As a business owner, you know how challenging it can be to grow it. Especially after 2020, when the market setup has turned upside down and many businesses worry about keeping afloat rather than expanding.
But:
Regardless of the current standing and business size, we all want to succeed, don’t you agree? What can help here is diligent market research, understanding of our opportunities, and a plan.
In other words, we need to develop a growth strategy for our businesses.
And here go the tips for making it as efficient as possible.
Decide what you’re going to grow
In general, a business growth strategy is about ways to make more revenue and profits from it. Many business people think of it as scaling up marketing efforts for better customer reach and customer relations.
So, you take the situation of your business (your industry, competitors, audience, current performance, and budget) and think about what you can do with all this to better perform on the market.
But there’s a catch:
You can’t appeal to general terms and definitions when it comes to business growth. It’s impossible to grow all the business aspects at a stroke. It would be best if you focused on what exactly you are going to develop. If not sure, it’s worth addressing research paper help for specialists to examine your business model or niche and provide you with a detailed analysis of what could work best. Some of the corresponding services are available on LinkedIn, where you can learn all the details, compare their features, and decide which is relevant to your business situation in particular.
Depending on a business goal you want to accomplish, please focus on one of these strategies:
- Market penetration – if you plan to sell more current offers to existing customers.
- Market development – if you’re going to expand your customer pool and sell current offers to a new market.
- Product development – if you plan to introduce new proposals to existing customers.
- Diversification – if you want to break into new markets and sell new offers to them.
Map out high-level growth goals for the chosen strategy
Once you’ve decided on a type of strategy to focus on in 2024, you’ll need to map out the high-level goals for it in a quantifiable manner.
Yes, goal setting is a common practice for business people; but let’s take a step further and develop seemingly unattainable and overly ambitious growth goals.
- How much revenue do you expect?
- How many employees are you going to hire, if any?
- How many customers do you want to gain?
What you need to do is map out the exact, even if overly ambitious, numbers. Let’s say you expect to generate $1 million with a team of 20 and 2,500 loyal customers by the end of a year.
Think big. The bigger the goals, the more motivated you’ll be to brainstorm alternative business tactics to come as close to them as possible.
Numbers make it easier to develop a strategy that will help make those high-level growth goals attainable. Based on the numbers, you’ll be able to list out the activities needed for achieving those targets.
Write down core metrics for your growth strategy
They’ll help you identify if your business can achieve the goals you’ve assigned and what you should do to make it happen. As a rule, the metrics directly correlate with your business revenue and customer acquisition.
The common ones include the number of customers, the level of their engagement, the number of offerings, etc.
For example, if your business is about mobile app development, one of your core metrics will be the number of downloads. If continuously increasing, it means the conversion grows, therefore contributing to your overall revenue.
Also, take your time and determine your current state for those metrics so that you can figure out the steps to take to achieve the growth.
For example, if you have 250 downloads at the moment but expect to generate 2,500 by the end of a year, one of the steps to achieving that goal could be to grow organic traffic to your landing page so that more users would see your app.
Based on that, you’ll create a step-by-step plan on how to do that.
Visualize a growth plan for achieving your goals
The best plan will be to combine your strategy type and specific measures you’ll need to take to fulfill your business objectives.
To continue the example with mobile app development and growing traffic:
The growth plan here would highlight the steps to increase organic traffic and customer retention rate. Please list all the steps to influence your high-level, primary business growth goals positively.
You might need to build a website or start a new blog, publishing 50 articles there.
Or, you’ll need to focus on video marketing and launch a YouTube channel for your business.
Also, the partnership with influencers and guest bloggers could be a part of your growth plan. By monitoring and analyzing your business presence online, you’ll see if you are on the right path and if you need to change something to attain your long-term targets.
In a word
A surefire way to business growth in 2021 is thorough research: Analyze the overall situation on the market, what happens in your niche, and your business situation in particular.
Based on that, decide on the type of growth strategy your business needs at this very moment. Come up with your goals and core metrics you’ll use to understand what to do to achieve them.
Finally, create a growth plan specifying the detailed measures to take. Execute, iterate, or tailor it if necessary. Consider the unique aspects of your industry and business, and remember to track and analyze your performance on the way to success.