Growing your business is not an exact science, but some rules could make or break your effort. You see, to grow reliably and sustainably (a growth that can continue and one that you can keep up with), you need to make sure that this growth is strategic enough. With that in mind and without further ado, here are the top five strategies for business growth that you should start applying as soon as possible.
1. Define your target audience
The first thing you need to do is find a way to understand your customers better. The first step lies in figuring out who your customers are. What do they want, and what do they expect of your business? Here are a few things you should do to get to the bottom.
- Make a customer persona: Imagine a single customer based on their median traits. How old are they? Where are they from? What's their gender? What are their income and education levels? These traits will help you profile them and make a better outreach strategy.
- Feedback and surveys: While the theoretical and hypothetical (making a customer persona) aspect of defining your target audience is important, don't ignore your actual customers. Look for some feedback. Ask them what they think about your business and ask them to share their insight verbally.
- Competitor analysis: Sometimes, you can analyze your competitors' audiences and assess that the overlap with your audience is fairly similar. Needless to say, this is a complex task and may require a series of specialized tools.
Those willing to think a bit more outside the box could even use ChatGPT to speed up the process. With the right prompt, you can role-play conversing with your customers fairly accurately, which will help you with the research quite a bit.
2. Improve your project management skills
Running a successful project is a prerequisite for running a great enterprise. Project management skills are closely tied to overall leadership skills, and it's so important that you get ahead.
- Use the right tool: The first crucial task is finding the right collaboration platform. With project management tools, you'll have a much easier job keeping everything transparent and well-organized. This is a communication hub, a calendar, and a shared workspace for everyone.
- Setting deadlines: While external factors determine major deadlines, you need to become great at setting micro deadlines. The thing is that when you give people too long to finish a task, they'll extend their work to fill the available space. This is why you need to break down tasks and keep everyone on their toes.
- Resource allocation: This is the biggest challenge of project management. However, the most valuable resource on your project is the amount of work hours and available team members. Then, in a scenario where you have a limited number of tools and licenses, it might be even more challenging to coordinate.
The most important thing about project management is that it's a reusable skill. There's always some sort of project, meaning the sooner you master this art, the better. More importantly, it helps your other organizational skills, another great advantage.
3. Increase your digital marketing spending
According to some estimates, your marketing budget takes 2--5% of your total annual revenue; however, this is money well spent. With more marketing investments, you'll expand your reach, increase your competitive edge, and improve your targeting. Still, money can't solve everything, and you need to learn where to direct this money.
- Greater reach: With more investments in marketing, you have a chance to reach a bigger audience. A part of that audience undoubtedly consists of qualified leads who will eventually become proper paying customers.
- More authority: An online audience often equates your presence with your standing in the industry. This means that by ranking better and appearing more often, they'll start believing that you're an industry leader.
- More content: To stay in their minds, you must stay in front of their eyes. This is why you have to produce more quality content. Even with the help of AI tools, quality content takes time. Just coming up with topics can be exhausting, and you need to give it your best.
Even if things go south, the last area where you should try to save money is your marketing. Once you reduce your marketing spending, you'll stop growing and miss out on many amazing opportunities.
4. Optimizing your pricing strategy
Aside from all the effort, the price of your products/services will most likely determine the success of your business. People are not too lazy to shop around, especially for the products that they buy regularly. So, here are a few tips on how to optimize your pricing strategy.
- Understand your costs: You can't set a price without understanding your costs. Sure, you can decide to lose money on one item to draw the customer in, but this is a decision that the majority of small enterprises just can't afford to make. Therefore, you should start by figuring out what you can afford to charge, and the rest will fall in line later.
- Analyze the market: You need to stay competitive; therefore, you need to get a reference point of what others are charging. We're not suggesting that you try morally dubious tactics like price scraping, but you could do some research.
- Experimenting with prices: A/B testing is a method that you can easily try out on pricing. You might be surprised to see how different prices affect customer behavior and revenue. This way, you can use the knowledge obtained from these experiments to craft a long-term strategy that will give some outstanding results.
Ultimately, if the price is not right, no one will buy your products or pay for your services. This is one of the first questions you must address and a standalone issue on which your customers might not be willing to budge.
5. Pick only the most scalable solutions
We usually pick temporary solutions because they're the cheapest and the most convenient. However, because you later have to pay for an expensive migration, they usually cost you more in the long run.
- Flexibility: A scalable solution can be adjusted to your needs much more easily. Namely, a scalable solution can be scaled up or down. While most people immediately think of growth, what if things go south? Wouldn't it be great if you could downscale a bit in that scenario?
- Reduced downtime: Switching from one system to another takes a lot of time. It takes training your team and waiting for them to adapt to the new system. While all of this is taking place, your business will have to wait. By picking a scalable solution, you can solve this once and be done with it.
- Future-proofing your business: Planning for growth is never a bad idea. Still, your main objective should always be to have the necessary steps ready for upscaling. Scalable solutions can give you this kind of edge.
Making your business scalable means keeping it flexible and resilient. Whatever happens, you'll have a solution ready.
Without strategy, there's no real growth
Growth that you can't keep up with can be a frightening thing. This is why you need to ensure that your enterprise has a trodden path in front of it. By setting these basic parameters, you can ensure that no matter what happens in the future, you keep things firmly in your grasp.