so why wouldn’t you include your personality and family life in your business page?

Join Business Directory sites

What is a ‘Business Directory’ site?

“A business directory is a website or printed listing of information which lists businesses within niche based categories.”

By putting your business on these sites, you can be found on a much wider scale.

There are many sites you can use to platform your business, with Google being one of them.

Not only does being on these sites help you be found, it will also help your SEO as it will link back to your website

This may take a while so make sure you take some time out of your day to get this done!

Have a website that helps to Nurture

Having a website for your business is so important as this is a great way to grow your reach.

However, if you don’t keep your website up to date, your ranking will be lower meaning it will be difficult to increase your online reach.

Here are some great tips and advice on how you can improve your rankings and grow your reach!

• Your website speed needs to be fast, if your website takes too long to load people will get impatient. 
• Keywords are important, SEO is key.
• Your website needs to be able to work on mobiles. 
• Include pictures of yourself and your life. 
• Have a chat box, this makes you more accessible online.
• You need to use Facebook Pixels. This will show you who has been on your website from Facebook.
• Your domain needs to be safe and secure. An easy way to check if it is, is to go to your URL and if it has ‘https’ it’s secure. 
• Your content should be easy to read by an 8 year old. No jargon, keep it simple. 
• Give free downloads. This is a great way to get people’s email addresses and build your email list. 
• Keep your website up to date. This will show that you are still active and stay on Google’s good side.

NURTURE an audience

Nurturing your audience is so important to do as a business owner.

You need to be able to show your audience and potential clients that they can trust you and your business before you try to go straight in with selling.

By nurturing them, you are showing them what you offer, why they should trust you and your business.

So, when the time is right and they are ready to purchase something, they will purchase it from you.

To help you nurture your audience, we have come up with 3 things you can do:

Stay relevant

One way to nurture your audience is to send them relevant information.

This could be articles that are specific to your target audience or free resources to help them in life.

By doing this you are showing them that you are actually wanting to make their life easier rather than just wanting their money.

So, if a potential client signs up to your mailing list, before you go straight to selling to them, you can start with free resources. 

For example, for us, our target audience is small business owners.

They need help with running, growing and scaling their business and everything else that comes along with being a business owner.

So, every week, we will send our mailing list a free resource they can use which will help them within their business.

This could be worksheets to help them with their content, planning tools, goal setting.

Anything we feel will benefit them, and, because we are a small business also, we use these tools as well.

We also like to keep our audience updated with anything that’s going on in the world.

If we come across an article or website which has helped us, we know that it will probably help some of the other businesses we work with so we share it with them.

This could be things on ACAS or the Gov website.

Nurture in the virtual world

Another way to nurture your audience is to set up a virtual group.

This will usually be created through social media platforms such as Facebook.

By creating a group, you are creating a community for your audience.

This can really build trust with your potential clients.

As the facilitator of the group, you will be the one to encourage engagement and relationships within the group.

When starting a group it can seem like you are putting lots of effort in to encourage conversations, but you get nothing in return.

But you need to stick with it.

Keep giving advice, growing the group and keep conversations going.

Eventually the group will start to take a turn and will end up running on its own without you.

This is definitely what you want!

You can also go into other people’s Facebook groups and be as active as you possibly can so that you are the ’go to’ person in that group for your industry.

So, if you own a marketing business, by being present in the group, when people are ready to do something with their marketing, you will be the first person to come to mind.

Meetups

Meetups are great to build trust and relationships with your audience and potential clients.

You get to meet them face to face or over a video call and you can really show your personality which can be difficult to do over the phone or social media.

The meetups can be anything from holding small informal catch ups at local coffee shops, having 1:1’s with people or even holding actual events and workshops.

By meeting up, you will be able to see if you even want to work with this person or if they want to work with you.

You will be able to get a feel whether they will benefit from using your products or services or if it doesn’t quite fit with what you do.

By holding your own events or workshops, this can also really help with your credibility and show your potential client your capabilities.

Sometimes they need to see you in action before committing to anything so events are great to build trust and relationships.

Building relationships with your audience and potential clients is probably the most important thing you need to do as a business owner. 

The worst relationships are the ones that are:

• One sided
• Inconsistent
• Take, take, take
• No help or understanding

But the best relationships are:

• Give and take
• Consistent
• With people who are helpful and understanding
• With people who genuinely care

You want the BEST relationships with your audience!

CONVERT

So, you have gone through the process of reaching new people on social media and nurturing them to build relationships.

Now it’s time for you to convert them to paying clients.

But how?

We have come up with 5 ways in which you can convert your audience into actual paying clients!

Make it easy for them to nurture you

This may seem a little obvious but you want to make it super easy for them to purchase something from you. 

Don’t be confusing!! If you’re advertising one thing, don’t then try to sell something else that is completely different.

Or if you have a complicated sales page or your pricing isn’t clear, you could potentially lose them as a customer.

So, you need to make it really clear on what you’re selling, how they can purchase it and what the price is. 

Your choice of words matter, especially if somebody is new to your products and services.

Think about your customer journey 

Your customer journey is the process in which your customers purchase through you.

They usually start off with a cheap or small item that you create and then once they know they like that, they will gradually start to purchase your more expensive items.

For example; with my salon, people are very precious over their hair and it can take someone a lot of courage to change their hairdresser.

Before they dive straight in with a full head of colour, most clients want to test out to see if they like the salon, the atmosphere and the service.

So for their first appointment they will book in for a wash and blow dry.

They will come in and get a feel for the salon to see if it’s right for them.

From there, if they liked the overall service, they may book in for a haircut just to double check that they are happy with the service.

Once they’ve done that, they will then trust the salon with a colour and so on.

So go through your customer journey.

Once they have brought into one thing, how can you move them through your funnel to purchase more products from you?

Use our template of the sales funnel to help you map out what your customer journey looks like.

Call To Action’s can convert those you nurture

Everything you do should have a Call To Action (also known as CTA).

This is where you are telling your audience and potential clients what they need to do after reading something or if they are on your website. 

You want them to always have somewhere else to go.

For example; if you are trying to get more people to read your blog on your website, when promoting it on social media, you need to tell them to ‘click on the link’.

So, if you have an appointment cancelled, which means you have one free slot between 1pm-2pm, you need to tell them how to make their booking.

CTA’s can include;

• Email them
• Discovery calls
• Booking online
• Physically come to your shop
• 1:1 meetings

Again, this makes it super easy for the customer to know exactly what they need to do.

Listen

Listening to your audience and potential clients is probably the MOST important thing.

By listening to them and what they need, you can put together resources and products that they have TOLD you they need. 

For example; at the beginning of my business mentor journey, I knew a lot more about social media than my community.

When talking to my audience, social media would always come up as an issue for them and their businesses.

So what did we do?

We put together a 30 day social media challenge where we sent them a challenge every day for 30 days to do with their social media, which led to 50 people signing up.

You can also look out for what people are asking help with.

If you’re in the VA industry and you’re seeing lots of people ask for help with choosing the right CRM system, you could put together a list of pros and cons of all the major CRM systems available and send it to them.

They will see that you’re more knowledgeable about it than they are and may even come back to you to ask for your help with setting up etc.