After 2020 over 90% of businesses had to reinvent themselves in order to keep their businesses afloat. Now the business landscape has changed drastically, and most operations have moved online for almost all types of businesses. This means you need to find the best strategies that will grow your business startup the right way going forward.
Truth be told, scaling a business is hard, and it’ll undoubtedly take you considerable effort to break even and hop on the 10%. In the beginning, it could mean dealing with marketing a startup, sales, taxes, corporate compliance, and wearing several hats at the same time. However, it could be that all you need is a different perspective and several growth strategies to get things going.
This guide compiles nine of the best core strategies that will truly make an impact on your business growth and bottom line. Some of them may come off as intensive and too much work, but at the end of the day, it’ll be well worth it. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Table of Contents
1. Set SMART Goals and Objectives
Once you decide to get your business startup off the ground, you need to set the right goals and objectives. This may sound quite a cliche, but without clear goals and objectives, you may misuse your funds, mix personal and business expenses, and before you know it, you have cash flow problems. What you need is a smart and strategic plan that goes around achievable and measurable goals.
Depending on how long you’ve been doing business, evaluate how you have been performing and gauge what you can change. Are you targeting the right market? How well is your business website running?
Is it fast enough? Are you posting the right content? You need to figure out your business priorities.
2. Know, Understand, and Focus on Your Core Customers
One of the most important aspects of growing a business is selling to the right market. You see, not everyone will be interested in your products or services. You have to narrow down and capture a target market.
It’s of absolute importance that you identify your demographic and focus all your startup marketing efforts on them. As with most things in your business strategies, you have to start with data to create a customer profile.
Apart from core demographics, you need to understand their psychographics as well. Understand what their spending attitudes are, what excites them, what makes them tick, and what will make them purchase what you’re offering.
On social media, use social media analytic tools to identify your customers. For instance, Instagram and Facebook offer analytics that show user gender, age ranges, and demographic locations. With the right data, it’ll be easy for you to put together a comprehensive strategy for targeted small business marketing, which is much more effective than selling to everyone.
3. Focus on Building Relationships
Now that you know who your target market is, one of the most important things you can do for long-term growth is build lifelong relationships. When you have an awesome product or service and focus on building long-term relationships, then they’ll become loyal customers. If you’re building a service-based relationship, then you can provide more value in the future as you scale and expand your business.
Putting your customers first and making them feel that they matter to you is the best investment you can make. It’s also one of the best ways to grow your business startup. A business thrives when there’s trust from the consumers, and with so many businesses bombarding them with adverts left, right, and center every day, trust is hard to come by.
Now, it gets a little more complicated because the cost of customer acquisition has risen to over 50%. It’s a lot cheaper to retain than to acquire customers.
Beyond that, you should also build relationships with other businesses, so attend conferences, seminars, trade shows and the like. If you’re selling products, check out trade show exhibits here.
4. Leverage Social Media
With over 4 billion social media users worldwide, social media happens to be one of the most critical tools for business growth. Social media is so powerful that over 50% of brand discovery happens on public social media feeds. Even better, annual spending on social media advertisement is set to hit about $50 billion or more in 2021.
This says a lot about how crucial it is for you to leverage social media platforms. You don’t actually need to rely on ads only to get exposure because there are so many ways for different users to discover new brands. For instance, 60% of users on Instagram report to have found new products on other people’s profiles.
If you partner up with influencers, which you should, then their social media followers will be exposed to your brand, growing your following and business exponentially in the process. As long as you narrow down your target market, then you’ll have a better chance of getting your products to the right hands and snagging loyal customers.
5. Build a Sales Funnel
Building a sales funnel is one of the quickest ways to grow your business. You are making a major mistake if you are running your business without one already. The best thing about sales funnels is that you can automate your business, so once you get the front-end work done, then it’ll be a smooth sailing process.
Consider all the different sales funnel models, then carefully conceptualize the right one and build the automated selling machine that will help you quickly scale your business.
6. Research Your Competition
Researching your competition is an integral part of growing your business. You need to know what they’re offering, so you can up your game and capture more consumers. Find out what they’re not doing and do it to stand out in the market.
Researching them means finding their online marketing strategies and emulating them or doing much better. It means finding their target keywords so you can beat them on SERPs. If they have proven certain strategies work, then you can be sure they’ll work for your business as well.
The Best Strategies to Grow Your Business Startup
Running a business startup is not an easy feat, and there’s a wide array of things and decisions that have to be made. However, if you pull off these strategies, you’ll be well on your way to a behemoth of a business. Be wary of cash flow problems by hiring a bookkeeper because they’re responsible for 90% of business failures.
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