Because of the competitive global business landscape, as a business owner, you always need to be thinking ahead to ensure that your business grows, succeeds and thrives. Growth can mean different things to different entrepreneurs in different sectors, but the most important thing is continued investments in innovation and expansion efforts to see you stay ahead of the competition and to reap the rewards from your efforts. Most business expansion strategies revolve around sales, marketing, finance and legal considerations. So if you want to find out how to grow your business, take a look at our seven tips for business growth below.
Strategies for business growth
Every business owner, irrespective of their industry, needs to follow certain strategies for their growth of business. We’ve picked out the seven most important ones to help you scale your business.
Market research
Knowing exactly who your target market is will involve an exercise of market research. This is crucial to any business because if you don’t know who your target audience or market segment is, you will not be able to tailor any of your marketing efforts to them and will end up losing out on a valuable clientele. Building your ideal client avatar is the best starting point for this exercise. It involves identifying your ideal customer’s gender, age, socio-economic background, pain points, preferences, aspirations, goals and aims and more.
But also importantly under market research is studying your competitors. Competitor analysis must look at their strengths and weaknesses, their positioning, unique selling points and value propositions, and as a result of all this research, you need to make careful decisions about how you plan on beating them.
Create a sales funnel
A sales funnel is essentially a pictorial representation of the journey each customer goes through from the moment they find out about your brand to the moment they make a purchase from you. This funnel should be defined, nurtured and consistently refined to ensure you lead your clients through the sales funnel effectively to drive more sales. It doesn’t matter whether you sell products or services. The customer journey with your brand is a crucial element of your business’ reputation and ensuring that they walk an easily outlined path towards the final sale is crucial. To do this, you may need to build email lists for the customer lifecycle journey. Other options include offering certain customers special deals. Creating a website to promote your offering. Creating landing pages for special deals and more.
Invest in customer retention
It is often said that customers these days are purchasing not necessarily for the product or service that they’ll get, but for the actual experience. This means your customer service efforts must be optimised in order to ensure you retain customers. If you’re dealing with a complaint, make sure it’s resolved quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction. One negative online review could take a toll on your business’ reputation and affect your bottom line. Investing in a customer service team that’s dedicated to this goal will help you grow your business.
Build brand visibility and foster strategic partnerships
A business’ reputation is what they’re known for in the industry. It takes years to build and mere minutes to be destroyed. You therefore need to invest in building your brand. Some of the ways to do this include raising your visibility on various platforms and channels such as social media. Showcasing your expertise through regular industry talks, events, conferences, trade shows, etc. You can even consider building strategic partnerships with other industry bodies or businesses to help your business’ brand gain wider recognition and visibility.
Product or service diversification
Although we talk about product or service diversification here, this can be considered a two-pronged process. Firstly, as a business owner, you need to focus on established sources of revenue to ensure that you can scale your business based on current efforts. The more you refine these income streams, the stronger your business will be. However, there is a second approach to this as well. And that is to develop additional revenue streams to supplement your initial source of revenue. The ways in which you can do this go back to market research and identifying gaps in the market and needs that you can meet that your competitors haven’t done yet. And you can then build and refine your offering even further so that your income streams are diversified to help your business grow.
Planning ahead through market expansion
Market expansion is another important area of consideration and this should come as a natural extension after you’ve put in place strong customer service systems, established your brand in the industry to some extent and you’ve diversified some of your products or services. You’re now ready to move to new markets and both explore and tap into their potential. This will mean replicating what is working in your business already as well as ensuring that you continuously monitor for better and more optimal ways of growing your business.
Measure, Refine, Revise
We now come to the final point in this analysis and it is to continuously measure, refine and revise your offering. What does this mean? In essence, it is “what gets measured gets managed”. If you’re not quantifying your business outcomes, you have no way of determining whether your business is growing. But once you quantify certain targets and you reach them, you always need to be in a process of refining them even more strategically and revising what isn’t working to ensure that you’re constantly staying on top of your business needs and that you’re always feeling the pulse of the market, responding to its every manoeuvre.
Final thoughts
To improve a business offering will take time and considerable efforts. But it certainly beats doing the opposite – nothing. While the former can take you on a business expansion path, the latter will see your business being driven into the ground with devastating results for you. If you’re looking for a business development and market expansion partner, we at Motion Advice are your best bet. Having worked with multiple different clients over the past few years on a global scale, we’ve reached results for them that were not previously imaginable. Imagine where we can take you. All you’ve got to do is click on the Contact Us button and we’ll get right back to you!
