As difficult as starting a business is, sustaining a functional business has proven to be more difficult as many fail within the first few years. The statistics are glaring. More than anything else, growth is the true test of your business wit. And any business that is not growing is dying.
Contained in the plan of establishing your business should be the strategy for growing your business customer base. This plan should detail tasks to be repeated, new ideas to be explored and older ideas to be reviewed.
If you are in business for the long haul, you must have and review your growth strategies from time to time. The best performing businesses all do periodic assessments of their business plans to see how relevant it is and to highlight areas of improvement. Below are four of such growth strategies your start-up can quickly adapt.
1. Go social with your business
It is common to have social media accounts where you casually post ‘stuff’ about your business activities. But it is not enough to roll out banners and posts, these posts must be strategically conceptualized, designed and posted across relevant social media platforms to attract the relevant customers. There is a social media space best suited for every type of content and you must understand this.
You must also understand your target customers and the social media platform they are most likely to spend their time on. If you are selling human skincare products, you are bound to do lots of photoshoots highlighting your products, and the social media platform for that is Instagram and Snapchat. If you offer services, you should be spending more time on twitter and have an impressive profile on LinkedIn as well.
Social media usage continues to grow daily. Engagements are increasing as social networking platforms continue to gain more prominence and reach across new regions, penetrating deeper into older regions and has become a crucial part of day-to-day life.
Every post you make on social media has the capacity to reach 3.84 billion people representing about 42% of the population. An average of 2 hours 22 minutes is spent on social networks and messaging per day by the average person. There is a whole market on social media capable of sustaining your business growth efforts.
2. Sales, sell, more sales
The only magic that can sustain your business even if other factors fail is sales. And one effective way to sell is by engaging regularly in sales conversations. With regular sales leading to profits, you can get every other thing working. You have to be selling to stay afloat. If you are not selling, you are spending. And to continue spending, you need to sell.
All your business efforts amount to nothing if it is not translating to sales. Every business strategy is a means to an end – sales. To choose the right sales strategy, two things must be taken into account: customer acquisition cost (CAC) and annual contract value (ACV). You cannot afford to postpone on your sales strategy, decide and get implementing ASAP.
3. Add a blog to your website
Content is king and whoever produces it is a kingmaker. Nothing emphasizes the relevance of your brand like the content. When people read you often, they begin to like you. Once you become a liked brand, you become the trusted brand and then the preferred brand for business transactions.
Content marketing also helps to establish the authority of your brand. The idea of creating content is to teach your audience, buy into their emotions and sell them copies. Content must be regular if it is to win in the market and keep your business growing.
Like the king to a palace, your king (content) needs a home. Adding a blog to your website is a great move as it increases the traffic that comes to your website. Additionally, it adds a premium to the authenticity of your brand.
It goes on to show that you don’t only care about making sales, you care about making a real impact, educating and adding value. From AI-powered blogging platforms to easily adaptable drag and drop tools, there are tons of affordable blogging platforms to choose from. Be sure to evaluate the pros and cons of each of them.
4. Define the keys for evaluating the performance
Set the parameters that define the success or failure of your business efforts. Without a measure, all effort is worth little or nothing. Set metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) that clearly define the milestones to be met.
If you have a team, ensure that each team member has specific KPIs. This would form the basis for review as activity does not equal productivity. Without KPIs, it is easy to assume you are making progress when in fact, you are just swamped with loads of unproductive activities.
Applying these strategies would significantly impact the growth of your business. They are not one-offs, revisit them frequently and ensure you are never slacking on any of them. The strength of your strategy would determine the level of growth your business can and will experience.
