• Equity financing, 
• Debt financing, or 
• A combination of both.

The answer to the questions is simple really. You need to promote your business more in order to attract the maximum number of customers or clients. Adverts are a very effective way to generate massive awareness to a targeted audience likely to require your goods or services. 

If you're in business to make money you need customers and lots of them. Once you have a steady trickle of customers, how do you find a way to turn that trickle into a stream and then a torrent?

Over the long term, customer acquisition is the biggest challenge facing most businesses.

The best practice is to settle on a small number of marketing channels that meet your customer acquisition goals and execute those properly, either directly or through an agency partner. If a channel looks like it isn't working, drop it and try something else.

An example of a few channels includes Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, AdWords e.t.c. Each channel has different rules.

Your business can also generate more customers by using SEO keywords in your website content and on your social media platforms. By doing this, you will be able to reach people who are actively searching for the products or services that you offer. In addition, you should make sure that your website is easy to navigate and contains relevant information that potential customers would be looking for.

Another way to generate more customers is through word-of-mouth marketing. This can be done by providing excellent customer service and creating a positive brand image. If your current customers are happy with your business, they will be more likely to recommend you to others.

You can also encourage word-of-mouth marketing by offering incentives such as discounts or coupons for referrals. You can create a referral program by offering something of value to new customers who bring in their friends. For example, you can offer a coupon that gives new customers 10 or 20 percent off their first purchase if they bring in five or ten of their friends.

Do you need a business loan to grow your business and get the resources you need? Our team of experts can help you get the funding you need. 

You might not be a professional salesperson, but you still sell all the time.

Read also How To Master A Successful Entrepreneur's Mindset

It's a digital world out there. Participating and taking advantage of this digital age is not an option, but rather, a MUST for all small businesses. 

With more than 4.5 billion plus and growing  daily Internet users, the opportunity for small business to reach their target market has not only, never been better, its also allowed SME's to compete with the big enterprises and do so cost effectively. 

Creating consistent & growing revenue is possible with the right business systems in place and an understanding of business development principles.  

Randomly posting on social media does not even come close to being classified as a lead generation system, let alone, reliably produces quantifiable results that grow your business revenues consistently. Even consistently posting on social media is only one part of a solid lead generation strategy and system.  

Unfortunately, most self proclaimed marketing experts as well as companies out there over promise and under-deliver with in the majority of cases, no accountability and certainly no alignment of interests. 

Guerrilla Marketing

1. Time, Energy, Imagination = Know How = Team 

2. It Costs More to Acquire New Clients than Leveraging your existing client base. 

3. Embrace Technology  

By CEO, GIC Capital  

Recent figures have revealed that the average UK SME owners will be dedicating around 16% of their annual budget for 2018/19 to marketing efforts within their companies.

Many have admitted that upping their spending on marketing was part of their plan this year, especially given the fact that most have cited the positive returns that their competitors have received as a result of spending more on marketing.

So, how could your SME benefit from funnelling more money into your marketing budget?

Marketing will give you a competitive advantage

Most industries are becoming much more competitive, and as a result consumers now expect more from businesses in terms of an experience. In order to achieve this, you need to think of new and inventive ways that you can appeal to them, perhaps on channels that stretch further and engage audiences in a different way to social media.

Ensure that your messages are clear and concise and consider the benefits of using either print, digital or broadcast to convey them. Remember, you will need to enlist the help of industry experts to produce this work which is going to be costly, so budgeting accordingly is important.

It helps you to learn more about your audience

An effective marketing strategy isn’t just there to draw your audience in, it also helps your business learn more about them, allowing you to create more targeted content that is meaningful and elicits the right response. After every campaign that you put out, track the results and study the audience’s behaviour. This will give you detailed insights into the way that people engage with your content and will help you make better marketing decisions in the future.

Spending more on marketing helps to bolster creativity

All businesses know the importance of being innovative and creative, and spending more money on marketing is a sure fire way to achieve both of these things.

In the context of social media, visual content gets, on average, 40 times more engagement than text-heavy posts, so investing money in visual content like videos and infographics is going to help you engage your audiences online.

Your business is worth it

Your business is your livelihood and your passion, so why wouldn’t you want to spend more money encouraging people to engage with it?

Ensure that your marketing strategy is well thought out and remember to be realistic and funding.

Check out our capital expansion funding options here. 

Starting up any new business endeavour is, as we all know, riddled with risk. Whether it’s due to finance, market placement, or just a lack of interest from prospective customers, there are a number of things that can go wrong when you start your own SME and being prepared for failure is crucial if you want a shot at success.

There are a number of risk factor signs that suggest that your business might be in a detrimental position, so read on to find out how to spot them.

A lack of cash

Even if your business is making profit and is increasing sales, if your outgoings are significant and you don’t have enough money to pay staff and lenders, you could run into problems.

An ineffective team of staff

The people that you have working for you are the backbone of your organisation and if their skills, experiences and goals don’t align with those of your company, you could find yourself in an upward struggle. It’s also important to develop a team that works well with each other and gets on. This is going to make things much easier for you in the long run and can easily be achieved with team building exercises that can help to boost morale.

Strong competition

Of course, healthy competition is a good thing, but if you are planning on entering a market that is completely saturated, it’s likely that your business is going to face some problems when it comes to getting up and running.

Bad marketing

These days, an effective marketing strategy is an intrinsic part of any new businesses plan. There are a number of fundamental mistakes that you can make that can spell out poor marketing. Funnelling too much money into marketing can be detrimental as it can mean that other aspects of the business fall by the wayside. There is also the risk of one bad campaign tarnishing your businesses reputation in the early days.

A lack of passion

Sure, there might be a new type of business that is taking off at the moment and earning people heaps of cash, but if you don’t feel any passion about the venture, it’s unlikely that it will be a personal success story for you. You are going to live and breathe your new business idea, so it’s important that you can at least enjoy and appreciate what you are doing on some level.