Are you a business owner looking to grow your company? It can be challenging to find the right strategies to propel your business toward success. Business growth is not just about having wider knowledge. It’s about having the right strategies in place to make sure that your business moves on the right track. 

Transcript:

Hey, what's up? And welcome to Hack My Growth. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about business growth strategies for 2023 and beyond.

What is a growth strategy in business?

Well, essentially it's a plan, but a plan of action designed to help you increase the size and the profitability of your business. The reason we build businesses is to make a profit, right? That's what we're in business for. Yes, we have services. Yes, we want to serve people too, but if the business doesn't make a profit, we can't have the business for long. Making sure that we're growing is a very important thing.

This could involve things like expanding into new markets, creating new products, and exploring new ways to find customers. A successful strategy is going to require that the business has a very clear vision of long-term goals.

When we partner with other companies, it's essential that we understand those long-term goals because marketing and SEO and all this technical stuff that we talk about a lot on this channel is pointless if it's not tied to a larger goal with a long-term strategy in mind. 

Why Is a Business Growth Strategy Important?

Business Growth Strategies ensure that the business is able to adapt and respond to changes in the environment. Economies shift, things change, and we need to be able to adapt in order to maintain growth for our business. And a successful strategy is going to help a company stay ahead of its competition and remain competitive in the market.  It will also help it identify and capitalize on new opportunities. For instance, when the market's headed down, there are still opportunities to grow - if you can find those opportunities and know how to capitalize on them.

What Should A Growth Strategy Consist Of?

It should consist of a number of things, but to start, ask yourself, "Where is my business now?" You need to have that clear understanding of where you are, where you want to go,  what it's going to be, and the different stops along the way. This is going to help you plan and track your progress.

It also should include competitive analysis and an understanding of the resources and capabilities that you're going to need in order to grow. And finally, it needs to include the assessment of the risks that are associated with a growth strategy and a plan for how you can mitigate those risks over time.

4 Different Types of Growth Strategies

Market Penetration Growth Strategy

Now, this is where you expand into an existing market or where you increase your market share. This can involve introducing a new product or service, increasing visibility, or improving your customer service. This is often used by businesses that already have a strong presence in their existing market.

Market Expansion Growth Strategy

This is where you're looking at expanding into a new market. In this strategy, you may be looking at new geographic regions, possibly launching new products and services, and leveraging your existing customer base. Now, this type of growth strategy is used for businesses that want to expand their customer base and reach new markets that they're not currently in.

Diversification Growth Strategy

In a diversification growth strategy, you're entering new products in markets or services. This strategy may involve introducing a new product or capitalizing on your existing customer relationship and partners in order to diversify the types of people that you're reaching.

Product Development Growth Strategy

This is where you develop or introduce new products or services. This type of strategy usually involves a little bit more research on your customer's needs, and then creating new products and services around that and launching them into the market. It's used by businesses that want to capitalize on new opportunities to expand their product portfolio.

Who Can Benefit From Growth Strategies?

Well, the reality is all different types of businesses can benefit from growth strategies. Are you willing to take the time to develop one that's going to work for you? Now, being a marketing agency, it's very important for us to help our businesses develop these types of plans so we know where we're going and we know the different types of tactics that are needed to help them reach their goals. Let's dive a little bit more into three types of groups and how they might leverage different types of growth strategies to get their intended results.

1. Startups

What are some things that startups can do to help grow?

• Organic Growth Strategies. This is leveraging SEO, content marketing, and maybe even influencer marketing to help increase and attract customers organically.
• Networking. Startups can also use networking, networking events, and partnerships to build relationships with potential customers.
• Paid advertising can also be beneficial. Using PPC or social media to gain exposure can also be helpful when you're trying to attract more customers.
• Product expansion. This is simple. We talked about this a little bit before, but startups can use it to add new products or features to the existing products they have to attract new customers and increase revenue.
• Viral marketing. This is something that startups like to leverage using things like giveaways or referral programs in order to spread the word and attract more customers.

2. Small Businesses

What about small businesses? What are some things that small businesses can do?

• Customer retention through SEO. Small businesses can do local SEO, but also they can look at how they can expand their current customer base, retain those customers, and use those relationships to grow. This is where you can build something like a loyalty program using your CRM to build relationships with your customers to increase loyalty.
• You can do referral programs. Again, this is very similar sometimes to customer retention. Referral programs are where you encourage customers to refer their friends and families.
• Paid advertising can work very well for small businesses as well, using things like PPC and social media, and Google's even expanded that to the local packs with ads.
• You can do product expansion. By adding new products and services you can attract new clients that may not have used your original product and services.
• Networking. There's something powerful about working together with other local businesses, building connections, attending local events, and building partnerships so that you can leverage one another's customer base.

3. Corporations

And what about corporations, larger businesses? What are some things that they can do?

• Market expansion. This is whether you can enter a new market or a region by launching products or services to increase your customer base or revenue.
• You can also do things like mergers and acquisitions. Finding businesses that are doing the things that you want to do or have the products you want and acquiring those businesses.
• Paid advertising is still something extremely beneficial. Leveraging PPC, or social media ads.
• Product expansion is something that corporations do quite a bit, and oftentimes they do that through mergers and acquisitions.
• And finally, networking is still important. I say this all the time with our clients, our customers, and our team, people like to do business with people. When you can build partnerships in a strategic way, it can help you grow your business. 

Choosing the Right Partners for Business Growth Success

It's important when you are building a growth strategy and you're partnering with agencies to help you develop it or partners along the way that you choose the right partner. There are five things that you need to look at when choosing business growth partners.

1. Compatibility. You need to make sure that the person you're working with shares, goals, values, and strategies that are compatible with your own. You don't want to have misalignment here. If you have misalignment here, nothing else is going to work.

2. Resources. Consider the resources that the partner is able to bring to the table and how it's going to help your business grow.

3. Shared vision. Again, make sure the partner shares your vision for the future and is committed to helping you achieve it. They should be in line with the vision that you've set. When you try to go in two different directions, it doesn't usually end up very well.

4. Trust. You want to be able to know that the person you're working with is going to follow through and do the things that they've committed to doing.

5. Communication. You need to have honest communication between you and your partner to make sure that everybody's on the same page, and that you're able to work through things in an effective manner.

Business strategy is important, as well as a growth strategy, and it's one of the core things we do in our agency and when we do coaching. We help businesses build out strategies so that they can get the benefits of all the technical stuff we talk about. On this channel, we do a lot of technical stuff. We talk a lot about nitty-gritty SEO, but every once in a while it's important to zoom back and go, "Okay, how do I put all of these things together in order to build a strategy for growth?"

If you're interested in coaching, contact me for a free sample session. I'd love to sit down with you get a little insight into what your business is trying to do and, how you're trying to grow this year, and how you might be able to leverage some of these strategies to get you the results that you want.

Thanks so much for watching. Until next time, happy marketing.