About This Column
This monthly column is intended to inspire action. You know digital transformation is critical to growing your business, but there are so many moving parts and so much to learn! It’s easier to navigate if someone points you in the right direction so you can take the first steps. You don’t have to master anything right now, you only need to move forward and learn as you go.
If one growth tip doesn’t work for your business, pick another one and try that. If you do that over a course of a year, you may be surprised at how much your business has grown and how clear your path is to further growth. A custom strategy will naturally emerge from your efforts, all from trying something new every month.
Content for this column will vary from month to month. We’ll cover what’s trending, motivation, tools, diversification, funding, actionable Canadian data, expert quotes, and how & where to grow your business online over the following month. New posts will be announced in our newsletter, so sign up to ensure you don’t miss a single month of growth.
Grow Your Small Business Online in May
Spring kickstarts the growing season in Canada and there’s no better time to position your business for growth. These bite-size tips reveal fast ways to grow your Canadian small business online this month.
[DISCLOSURE:Â We may receive compensation for links to products on this website.]
TIP ONE: Funding & Competitions
You don’t need access to unlimited funding to grow your business, but it sure helps to have more than less. The same goes for the publicity, prestige (and often cash) that comes with winning a legitimate award.
Unlock up to $1.15 million to start up and grow your business: Accelerate your business growth with the Canada Small Business Financing Program (CSBFP). Since 1999, it has supported over 170,000 small and medium-sized enterprises through financing. Recent enhancements offer more support, longer loan terms and broader financing options.
2024 Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 nominations are open until May 14, 2024.
TIP TWO: Growth Marketing
“Growth marketing focuses on customer relationship building and fostering loyalty;” explains Iterable. “It’s a long-term strategy where authenticity and engagement creates advocacy and organically grows customer lifetime values.”
Growth marketing doesn’t only result in faster business growth, it nurtures relationships for ongoing results. This has a snowball effect that facilitates long-term growth, as well as immediate results.
Your May mission is to start testing customer behaviour in multiple channels (website, social media, email, SMS, etc.), and then analyze that data from a growth perspective. The first step is to identify user segments so you can begin to build personalized campaigns. Then, you can start sending test messages based on their behaviour (signals) and analyze the results again.
“The customer provides signals—information about his or her needs and intentions—through activities like purchases, online browsing, and social media posts,” says Marketing’s Holy Grail: Digital Personalization at Scale. “The company responds to the signal with a relevant and timely message, which we call a trigger, that is sent to the individual customer. Doing this effectively requires careful advance planning. The marketing team needs to develop a library of trigger messages matched to individual signals.”
The ultimate goal is to quickly engage customers at a deeper level to increase their lifetime value and reduce churn, while significantly lowering your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increasing revenue. Gathering and organizing data isn’t the most popular task in marketing, but you’ll come to enjoy analyzing it as successful strategies emerge and prove profitable.
Note: Just 15% of Canadian small-medium businesses feel very confident about the channels they are using to market to customers, according to Making Sense of Marketing: A 2024 Guide for Small Businesses (based on the report, The Current State of SMB Marketing). A closer look at engagement for growth marketing will also provide a clear picture of which marketing channels your customers prefer.
TIP THREE: Diversify Revenue Sources
Start an Affiliate Program
The most powerful, effective, efficient and economical way to market your Canadian products or services online is through an affiliate program (also known as an associate program or partner program). Affiliate programs are based on performance, allowing you to advertise on countless websites around the world, yet only pay for it when a sale is made.
You can quickly build an online sales force that is virtually guaranteed to boost your bottom line through an unbeatable Return on Investment (ROI). Most leading American retailers have affiliate programs in their customer acquisition toolbox, but Canadian retailers have been slower to adopt the strategy.
Learn How to Start an Affiliate Program for a Canadian Business
Want to start an affiliate program for your product or service? Take a free course from the experts at Impact.
TIP FOUR: News & Notices
NOTICE: On May 13, 2024, CARM (CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management) will become the official system of record that importers & other trade chain partners will use to pay Canadian duties & taxes.
TIP FIVE: May Content
Grow your traffic, grow your business. Timely content can differentiate your business while generating traffic that converts. Following are some ideas for May.
Note: We post a list of holidays & observances (monthly, weekly and daily) for marketers in the Online Business Canada Facebook group. There’s a lot of them! You’re bound to find some that are a perfect fit for you business.
Here are just a few May holidays & observances:
Internet & Ecommerce Services Month
Barbecue Month
Family Wellness Month
Good Car Keeping Month
Gardening for Wildlife Month
Inventors Month
Moving Month
Pet Month
Physical Fitness & Sports Month
Egg Month
May content themes and slants can include motherhood, royalty, spring, cleaning, renewal, planting, and the outdoors. Mother’s Day is on May 12th, 2024 (second Sunday of May). Victoria Day is on May 20th.
TIP SIX: Business Books Worth Reading
Here we share quick quotes from business books we’re reading.
“Your goal is to be so good that potential competition decides it’s not worth competing. That’s when you know you’ve created something special.” John Lee Dumas, The Common Path to Uncommon Success: A Roadmap to Financial Freedom and Fulfillment.
Changes spread out over the year will combine into powerful results. When growth based on technology overwhelms us, we can make small changes to continue growing and develop further as we feel our way through it.
How will you grow your online business in May? Please share your ideas or questions in the comments below, or join us in the Online Business Canada Facebook group.
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7 Recession Proof Online Businesses To Start From Home
Expert help to choose, start, and run a successful online business!
“Almost 200 pages of pure gold…”
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Melody McKinnon is an internet entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in a wide range of online business models, backed by a formal business education and enhanced by training and mentorship. She has owned or managed both educational and ecommerce websites. Her book, 7 Recession Proof Online Businesses to Start From Home, is available from all major ebook retailers.
Melody has worked with many businesses & brands in a multitude of capacities. She can often be found on CanadianDigitalMedia.com, CanadiansInternet.com, CanadianFamily.net, and AllNaturalPetCare.com, as well as other quality digital publications. Her content has earned reference links from highly-respected websites, magazines and university textbooks.
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Your blog is a treasure trove of valuable insights and thought-provoking commentary. Your dedication to your craft is evident in every word you write. Keep up the fantastic work!
This is the kind of content that keeps me coming back.