Business Growth Strategy. It’s about getting people to want to do business with you
How to Develop Your Business Growth Strategy
Creating your Strategic Plan is a key element of planning for growth. It helps you to prepare a realistic vision for the future of your business.
It should be focused on mid to long-term goals, it explains the basic strategies your business will follow in the coming years, and the key elements you should consider in your “Business Growth Plan”.
A good strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that define the actions people in the business should take and not take, and the things they should prioritise and not prioritise to achieve your desired goals.
The Purpose of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is necessary to determine the direction of your organisation. It focuses your efforts and ensures that everyone in the business is working towards common goals.
This process would be a key element of your formal strategic business plan document and would be implemented over 4 to 5 years – No More.
In these uncertain times, with the impact of Covid 19 still continuing to disrupt supply chains worldwide, and the war in Ukraine and international political uncertainty adding fuel to the disruption. Even 4-5 years is challenging.
This uncertainty has become more widespread, growing from an industrial problem to a threat to worldwide economic stability.
Every business and every industry have unique characteristics, so there is no “One-size-fits-all” strategy. Your growth strategy and plan should be customised for your business and industry
Creating a business growth strategy for an SME will usually be much simpler than for a larger business,
You will need to thoroughly research all options you might want to consider to make sure you are clear on the positives, negatives, risks & rewards.
A Growth Strategy for an SME will usually be much simpler than for a larger business, and will depend on factors such as type of product or service, geographic location and target locations, competition, market size etc.
Many businesses choose to outsource managing this process to a suitably skilled & experienced business consultant or coach.
Identify options available – selecting your most attractive options.
So, based on a growth strategy of constantly adding value for your existing customers, and attracting your ideal new customers, there are many ways to grow your business, including:
- Creating new products or services your customers need, then marketing & selling to them
- Marketing and building strong ongoing relationships with your existing customers.
- Investing in marketing to increase brand awareness and attract potential new customers.
- Widening your geographic areas of activity, nationally and internationally.
These days, your business exists in an incredibly dynamic and ever-changing environment with technology being a key driving factor.
You need to be prepared for these things, so start by thinking about your growth strategy, all the options listed above, and more, whilst at the same time, making sure you are optimising your sales and administrative expenses. The combination of these factors must be optimised to ensure that you achieve the target Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) in your plan.
Other Resources and facilities required to grow your business.
You will potentially need additional:
- Production capacity,
- Cash to fund Growth, potentially including acquisitions,
- Systems–To what extent are your current systems scalable?
Funding to Grow Your Business
If you are really serious about growing your business – unless you are fortunate enough to have a substantial amount of cash or liquid assets available to fund your business, you’ll have to embrace funding.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s for new premises, new equipment, or new staff members, there is simply no way to pay for it all yourself, and so every successful business has sought funding at some point during their growth phase.
Marketing Strategy for growth-digital marketing has changed everything
Marketing is key to growth. It’s about getting people to want to do business with you.
If you are looking to grow your business, chances are, you have established a customer base by identifying your target customer, creating products or services they need & marketing & selling to them.
If you are just getting started, this involves two simple steps
- figuring out who your ideal customer is? Who’s the customer that’s going to want your products or services and refer the most business and become a long-term client, not just a customer? and
2. keep finding new ways to add value to meet their needs, and never stop marketing to them.
Marketing is probably the most important thing to get right in your business. Businesses with great marketing will outperform a brilliant strategy with poor marketing.
So where should you be looking to spend?
Keep in mind that most SME’s will not have the expertise to do this for themselves so, at least initially, you will need to work with someone who understands digital marketing and can make it work for you.
Digital marketing has created a revolution, allowing small businesses to compete in niches previously the exclusive territory of big corporations. Digital marketing works, but not for everyone, or every product.
The advantage of digital is that it can be specifically targeted, so you should never have to just hit and hope with your paid marketing.
For B. to B. businesses LinkedIn is a very powerful platform to use to attract your ideal customers.
Customer Experience is equally important
Focussing on all the stages of the “Customer Experience”, not just sales and marketing, is as important as your sales and marketing strategies.
This means ensuring that the experience the customer has during the whole customer life-cycle is as good as it was during their sales and marketing phase. This will ensure that customer defection (or churn) rates” (I.e. the annualised rate that customers leave as a %age of total customers) are minimised.
Unfortunately most businesses reward customer acquisition over retention. Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that the cost of acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer.
Conclusion
In this brief overview, I have outlined some of the key elements that will be to be involved in creating and implementing your strategic business plan. But in practice, there is much more.
Your Next Steps
If you would like to get more details about how to create your Customised Business Growth Strategy and Plan to grow your business to a whole level, you can request a Free 20-30 minute Strategy call with me by clicking on the link below:
Click Here to Book Your Free Strategy Call
You will receive an email confirmation and a reminder from my booking system prior to the meeting.
My mobile number in Australia is 0418 277 137.
My business email address is: [email protected]
I look forward to talking with you.