Starting a business can be a particularly tricky endeavor – once you’ve got your feet off the ground, exploring your next steps can seem like a daunting process. In reality, business growth is based on some simple, sound principles that you can pick to learn through a qualification such as an online MBA with AACSB, and implement in your day-to-day actions at work.
From revenue to marketing, let’s discover the four pillars of growth – how each forms an essential component of business operations, and how each of these strategies can position you for future success in complicated operating environments.
The Four Pillars of Growth
Let’s face it – business strategy is often pumped up with a lot of buzzwords and corporate complexity. While that may be great for a large business, for a small business trying to get their feet off the ground, a lot of the complexity isn’t relevant to their needs.
In reality, growth can be distilled into four distinct pillars – and how as business owners, adjusting those pillars can have benefits to your organization. Simply put, to grow your business, you need to consider how you can either increase your revenue, improve your customer pool, enhance your product, or more effectively market your brand. Improve any one of these, and you’ll be likely to position yourself for future success going forward.
Growth Strategy #1: Increasing Your Revenue
Driving revenue into a business can yield positive momentum for a business. Having a strategy to improve revenue over some time can help to improve the quality of service offered by sales representatives, and provide the opportunity for further investment in the business without the need for a capital injection.
Growing revenue can happen in a variety of ways – while the simplest may just be increasing prices, the reality is, that can be a deeply unpopular move (just ask Disney’s theme parks). Focussing on retaining existing customers can be a great way to maintain current revenue levels – providing a great customer experience can not only be great for existing customers but can also provide free marketing if you become a recommended brand.
Growth Strategy #2: Enhancing Your Product
While increasing revenue is one area of the business, another critical area of focus is your product offering. Depending on what you’re selling, it may be time to update your offering. If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, having a steady product plan can be critical – particularly in today’s world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage in-store inventory.
Physical retailers may look to enhance their product offering by providing complimentary products and services – for example, offering a paid installation service for a fitness company can be a great way to drive sales and reassure customers that support is available beyond the shopfront.
For service businesses, enhancing products may simply be a matter of improving your offering. Perhaps it’s something as simple as a value add or additional offering, or adding new products and variations to your lineup. No matter the strategy, be sure to explore new opportunities with customers to line yourself up for future success.
Growth Strategy #3: Improving Your Customer Pool
Growing a customer base can sometimes be a difficult endeavor – particularly in markets where competition is well-ensconced in the market. That being said, it’s not impossible to grow your customer base in a contested market – just ask Netflix about the Blockbuster wars.
Customer growth is all about reaching out to markets, as well as engaging with existing customers. For physical retailers, this may involve evaluating new operating locations, and for service companies, this may involve investing marketing budget in additional markets.
Not all strategies work with all customers, so it may take a few different attempts to find a customer growth strategy that works for your business.
Growth Strategy #4: Marketing Your Brand
Last, but certainly not least, is the use of marketing to grow your brand. Depending on your strategy, marketing can be a particularly costly endeavor – however, effective and smart use of a marketing budget can go a long way in improving product market share without breaking the bank.
Marketing can happen in a variety of ways – in particular, outreach and brand appeal can be two areas that really drive growth in a business. Celebrate your wins when launching in new markets, and engage at an event level. After all – it’s unlikely that people will see your business if you don’t advertise. Also, implementing the use of custom challenge coins for your business can go a long way in improving your brand identity.
Putting it all together, business growth doesn’t have to be a challenge, even in highly competitive markets. No matter your business, there are opportunities through the efficient and effective use of resources, whether they be sales, service, or marketing teams, to provide a great offering for customers and an attractive product for new sign-ons.
In the years ahead, it’ll be fascinating to see how these tried and true marketing methods evolve.
