Top 10 Piggybank Budget Hacks to Grow Your Business
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Growth Hacking, Growth, Digital Marketing

Underneath all the hype, marketing and sales are about relationships. And like any good relationship, it’s got to be give and take. When you focus on giving and educating rather than selling, the universe will conspire for the sales part — or for you more scientific folk — energy in = energy out. Using this as the basis for transforming your business and coming from a place of abundance, creating value for others, plus some good old fashion elbow grease — these elements can be the defibrillator you need for your flatlining ROI.

Here are 10 things you can do right now to improve your sales — be encouraged!

1. Build a Social Community — Are you doing this one thing wrong?

This may seem like the obvious one, but there are still so many businesses who still don’t take advantage of this and even if they do, they aren’t finding success. Why?

Most people excitedly take to Facebook Groups, Quora or Linkedin trying to sell first and provide value later. It should be the other way around.

Granted this takes a bit of time investment, however with helpful interns or spending time on business networking on Facebook instead of personal perusing, just 10–15 minutes a day time investment can pay off in a big way.

Some people don’t even have a business or model but build their communities first, and it turns into a thriving market — because they’ve already attracted the biggest fans in the niche. A fantastic example of this is I F@!^&*$ Love Science. This story shows the power of social communities to build a brand.

Here’s a great guide from Social Media Examiner breaking down how you can use social to grow.

2. Use Contractors, Outsource & Automate

Take a few minutes to write down the daily or weekly tasks that are slowing you down the most. What are the things that you hate to do most or take you the most time to do for little result? Maybe it’s project management, marketing, maybe it’s customer service, web design or copywriting.

Find your weakest link and then, hire someone else to do it.

With an increase in online freelance hiring sites like Fiver, Freelancer.com, etc., etc. it’s easier and cheaper than ever before to outsource. Just make sure you brush up briefly on what you’re looking for and make sure it’s something that will truly give you back time, so you can use your powers for strategy and growing the business, rather than day to day tasks.

The same goes for automation. With the growth of cloud platforms that automate and organize things like customer service, marketing and collaboration software like Taskworld.com , investing a few bucks in software that allows you to create repeating tasks or automates email marketing, can exponentially increase your productivity. And we all know time = money.

3. Co-Host an Event

If you’ve never ventured onto Meetup.com or other networking sites, you might be surprised at what you find in your business niche. You don’t even have to do the heavy lifting of building a community, you can just tap into the ones that already exist!

Again, focus on how you can add value — maybe it’s a free workshop, presentation or donating time to a non-profit event, these are great ways to show you are engaged in other’s education and success, and this will get your business out to new potential clients and their networks.

4. Listen to Your Clients & Ask for Referrals

Sometimes businesses are so busy discussing what they think their clients think when instead, they can just ask. Using surveys, polls or doing a check in can bring things to the surface that you did not even know your product or service was doing right or wrong. This is powerful information you can use to do — of course — more of what you are doing right, and less of what you are doing wrong.