My 25 years of experience in sales and marketing has given me the knowledge and training to become a business growth coach for a government scheme called Growth Accelerator.
Growth Accelerator (otherwise known as “Business Growth Service”) is a government scheme. By this, I mean that the government has given £200 million to a private enterprise to invest money into businesses that want sustainable growth. As a business growth coach, I work with high-growth potential SME’s (small to medium enterprises) to give them the knowledge and support they need in sales, marketing and technology.
One of the companies I have been working with; Deals on Bathrooms has, thanks to this government scheme, received the necessary advice and support to take their sales from one a month, to one a day. Here is how I helped them do this.
After seeing me speak at a trade show in Birmingham last year, they signed up to the Growth Accelerator scheme to work with me. Their biggest issue was direction. They didn’t know what they wanted to achieve, or, how to build a marketing strategy to grow their business.
The first two/three meetings was focused on asking the hard questions. Knowing what your business does, where you want to take your business and ideas for growth are three key components for a successful business. Making them think about their business was step one. Step two was designing the strategy.
When designing your business strategy, it needs to include everything from social media, digital marketing, content marketing to sales. One critical aspect of the business that had not been approached, was SEO and more importantly, meta data.
Once I explained the importance of on-site SEO and how Google ranks your business based on keywords on the website and in the meta data, things started to change. As you can see below during their keyword research phase, they went so granular, to really find the right keywords that were being searched by their target market to find what their business offers.
Google know’s what you search for as a brand and once you know your customer, you can embed those keywords into your content marketing so that when a user searches for your product, Google can see your site is relevant to that search term. This is where traffic increases and in this case, by dramatic measures.
By implementing the right keywords, Deals on Bathrooms went from just one sale a month, to one sale A DAY.
The new build of the website coupled with teamwork, an overall business strategy and the passion to grow a business has allowed Deal on Bathrooms to not only improve their sales, but also their traffic, which has tripled since the new website launch.
For you to be able to achieve similar results for your business, follow the three simple steps below;
- Know Your Customer
How do you define your target customer? You will need to characterise and define this, for example;
- Female
- Lives in London
- Has Disposable Income
- Married
- Has two children
- Drives a BMW
Honing in on your target market will allow you to really define who they are, where they like to hang out and most importantly, how they search for products/services like yours.
- Know Your Business
What does your business have to offer? What are the products/services that you are using to solve your customers pain? As you can see in the image below, Deals on Bathrooms know what they are selling. If you are a seasonal business and have collections, make sure the products in each collection are researched during this process.
- Tell The Story
The final part of completing your research is by turning it into a story through the meta data on your website. Based on your keywords and target customer, create sentences (no longer than 160 characters) that can be applied to each page/category of your website which include your keywords/phrases.
My work with Deals on Bathrooms is continuing and I wanted to share this journey with you, to show you that with funding and the right business coach, YOU can achieve the same results.