7 Killer Growth Strategies for Small Businesses

Starting and sustaining as a small business is actually cumbersome in today’s tough economy landscape. Do you know there are only 50% of the startups that could survive for 5 years and only a few of them could make it to the top 10? This graph manifests how grueling and difficult it is to survive and sustain in today’s world. Absence of the right growth strategy is one of the major causes of most of the startups’ failure.

Creating a well-planned and effective business growth strategy coupled with several other vital aspects could actually push your business in the right direction. A growth strategy is not about just having a long-term goal but it also should have a tangible and sound plan.

Be consistent and motivated in every step of your growth plan. Define every step you are going to move forward in your growth in a fixed interval of time and ignite as much fire as possible to rekindle the spirit during your long journey of growth travel. Here are some killer growth strategies that can work for your small business if you implement it mindfully complementing with other boosters of your small business.

1. Define a Value Proposition

To survive and sustain a long-run, you should know and define what is unique and offbeat about your business that sets it apart from the crowd! Find out and streamline why should customers come to you and not go anywhere else? What makes your business so relevant, distinct and credible? Answer these questions to narrate to your customers why they should deal with your business shunning away thousands of other options.

It could be your customer service, pricing, product quality, fast delivery or anything that steals the show. Make out a special benefit that only your business can deliver, and forget the rest. If you cannot define your value proposition, you’ll never be able to sustain in this market and the threat of devaluing your business will always loom.

2. Identify Potential Audience

For any business, identifying the right customer is of the essence and very crucial for its growth. You would be offering some product or solution for some specific audiences. Who are they? Is that audience your potential buyer? Who are you serving? Find out your potential customer, and develop your business plan or growth strategy considering your potential customer.

3. Define your KPIs

Whenever you edit or make any changes in your business strategy, it should be measurable. If it is not measurable, how would you figure out if your changes are working or not? You must, therefore, define your key performance indicators to evaluate the growth of your business, then spend time and resources to those areas. Also, keep testing properly by changing your strategy over time and having comparative statements to evaluate the results. This will drive better vision and strategy to grow your small business.

4. Study your Competition

Irrespective of which industry or product and services you’re selling, your competition would be doing better which your business would have been struggling to deliver. Study such case studies of similar businesses that are growing and try to learn lessons. If you are not capable to define a strategy take help of professionals. Learn from your competitors and try to position your business differently to deliver something unique.

5. Know your Strengths

It is often more beneficial to focus on your strengths than improving your weaknesses. You can keep working on your weaknesses but do not fail to focus on your strengths. This will enable you to define a better growth strategy. Plan your marking strategies suiting your strengths and keep promoting them to establish your footprints in the business world.

6. Identity your Revenue Streams

This is very important. You should be completely aware of all your review streams! Also, try to find our additional revenue streams to make your small business more profitable. After identifying such additional revenue streams just find out how sustainable it would be? There are several great ideas or amazing products with no sustainable revenue streams associated. Better to isolate and know the difference.

7. Hire the Right Talent

Your people will have direct contact with your customers. Hence it is also suggested to hire the best talent who are passionate and motivated by your company’s culture and value proposition. You can recoup the costing by having cheap office furniture, marketing budgets and, other miscellaneous expenses. Hire a few employees, but pay them well. Such people would usually stick around if you have to cut cost during a rough time.

Key Take Away

Creating the right growth strategy isn’t a one-size-fits-all method. It is different for every business. Because of the ever evolving and dynamic market conditions, implying strategic decisions considering someone else’s successes would be just irrelevant. It doesn’t mean you should not learn lessons from other businesses, but executing a similar business strategy cannot lead to sustainable growth.

Create and implement your own unique plan to simplify your business processes, refine its strengths and offer your customers the best services, which should be completely different.

Activate and trigger your key indicators by using the data and revenue streams to enable a customized growth plan. This is the best way, you’ll be able to understand your business and your customers’ preferences and nuances, which leads to an improved bottom line.

 Mamta Sharma

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