As a small business owner, you’re responsible for encouraging the growth of your small business—a job that requires more than serving customers, hiring employees, and sticking to a budget.
While these aspects of business ownership can help you maintain your company, business success is more than maintenance. Just as a gardener strives to grow a flourishing landscape of plants and flowers, you strive to see the plant bloom to its full potential.
To experience this type of prosperous business growth, you will need more than soil, water, and sunlight. You will need actionable growth strategies. Read ahead to learn more about what types of actionable growth strategies can benefit your business, as well as how to implement them for overall success.
What is Actionable Growth?
Whereas growth can be thought of as a long-term endeavor, actionable growth focuses instead on goals that can be accomplished in the short term to positively impact the future of your business.
As a new business, actionable growth is mutually exclusive to proactive growth.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 45% of new businesses fail during their first five years, making this methodology an essential aspect of long-term business success.
By planning ahead, setting concrete goals for scaling, and understanding how to actualize them, you create a thorough roadmap that helps guide your venture forward.
5 Actionable Growth Strategies for Your Business
While actionable growth can be achieved in a number of ways, we have identified five strategies you can consider implementing to help your small business flourish.
#1 Investing in Customer Acquisition
Investing in effective marketing strategies can play a significant role in building a base of loyal customers. Marketing strategies can include:
- Email marketing – With email marketing campaigns, you can encourage direct customer feedback to demonstrate your business’ commitment to customer service.
- Social media marketing – These marketing strategies can be used to promote your business through product or service discounts for new or repeat customers.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO marketing strategies help to guide customers to your website when they are searching for the particular product or service you offer.
- Point-of-purchase (POP) marketing – POP marketing utilizes product displays, promotional displays, and in-store advertisements to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
To help make your marketing campaigns stand out, identify what makes your business valuable to the consumer. What sets you apart from other businesses within your industry?
In taking the time to establish your business’ unique qualities, you can better demonstrate to customers why they should choose to support you over your competition.
#2 Increasing Your Market Share
Similar to acquiring your client base, increasing your market share focuses on exploring ways in which you can differentiate yourself from other businesses within your industry to gain a competitive edge.
So how can you increase your market share?
Consider the following strategies:
- Price products and services at more affordable rates than your competitors
- Offer a wider variety of products or services
- Hold promotional events that benefit your customers and your community
- Incorporate sustainable and eco-friendly business practices to encourage support
- Improve the customer experience by offering customer feedback portals, reliable support, and personalized service
#3 Expanding Product Lines
Explore the area of product development by expanding your small business’ product lines.
Not only does this strategy allow you to provide more of a product that is already in demand, it also allows your growing business to branch out into new products. This, in turn, can expand your client base and increase your revenue.
To ensure the success of this strategy, conduct market research to determine what types of products and services are in demand within your industry. While your service or product solves a pain point, can it be expanded upon to address another? Are there gaps your customers are still having to deal with?
Can you fill them?
In the business world, this is often attributed to upselling, or a practice where you take your existing customers and increase their contracts to include new services.
#4 Increasing Product Availability
If you own a brick and mortar storefront or office space, you can further grow your business by selling your products through an online store or alternative online platforms. By taking advantage of the wide-reaching storefront of the internet, you can ensure product availability to all interested consumers, regardless of their location.
An online store can also provide convenience and improve overall customer experience through the use of:
- Chat bots
- Customer support portals
- Customer feedback portals
#5 Exploring Additional Revenue Streams
Additional revenue streams can contribute to your business’ growth and success, especially if they run autonomously. However, the secret to benefitting from additional revenue in the long run is finding a sustainable opportunity.
These opportunities can include:
- Partnering with other businesses to sell your products or services
- Selling advertising space on your company’s website or blog
- Franchising
- Offering classes that correlate to your business (for example, offering gardening classes if you own a flower shop or operate a nursery)
Identifying the Best Growth Strategy For Your Business
When determining which actionable growth strategies you want to incorporate into your business model, consider how you’d like to see your business grow.
For instance, you may want to:
- Hire more employees
- Expand your physical space (whether it’s retail space or warehouse space)
- Branch out into new cities, states, or regions
- Offer more products or services
- Build a greater online presence
- Increase your revenue and profits
Once you can define your goals, you can conduct market research to ensure your strategy for growth is financially sound based on customer demand, the competitive landscape of your industry, and the economy.
Then, you can set key performance indicators to measure your business’ progress and identify which strategies are working (as well as which strategies may need to be reassessed).
CFO Hub: Your Partners in Growth
As a small business owner, actionable growth strategies can help you scale your business to unprecedented heights by expanding your client base, increasing your product line, and exploring additional revenue streams.
But this type of growth also requires sturdy roots, and in this case, we mean solid financial management and support.
That’s where the team of financial professionals at CFO Hub can help.
Here, we offer outsourced accounting solutions so that you can focus on achieving your growth strategies. With years of market and industry experience, our financial professionals can analyze your company’s finances and provide valuable insight into your actionable growth strategies.
Whether it’s through budgeting, financial forecasting, or risk management, we’re the input that acts as your sherpa, bookkeeper, and creates the bandwidth you need to act on these strategies.