Suppose $G$ is a connected noncompact locally compact group, $A,B$ are nonempty and compact subsets of $G$, $μ$ is a left Haar measure on $G$. Assuming that $G$ is unimodular, and $ μ(A^2) < K μ(A) $ with $K>1$ a fixed constant, our first result shows that there is a continuous surjective group homomorphism $χ: G\to L$ with compact kernel, where $L$ is a Lie group with $$\dim(L) \leq \lfloor\log K\rfloor(\lfloor\log K\rfloor+1)/2.$$ We also demonstrate that this dimension bound is sharp, establish the relationship between $A$ and its image under the quotient map, and obtain a more general version of this result for the product set $AB$ without assuming unimodularity. Our second result classifies $G,A,B$ where $A,B$ have nearly minimal expansions (when $G$ is unimodular, this just means $μ(AB)$ is close to $μ(A)+μ(B)$). This answers a question suggested by Griesmer and Tao, and completes the last open case of the inverse Kemperman problem. The proofs of both results involve a new analysis of locally compact group $G$ with bounded $n-h$, where $n-h$ is an invariant of $G$ appearing in the recently developed nonabelian Brunn-Minkowski inequality. We also generalize Ruzsa's distance and related results to possibly nonunimodular locally compact groups.