All businesses aim for growth, but not all have an actual business growth plan. Meeting specific business growth objectives is more than just a strategy – it’s the bedrock of your growth as a company and essential to your success.
Consider this: Consumer behavior shifts frequently, and market conditions are often unpredictable. Business growth strategies enable you to expand deliberately and accordingly without being at the mercy of a fickle target audience and market fluctuations.
Key strategies for business growth involve thorough planning, pinning down marketing fundamentals and growing your audience. Your task is to implement the best business strategies and marketing initiatives and focus them on growth.
Keep in mind that there isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, learn about the best existing business strategies and get the help of business growth experts to create a business growth plan tailored to your specific objectives. Pursuing the best business strategies that make the most sense to you is precisely how to grow your business.
This blog post provides you with an overview of business growth strategies and important things to consider when building a business growth strategy. We also answer what is growth hacking? and discuss its potential as a strategy for business growth.
Understanding Business Growth Strategies
In his webinar called “Growing on Purpose,” Josiah Wiles, client experience director at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, shared that it’s really easy to fall into the habit of “choosing the urgent over the important.” He said around 50 to 70 percent of businesses operate this way. But businesses need to “stop growing by accident” and make a conscious effort to balance addressing short-term needs and long-term goals.
To better understand key strategies for growth, let’s first unpack what a growth strategy is and how it relates to a market penetration strategy or business development strategy.
What Is a Growth Strategy?
A growth strategy is loosely defined as a plan to expand your business in terms of your market share and, most importantly, revenue. A business growth strategy guides your team to take action with marketing and business growth in mind. Common business growth strategy examples involve a market penetration strategy to introduce a new product or service or a business development strategy to take your business in a new direction.
Google started out as a search engine but chose to develop its product and pursue a new source of revenue through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Facebook’s social media site was only available in one university before being rolled out to more and more universities.
What made these businesses successful was taking what they had in front of them and moving forward, fueled by the desire to grow. Keep in mind that today’s business growth strategy examples utilize a mix of strategies according to their specific contexts. The same applies to your business: You must identify your unique business conditions around which to develop your strategy plan.
The best part is you now have knowledge and tools that Google and Facebook didn’t have when they were just figuring it all out. One of these resources is called growth hacking.
What Is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is the use of low-cost but high-impact strategies to accelerate marketing and business growth. It involves “hacks” or industry best practices for businesses of any size to follow.
What is growth hacking? has become a more common question as the concept has gained popularity as something akin to a templated roadmap for growth. Good examples of growth hacking in action include Uber creating a massive business from other people’s investment in its cars and PayPal leaning heavily on an aggressive referral program.
But we want to emphasize that how to grow your business is never black and white. The question you should be asking is how to write a business growth plan tailored to your unique needs. An excellent place to start is getting expert-approved tips on how to write a business growth plan.
Measuring Business Growth
Crunching the numbers is essential in pursuing key strategies for business growth. One of the most common methods of measuring business growth is calculating your growth rate. Growth rate represents the increase in your business’s value and often uses year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth as basis.
Some look at the average business growth rate to determine whether they’re doing well, and most experts place the average business growth rate between 15 to 45 percent annually. However, this will vary greatly depending on many external factors. So instead of comparing your performance to the average business growth rate, you’re better off measuring your success based on how your own figures improve and plotting your growth rates on a growth map.
10 Things To Consider for a Winning Business Growth Strategy
Jimi Gibson, director of operations at Thrive, described a good growth strategy as one with “sustained increases in lead sources and traffic channels.” Instead of expecting “epic performance” from one channel and falling short of your marketing and business growth goals, businesses should improve in a variety of areas to generate impressive overall results.
Here are some of the most important considerations when building your business growth plan:
1. Growth Hacking
Some of the most iconic business growth strategy examples involve growth hacking. It’s all about using tactical marketing techniques to grow rapidly at a low cost. Explore growth hacking ideas that align with your goals, such as referral marketing or providing useful content for free to attract more customers.
Most importantly, keep your eyes peeled for the best opportunities to promote your business. You’ll see even better results when you’ve already laid the groundwork for a results-driven business marketing strategy.
2. Long-Term Goals
The first thing a business growth consultant will ask you is what your goals are. Growth goals provide direction and drive your marketing efforts. Start by clearly defining where you want to take your business in the following years or decades, and create a growth map to visualize your progress. Your goals will ground your strategy for business growth.
3. Business Growth Objectives
If your goal is to be a multi-location business in five cities, your business growth objectives should be centered on expanding to a new city every few years. A targeted approach is critical to growing successfully. Tweaking your strategies based on how you meet your objectives helps you stay on track for your growth goals.
4. Budget and Capacity
A business growth consultant helps you set realistic goals and objectives largely based on whether you have the budget to support your growth goals. And since employee salaries are some of the biggest business expenses, assessing the people on your team is critical. Is there a need to hire more people? At what rate should you hire more people? Does it make sense given your competition, industry and current circumstances?
5. Audiences and Channels
An effective business marketing strategy is audience-centric and always will be. Continue deepening your understanding of your target market and differentiate your audiences on your various channels. The goal is to drive maximum impact on every customer touchpoint to encourage retention and loyalty. Diversify your channels and never depend on only one or two channels for leads.
6. Content and Engagement
Having a business marketing strategy is a no-brainer – it contains specific plans to expand your customer base and grow your business. Using what you know about your target audience, engaging them with content and keeping them interested presents a “nurturing opportunity” to win or retain customers over time.
7. Technology and Data
Having technology on your side simplifies your processes, optimizes your approach and enables you to scale with ease. For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) software improves customer experience by sending personalized messages according to where prospects are in their customer journey. Analytics and tracking tools make it possible to gather vital data on your customer behavior that you can use to improve your results.
“From a digital marketing perspective, access to historical data, current market trends and competitors’ success should be part of your consideration,” said Gibson. Any software or tool that provides insight into this critical data is beneficial.
8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
How easily can your target audience find you through a Google search? Are you on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs)? Where do your rankings stand in comparison to your competitors? Are you in a good position to pursue paid options through search engine marketing (SEM)?
Considering that more than 80 percent of consumers search online for products and services, SEO is indispensable. Targeting people doing relevant searches is one of the best ways to reach people you haven’t tapped before.
9. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
From the 100 people who clicked your ad, how many went on to purchase on your site? You’re already investing in your marketing initiatives, so your goal should be to get as many conversions as possible.
High conversion rates indicate your strategies are working and increasing conversion rates put you on the right path to grow your business. One of the best ways to drive your conversions up is through A/B testing and tweaking your strategies based on real data.
10. Return on Investment (ROI)
“Business owners should treat digital marketing as an investment towards your growth – and expect returns,” Gibson said. Of course, you will only grow if you profit, but far too many people try to execute key strategies for business growth without a clear understanding of the numbers.
Deciding if it’s right for your business to pursue a paid advertising strategy entails costs far beyond your actual ad spend. There are employee salaries, technology costs and more that should be factored into your calculations. Looking at your performance data and measuring business growth is critical to your success.
Scaling With an Agile Strategy for Business Growth
To grow intentionally, you need a strategy first. Wiles recommends your next step to be “scaling with an agile investment approach.” This means adjusting your strategy continuously according to what your data tells you.
Having a comprehensive marketing strategy backing your efforts is necessary to grow, but you can grow effectively by making informed and data-driven business decisions along the way.
Business growth experts help you focus on what’s working, extract better results from your existing strategies and offer the support you need to scale at a pace that’s right for your business.
Gibson shared four crucial things you can expect from business growth experts:
• Realistic projections of what is possible from a digital marketing perspective
• A clear picture of the strategies producing the best results
• Insights into the strategies that need an extra push to produce better results
• A detailed plan of action for an effective business growth strategy
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is a strategy-first digital marketing agency. We become an extension of your team, sharing the same determination to grow your business. Our strategy development experts have years of experience and diverse skill sets to drive the results you want to see.
With us on your side, you don’t need to worry about how to write a business growth plan or how to create a growth map. We equip you with the necessary digital marketing tools to pursue a market penetration strategy, business development strategy or any other growth strategy you want to explore.
Contact us today to speak to a business growth consultant on how to grow your business the right way.
