Today, we want to address the topic of business growth strategies that you will need if you are opening a new start-up or if you fail to grow your business.
After tackling the ideas for a new online business and the Growth hacking for start-ups, today we talk about strategies and highlight the fundamental pillars for the growth of your company!
As we also said in previous articles, to successfully start a growth process, it is imperative to establish a strategy.
Moreover, all entrepreneurs are aware that business growth is essential for long-term success, which is why it is crucial to use strategies and not just rely on existing customers.
Let us therefore look specifically at these 9 strategies for business growth.
Corporate growth strategies
- Involve your customer base
- Exploiting the exclusive selling point
- Focusing on online presence
- Increasing social presence
- Using user content
- Diversifying your catalogue
- Adapting to the times
- Asking for referrals
- Analysing data
Before we start addressing these business growth strategies one by one, we would like to remind you that Grot Academy holds courses of industry professionals who will be able to help you draw up a plan to better manage and grow your business, by clicking here!
Involve your customer base
Among business growth strategies, building a loyal and lasting relationship with your customers is fundamental.
First of all because retaining customers you have versus losing them or acquiring new ones is always cheaper!
If you are building and growing your business, keeping customers is crucial, to lose them would be to have done something wrong in the strategy you are using so far.
It would also require stopping for a moment to reflect on the fate of society.
What you need to do to engage your customers is to get to know them and above all to know what they need.
One of the key things in business growth strategies is to be able to meet the needs of your target audience and this can be done through the channels of the customer service and the reviews.
Another very important element besides the customer feedback to which the company must pay attention is themarket analysis.
Therefore, paying attention to the needs of your customers and the companies competing in the market is crucial!
Exploiting the Exclusive Selling Point (USP)
What is meant by exclusive point of sale or USP among business growth strategies is why customers choose you over other businesses competitor.
To be able to identify what your USP is, you have to think about your product or service and divide it into three categories:
- Price. Yours may be cheaper than other companies.
- Product. The quality you offer is better than others on the market who have the same product as you.
- Service. As we said, customer service, after-sales support, guarantees are added values that your company adds over other competitors.
Focusing on online presence
Among the most frequently used business growth strategies in recent years is to focus on the online presence of one's company, you can find some useful information also here in this regard!
Online is a new way to attract new potential customers to your company and there are three ways to do this, which must work simultaneously:
- Marketing. Use email marketing, content marketing and paid advertising to reach new leads.
- SEO. Increase your chances of traffic to your site through SEO-written blog articles.
- Social Media. Use the right social platforms to promote and raise awareness of your product.
If you want to learn more about and explore these topics of business growth strategies, you can do so through the courses offered by Grot Academy, you will find them by clicking here!
Design your e-mail lists in such a way that they are always engaging; for example: deal with interesting topics related to your products, make customer promotions and special offers.
Among the many programmes there are for the creation of mailing lists, we recommend mailchimp.com!
If you are a start-up, rather than investing in paid advertising, we recommend hiring someone who knows how to write well and who can produce articles for your blog from an SEO perspective.
This is an extremely popular and effective method of growing business through search engines.
One of the largest and most popular blogging sites is Wordpress.
Increasing social presence
Among the business growth strategies related to the previous point, we find this one.
Improving and increasing your social media presence can certainly make a difference to your business growth.
This is certainly an effective and cost-efficient way to bring many more people to your company, thereby also increasing traffic and possibly turnover.
To be able to best implement this strategy, however, you have to consider some important elements such as the platform and the content.
The right platform:
As you know, there is not just one social networking platform but several, some even very sector-specific.
It is not essential to be on all of them, indeed many times it is detrimental, but one must choose the one(s) most suitable for our product.
The main platforms are:
- Facebook. A great social to generate leads and find new customers.
- Twitter. It is necessary to have a constant presence and can be perfect for answering direct questions about the product, as a kind of customer service.
- Instagram. Practical and effective for certain marketing models such as influencer marketing.
- LinkedIn. This is a B2B and B2C social platform. Compared to the others this one is useful for networking.
Content creation:
Together with the appropriate social media to use, you also have to think about social strategy and a detailed calendar of content to be shared.
What you have to do is define your audience and try to figure out the right content to publish.
However, in managing and better understanding which social network is best suited to your business, you can make use of specialists in the field such as digital marketers or social media managers.
Using user content
You should know that more than 86% of companies use user-generated content for business growth strategies.
This is because, in addition to achieving higher engagement, they are also much more cost-effective in terms of credibility and time in creating content.
What you need to do is to create a brand where users enjoy interacting, using GIFs and memes, as well as the ability to leave reviews.
To best increase user content, you can use these tips:
- Organise a competition using a #hastag that reflects you, maybe even your brand name.
- Run a contest, where by liking the page and tagging some friends in the post, one lucky person will be drawn to win a prize.
- In the same vein, call a giveaway through reviews, memes or photos.
- Ask questions.
- Create current and seasonal content.
- Customise and make your brand unique.
Diversifying your catalogue
Among the most effective and well-known business growth strategies is product diversification, so that sales can be increased and new opportunities offered to customers.
What you need to do is make the most of, as we said, online platforms and customer service to find out what products your buyers need.
But remember, diversification can only be useful if your new products will really improve the customer experience, otherwise it will only be a costly cost for you.
Adapting to the times
Adapting to the times is crucial for corporate growth strategies and, above all, for their survival.
The brand, the company and above all the team must always be up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends, so that you can evolve and continue to sell.
Many companies, in fact, close down after a few years because they stop at their products by not looking at and contextualising the society around them.
If you sell clothes, you cannot fail to look at the fashion of the moment and especially the materials or techniques used to recycle them.
Therefore, set aside time each week to check on changes in your industry and attend networking events and conferences!
Asking for referrals
Referrals or referrals work a lot in business growth strategies because customers tend to trust the suggestions of experts or other customers.
In short, they will trust this mode more than paid advertisements or other marketing campaigns, wouldn't you, or rather, haven't you?
There are many ways to obtain referrals the simplest are:
- experts in the field,
- blogger,
- influencer
- customers themselves with reviews
To help you with these referral business growth strategies, you can apply these practical steps:
- Expose yourself clearly. What you need to do is to state your intentions openly, give an overview of your organisation, your achievements and your products. Relate best to who you are facing.
- Maintain relations. Relationships take a lot of time and work to become effective. Therefore, keep an open line of communication and immediately update your partners on any changes you make.
- Offer exceptional quality. Remember that referrers have a reputation, just as you do, so always make sure the product is perfect.
Analysing data
Among business growth strategies is data analysis to study the growth of a product and your company.
Thanks precisely to data and its analysis, you can optimise your website and become more competitive on the market.
If you would like to learn more about this part of corporate growth strategies, you can view our Academy Grot courses.
For example, Google Analytics deals with user behaviour on your site; here you can view and monitor key metrics such as frequency, abandonment, session time and time spent on each page.
Google Search Console, deals with incoming traffic and how users find your website. If your site's traffic is poor as far as search engines are concerned, you could change your SEO.
In short. as you have seen, there are several business growth strategies that you can use to ensure the success of your business, however if you want to learn more about any of these aspects, you can do so by enrolling in the Grot Academy courses, by clicking here!
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