Scaling your business as an entrepreneur can be challenging. But it can be equally exciting. There’s a lot that you need to consider — such as cost and time — to determine whether you’re really ready for growth. But most importantly, you will need to consider how to expand and improve your service offerings.
It took me about five years to truly scale my business from a mostly SEO service company to a one-stop-shop for digital marketing. I have to say that gradually expanding my service offerings was what mainly contributed to the growth of my business. And I also learned a lot about what you need to do to properly expand your service offerings. Here are some tips to help you out:
1. Consider the needs of your existing customers/clients.
Most of the time, you won’t have to look any further than your existing client base when attempting to expand your service offerings. Talk with them and see if they have any needs that your business is still unable to address. Then consider whether you’re capable of meeting those needs and whether doing so will align with your current business niche.
Before I tried my hand at influencer marketing, I was mainly focused on providing search engine optimization services and a little bit of conversion rate optimization. I was working with a fitness influencer on her website’s SEO. But then she asked for my help in marketing her brand with influencers. And that changed everything for me.
I studied influencer marketing, which was still in a nascent stage at the time, and considered whether it would align with my SEO and CRO services. Since it’s all a part of digital marketing, I decided to give it a try and help her discover and connect with influencers. That’s how influencer marketing became part of my service offerings.
2. Consider your strengths and expand accordingly.
What are you particularly good at that you aren’t monetizing yet? Let’s say you’re an SEO strategist but you also have a good eye for design and can easily detect opportunities to optimize websites for conversions. Perhaps you could add CRO to your service offerings with a little bit of training.
For me, public speaking has always been my strong suit. But I never really considered it as an opportunity to expand my services until very recently. I was mainly meeting with clients and working with my team in the background to execute digital marketing campaigns and that was it. By the end of 2017, I started getting the occasional invite to speak at corporate events.
And as more invites poured in the following year, I realized that people actually wanted to hear me speak and that they would pay me for it. So I developed a plan to add speaking engagements as part of my service offerings. Now, people can hire me to speak at marketing events or to train people at marketing workshops.
3. Expand according to business alignment.
As I briefly mentioned in the first point, the new services you add should align with your business niche. If you’re not getting any valuable ideas from your existing clients or your strengths, you could explore other relevant options within your industry. This will help you gain a better understanding of other services that you can add that align with your existing service offerings.
Take a look at some of the other agencies in your industry and see what kind of services they’re offering. Is there anything you’re missing that you could work on and include in your services?
For example, my agency started out with basic content development services, which we normally bundled with our SEO package. Our team of writers and editors worked to create keyword-optimized text content in the form of blog posts, page copy, and product descriptions. But since we had an in-house designer anyway, we also started creating infographics for our clients to enhance our service offerings.
4. Expand to become a one-stop-shop.
To effectively scale your business, you need to put the needs of your customers first. This means offering them comprehensive solutions in one place so they don’t have to go anywhere else. The goal is to simplify things for them and reduce costs through package service deals. It also means discovering opportunities to deliver services that they didn’t even know they needed.
At the very beginning of my entrepreneurship, I was providing SEO consultation services. This meant that I was advising people on how they could enhance their SEO strategy to improve their rankings. I was helping them with keyword research and website analysis, so they were equipped with all of the basic resources to make necessary improvements.
But I also discovered that a lot of my recommendations could not deliver the kind of results I had expected. What I realized was that after I provided my clients with all of the keywords and plans to improve their SEO strategy, they had to take it upon themselves to create keyword-optimized content.
That meant that they were usually outsourcing their content development process, so the content quality was less than ideal. I had to come up with a solution. That’s when I began expanding my team to offer content development services that I bundled with my SEO consultation services.
So we were not only providing clients with suggestions but also executing those suggestions by taking over the content creation process. Since then, we have been gradually expanding by anticipating the needs of our clients and identifying opportunities to further enhance our service offerings.
Final Thoughts
Following these tips has helped me scale my business steadily over the past five years. Remember that although you may be eager to expand your service offerings, it’s equally important to upskill to deliver those new services. Make sure you enhance your skills and those of your team so that you can handle your service expansions.