If you are like most business owners you want to grow the revenue of your business. Most business owners believe that in order to grow their business they need to attract new customers. That may well be true, but it is only a part of the equation. This is a universal problem that businesses face either continually or at different points during their life cycle. Why do only a small percentage of businesses solve this growth problem and find lasting success?

The first thing you should do as a small business owner is examine your current customer base and determine if you can do a better job of monetizing them. Few if any companies are perfect, so if you think you are already providing your current customers with the optimal amount of value, look again you are probably leaving money on the table. Are you getting repeat customers? Are your customers referring others to you? What other products or services could be complimentary to yours, and if you don’t offer them internally, could you offer them to your customers as an affiliate of another company?

Value Not Revenue
Focus on providing value to your customers and the revenue will follow. Companies build raving fans by understanding the problems of their customers and then providing them with the solution. The companies that tend to fail are ones that focus their attention of making money from their customers instead of genuinely trying to help them.

Once you feel confident that you are providing maximum value to your current customers it is time to start marketing for new customers. The key here is to attract the right customers, not just customers. You want your marketing dollars to go towards the demographic that will convert; which is easy enough as long as you attract the customers that you can truly help.

Don’t Spray and Pray
If you are blasting out marketing randomly to large groups of people then you’re probably wasting your marketing dollars. Utilize the knowledge you have of your ideal customer and market specifically for that group of people. Avoid marketing when you can’t control any of the filters or qualifying factors involved. For example, if you own a mortgage company that wants to focus on refinancing people’s homes, then you need to market to people who own homes and not people living in apartments.
Whether its age, gender, occupation, amount of income or amount of debt; use every metric you can to hit your target. Marketing to drive your key demographics is imperative to success. Your response and conversion will both be significantly higher, resulting in a higher return on investment.

Funding For Your Business
In order to attract additional customers you will likely need to spend more on marketing. If you are targeting your key demographic, and following the customer due diligence outlined above then you should feel confident in your decision to borrower money.

If you have tried to borrower money for your business from a bank then you already know that is next to impossible. Thankfully there are companies like Advance Funds Network (AFN) that exist solely to provide funding for businesses. Unlike a standard bank AFN makes the process simple and transparent. It is their goal to provide money for your business, it is all they do and they’ve done it successfully since 2007. Borrowing money for your business is much more doable than you realize.

Three Simple Actionable Steps
First, make sure that you are providing all the value possible for your current customers. Second, know your ideal customer so you can target the correct demographic. Third, give your company an injection of funds for a targeted marketing effort and drive new convertible customers.