7 Innovative Ways To Grow Your Business In The New Digital Sphere

With the new year putting even more focus on the virtual world, it’s vital for small businesses to seize any opportunity to grow. As the digital scene changes month by month — even day by day — smart entrepreneurs and owners of startups must be continually on the lookout for the next big thing.

Advancements in tech, changes in how we communicate, cutting-edge branding techniques, and the shift to the metaverse and augmented/virtual reality — all of these have a part to play in innovative methods to keep growing your business.

But there’s a difference between glossing over the existence of opportunities and pinpointing the most effective possibilities. Here are seven of the top innovative ways to take your business to the next step as the digital sphere continues to shift.

Expand Your Specialist Base

During the past two years, we’ve seen more employees than ever switch to working from home, and along with that rise, I’ve noticed more skilled individuals leaving their employment and entering the freelance market, taking their experience with them. This is an excellent door to opportunity for startups who need to expand their base of specialist skills without adding the expense of hiring full-time employees.

This is not to say that all freelancers are created equal — some are just getting started, and some may claim experience or skills that they don’t actually have. But a careful search through portfolios, recommendations, reviews, and rating systems on sites like Fiverr and Upwork can reveal the specialists your company needs. 

Partnership Marketing

Our world is marked by divides, pitting one against another — but it doesn’t have to be that way. And promoting partnerships can actually be an excellent, organic, and even character-building way to grow your business. 

The concept is simple — choose another business whose values align with yours, and work with them to share marketing and promotion. Notice I said that the values must align. That doesn’t mean that your partner needs to reach the same audience. In fact, one of the perks of partnership marketing is reaching a demographic that you don’t normally have ready access to.

But values are a much more important sticking point than demographics. I suggest working with businesses with brand personalities that complement that of your own brand. 

Coordinate promotions, offer coupons for your partners with purchases from your own brand; co-brand on products and services — you may even decide to design a logo with alphabets of initials that fits your combined brands to be used on co-op products. Not only is partnership marketing helpful for growing your brand and reaching a bigger audience, but it’s also a rare, appealing touch in a world that seems focused on divisiveness. 

Video SEO

Search engine optimization has long been seen as key for written content. Visibility, credibility, and searchability are all vital for growing a startup in the digital age — excellent SEO usually means content that is relevant and worthwhile to the reader.

Less frequently talked about, however, is video SEO, which can be handled via several different strategies. Wrapping keywords into the transcript for your video, using custom thumbnails relevant to the content, carefully choosing your video hosting platform, strategizing video placement — all of these come into play with great video SEO.

Videos are one of the most effective ways to engage the attention of your audience. Approximately 84 percent of marketers, for example, state that video has helped them with lead generation, and about the same number say that video has boosted the amount of time that visitors spend on a website. As we draw ever closer to the concept of the metaverse, in which we’ll spend ever more time interacting digitally, videos will continue to increase in importance — and the way you craft your video SEO might make or break this method of growing your business.

Host Virtual Events

Speaking of the metaverse and interacting digitally, the pandemic is still a thing even now in 2022, and even our kids are now experts at using Zoom. Setting aside any personal feelings about this rather sad fact, if you aren’t already making the most of hosting events virtually, then I would certainly advocate this as an exciting way to grow your business.

Zoom isn’t your only option, of course — Skype, Facebook Messenger Rooms, Microsoft Teams, and even lesser-known choices like BlueJeans are out there to fill the void if you’re an anti-Zoomer. The point is, we have plenty of tools to build a social platform that can be tailored to our needs, and the best thing to do is to pretend that you’re crafting a live, in-person event…and then make it virtual.

Virtual events are a good choice even in non-social-distanced times because they enable you to keep the cost of the event low, generate leads, connect with people all over the globe, and even capture video clips that can be used for marketing purposes.

Work With Micro-Influencers

We all want to have big names promoting our companies, but there’s a newer trend to be explored — the world of micro-influencers. These tend to have thousands of followers rather than tens of thousands or even millions, but that doesn’t negate the impact that they have.

The appeal of micro-influencers is that they seem “just like us.” They’re not big-name influencers, and they’re less likely to come across as a paid promotion. In fact, micro-influencers with less than five thousand followers have higher rates of engagement than those who are celebrity-level.

Try New Social Platforms

This one can be a little frightening, but bear with me: have you set up a business TikTok account yet?

Okay, maybe TikTok isn’t for your brand. But don’t write it off without giving it some thought. New social platforms are often off-beat, maybe even seen as unlikely vehicles for business promotion. But they’re an excellent way to communicate on a more personal level, often promoting a sense of humor and quirkiness that can be very appealing to an audience.

And let’s face it, as we get closer to the concept of the metaverse, we may want to have online personas for every social media platform just to keep in touch with our audience.

Create A Community

This is another method that helps to grow your business while also striking a blow for unity and understanding in a world that’s a little rocky. To effectively allow your brand the space it needs to grow, you need an online home for your products. Why not make it an online home for your customers, too?

Facilitating communication between brand and customer is always a good idea. But I suggest taking it a step further and making it easy for customers to talk to other customers. Many large companies utilize their customer base to answer questions and discuss problems, and this model can be expanded upon to allow for other discussions and connections. 

At the same time, this allows you the interest and engagement to foster your brand personality, make sure your audience knows about new products or promotions, and interact more personally with your target demographic. Whether you choose to set up a community on your company website or utilize a popular social media platform such as Facebook, this is an excellent way to make sure that your company stays “personal” even as it continues to grow.

Looking To The Digital Future

Just when we think that there’s no way to get any more virtually-minded, something new comes along and changes everything. After two years of social distancing, a heavy emphasis on the digital sphere has become second nature.

And it’s only going to continue from here on out.

Smart entrepreneurs have to stay on the lookout for the next big thing — and that next big thing could be your business.