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How To Create a Business Growth Strategy That Works

Are you unsure whether you need a business growth strategy for your brand? What if we told you that there are 32.5 million businesses in the US alone? Imagine all of the competition you’d need to face daily.

That kind of competition means that standing out among the sea of brands is as vital as ever. There’s never been a more important time to have a solid business growth strategy.

But, how do you know which one to choose? That’s important to discuss because, as a business growth agency, we want to make sure that when you finish reading this article, you will know exactly what direction to go in.

We also want you to understand each type of business growth strategy. This way, you can pick the perfect strategy for your business and goals.

Forget about those websites that give you a generic template and tell you to go and use it on your brand. Instead, let us show you the ins and outs of a business growth strategy so you can make your own.

We guarantee that the strategy will end up being ten times better than some generic template. And the best part is that you can tweak it depending on how well it performs.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We need to cover the basics first and go from there.

Let’s get started and give you a business growth strategy you’ll love.

What’s Business Growth In The First Place?

What’s Business Growth In The First Place?

It’s what occurs when several factors influence the success of a company. Why do we call it success instead of growth? Because in our eyes, success IS growth. If you’re succeeding with your business, you’re growing your customer base and you’re increasing your overall revenue.

If that’s not success, then we don’t know what is!

You have to take into consideration that there are more metrics to be measured which contribute to business growth. These are:

• Your sales
• The number of your employees
• Your profits

This doesn’t mean that all of these metrics have to increase in order for it to be called business growth.

Your company could grow in certain metrics while other metrics don’t move at all. There could even be a case where some metrics go up while others go down.

All of this makes explaining business growth particularly complicated. But there’s a simple solution we’ve found that can help you determine if there’s any business growth going on in your company.

The solution is to have a single determining goal that helps you know if your business is going in the right direction.

We’ll show you an example to help drive this point home.

Let’s say you are a big brand with hundreds of employees. Your main goal should be to have enough revenue to pay each of those employees every month. This means that the main metrics that will determine business growth are both revenue and sales.

You want to increase your revenue over time but that comes with increasing the overall sales of your products.

You could also increase your revenue without increasing your sales by raising the costs of your products. But this might come at the cost of customer retention because old customers might not be pleased to see the same product at a higher cost.

As you can see, both help you achieve your main goal, which is to boost your revenue.

However, there’s more to business growth than just that. There are particular strategies that need to be thought out if you want to be as effective and efficient as possible.

Next, we’re going to talk about the four most important strategies you should know about.

Types Of Business Growth

Types Of Business Growth

When looking at companies that went through an amazing period of business growth, it’s easy to forget how much planning goes into making it work.

Truth be told, there’s a lot more planning and strategizing than you think! This is why it’s vital for you to know the main types of business growth. This way, you can also plan and strategize according to your particular needs and wants.

Market Penetration

Growing your market share, or “market penetration” as it’s generally called, is without a doubt the best type of business growth strategy for small businesses in any industry. Your main goal is to either promote a new product or increase the sales of an existing one.

There are different ways you can accomplish either of these two goals. The most popular one is to reduce the price of your products and make it as enticing as possible to potential customers.

This does several things for you. For starters, it makes your product look like a better option when compared to your competition. It also makes it easier for people who were unsure if they should buy your product to simply go and purchase it.

The “downside” of this type of strategy is the short-term revenue decrease due to lowering the costs of your product. But you also have to remember that your long-term goal is to acquire as many customers as possible.

This strategy is really good when you’re in an industry with a lot of competition and similar products.

This is because the customer will look to buy not only the best product available but the one that gives them the best bang for their buck. By lowering your prices, you make it easier for them to pick your product over the rest.

Alternate Channels

Knowing the importance of using different channels for business growth is vital. We bet you’re already promoting your business in at least two of the most important channels. While there’s a plethora to choose from, the main ones are: social media, email, and your website’s blog.

While all three are crucial as well as mandatory for solid business growth, you should be paying more attention to social media. Why? Because 4.62 billion people around the world now use it.

That means that not having a social media presence is most likely hurting your brand the most out of all three channels.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, we highly suggest you have an account set up for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. This way you can expand from there.

This doesn’t mean the other channels aren’t important! Your website and your blog are also vital, especially since it’s where you want your followers on social media to go.

So, making sure your website and blog not only look good but also perform well, is important. Being able to create content about your products on your blog is also necessary.

People want to know what they are buying, and why yours is the best choice. There’s never enough information for customers, so the more the merrier.

Being able to reach your customers, no matter the social media platform, is your priority. Customers want to know that they can find you and your product no matter where they go online.

This means that having all three social media channels ready has never been more important. But there’s a particular flaw when it comes to using an alternate channel strategy. While the word “flaw” might be a bit harsh, when you consider all of the time needed to get all of these channels set up, you start to understand why it might be an issue.

Not only that, but maintaining all of those channels and making sure you’re able to create content for each of them on a regular basis is hard. This is something you definitely have to think about if you want to apply this strategy to your business.

Product Expansion

There comes a time in your product’s lifespan when sales start to go down for one reason or another. This happens to every brand under the sun, and it’ll keep happening for as long as marketing exists.

There’s always a new product coming out that directly or indirectly targets your products. It may be a similar product, but with improved features. Or, it could be a different product altogether that does everything your product does, but better.

It’s important that you’re able to see when these issues occur. After all, you want to be able to refresh or upgrade your products as soon as you see them happen.

You have to evaluate your product, compare it to your main competitor’s offerings, and see if they have any sort of advantage over yours.

Think of what you should do next. Is it better to upgrade your product, or is it a better idea to create a new product from scratch?

You should also check your marketing strategy and make sure that you don’t have an outdated strategy negatively impacting your sales.

Market Development

Knowing how to retain existing clients AND attract prospects is vital. But, it’s sometimes complicated to achieve client retention and acquisition at the same time.

Client retention is generally a lot easier to accomplish. It’s all about keeping your customers satisfied while sending them news and offers for different products. But what about gaining new customers?

This is the area where most brands tend to suffer the most. The first thing you have to check is your marketing strategy. Do you have one? If so, is it working properly? These questions can guide you towards what you need to do next.

Adjusting or creating a new marketing strategy for customer acquisition is the first and most important step you need to know when picking a market development strategy.

These are the four most important business growth strategies in the market right now. While we know reading about them helps to a degree, we think that visual examples will help you understand them a lot better.

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club has been around since 2012. They are one of the fastest-growing businesses in the last decade. This is impressive when you consider that they have Gillette as a competitor.

How did they do it? They used a market development business strategy.

Their biggest standout feature was low prices sent directly to the consumer. They don’t work with Walmart or any of these superstores people usually get their razors from. They instead made it so you get your razors delivered directly to your doorstep using a subscription-based service.

While Gillette worked with supermarkets and big box stores to fill shelves with their products, Dollar Shave Club used the internet to sell their products to their consumers at a lower cost. This was all accomplished without the customer having to leave their house.

Facebook

Facebook

Love them or hate them, Facebook is one of the most important brands of this century. But when they first started, they had to face (no pun intended) a huge social media platform called MySpace. How did they manage to become the biggest social media platform despite having such a big competitor?

They used a market penetration growth strategy.

They understood who their customer base was from the start. They made sure to only target them and do it non-stop. When it started, they focused on targeting Harvard students who were looking for a way to talk with their friends without having to meet in person.

When Facebook grew in popularity within Harvard, they decided to venture into a new “market” and started to promote their platform in other colleges and universities. They did this the same way they had done it before, by targeting a very specific customer.

When they were certain their social media platform was a hit with students, they decided to make it an app that anyone could use. This made them change their strategy of focusing on one specific target customer to segmenting, expanding, and focusing on several different kinds of customers.

How Do You Determine Which Type Is For You?

How Do You Determine Which Type Is For You?

So, now you know the four most important business growth strategies out there. However, to make the best use of them, you have to learn which methods are the best for YOUR brand.

We’re now going to break each of them down and explain what they can do for you.

Market Penetration is all about promoting a new or existing product in a way that entices people to buy it more than the competition’s product. This is done in different ways, but the most popular way is to reduce the cost of your product.

This type of strategy is amazing for smaller businesses that are looking to acquire new customers at the expense of lower revenue. While bigger and more established brands can still do this, there are far better ways for them to grow their business.

A solid way is by using Alternate Channels. Being everywhere your potential client is and making sure you can reach them across various social media platforms is what makes this business growth strategy work.

You want to be in their minds all of the time, and this means that using various social media platforms is a necessity.

While this is a business growth strategy most businesses could take advantage of, there is one issue that makes it a bit complicated for everyone to use. It’s a very time-consuming business growth strategy. Why? Because you need to take care of all of these channels on a daily basis.

This means that a small business with very few employees will struggle to make this business growth strategy work by itself.

But don’t worry, there is a solution to make this process a lot less daunting. Here at CMDS, we pride ourselves on something we call the Maven Growth Method.

This is your go-to process if you feel like you don’t have the time to manage and work on all of the different social media platforms out there.

With this process, we’ll make sure your brand is everywhere, and that your potential clients can’t get you out of their minds.

The Maven Growth Method also works amazingly well with larger, more established brands. We understand how much time is needed to manage different social media accounts.

This is why we offer this service. We want to make sure you’re able to focus on other important aspects of your business that require your complete attention.

Now, we talked quite a bit about alternate channels, but what about Product Expansion?

This is a business growth strategy any brand can do because every brand needs to update or change its products from time-to-time.

With how fast the market is moving in every industry, you have to make sure your product is better than the competition at all times.

A Market Development business growth strategy, on the other hand, isn’t for every brand like product expansion is.

Why? Because this business growth strategy is perfect for established brands that are looking to gain new customers at a steady and consistent rate.

A big brand needs as much revenue as possible to keep growing consistently. This is why they need to retain existing customers AND gain new potential clients if they want to keep growing.

A well-thought-out market development business growth strategy helps them achieve just that.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Let’s do a quick recap.

First, we talked about the various types of business growth strategies and focused on the four most popular and effective ones.

Then, we showed you two examples of companies using a business growth strategy to grow their brands exponentially. We also explained what strategy each business used for success!

Last, but not least, we explained how to choose which business growth strategy might be the best for your brand right now.

Now that we’ve gone through the four most popular business growth strategies, do you know which one is the best for your business?

Tell us in the comments below which strategy seems like the best choice for your brand. If you’re still unsure, feel free to leave us your questions or share your thoughts below. We look forward to hearing from you.

Tagged as Brand Strategy, business growth, exponential growth, market development, maven growth plan, product expansion