Business Growth Strategies: How do you know when and what would increase revenue, expand your market shares, and/or improve profitability? A business growth strategy is a plan of action, if you will, that assists a company in achieving its long-term goals as well as its objectives. When starting a small business, or trying to scale your business into, someday, becoming a multi-billionaire company, what are the strategies you need to focus on in order to succeed?
Marketing and Business Growth Strategies
In order to move forward with understanding how to best skyrocket your business, it is necessary to delve into the basics. Marketing is the process of promoting and selling products or services, which involves a wide range of the following:
- Advertising
- Branding
- Market Research
- Public Relations
- Sales
Marketing is vital for a business since it offers reach and engagement with targeted audiences, building brand awareness and loyalty, and ultimately driving sales and revenue!
Business Growth Strategies and Market Penetration
It all starts somewhere – when you have a product or service that is out of reach, unthought of, or missing, people go after it. Keep in mind that it should be decently priced. Market Penetration focuses on increasing sales of already established products or services by gaining more customers through more than one way.
In order to best penetrate the market, you’ll need to expand your product research. Seeking a new retail partnership, building new stores, or buying out competitors with a sizable market share. Furthermore, acquiring and setting these up can result in increased sales, since the product or service is presented in front of a new crowd.
Impact of Market Penetration Strategy
- Revenue, Sales, and Profits
- Number of Customers
- Market Shares
- Geographic Presence
Business Growth Strategies and Market Development
What market development strategy means is that a business or company is expanding by imprinting its footprint through geographic expansion or the creation of products and services that are more so complementary to current offerings.
Marketing Penetration expands within an existing market; however, market development is the following:
- Something pre-existing customers are likely to adopt and acquire
- Ideally use core components, infrastructure, and/or resources
- Not yet restricted by any other company’s dominance within the market
- Located geographically in an area which is not yet serviced by a primary competitor
Impact of Market Development
- Revenue, Sales, and Profits
- Access to Talent
- Share of Market
- Geographic Presence
Business Growth Strategies and Product Development
To best achieve growth through Product Development, a company has two options, either enhance and update their existing product or create a new one that they offer to their customers.
To better get into the mindset of it, this is what product development could look like:
- Creating minimal or impactful changes to a product and selling only the new version moving forward.
- Side by side – releasing a second edition that goes along with the original version of the product or service, at a premium price.
- White labeling different popular or essential products and selling them at a cheaper price under a store brand name.
- Creating entirely new products or services, different from existing ones, and selling to a customer base.
- Purchasing another company that sells a complementary product or service to your own, after which you integrate the new product into your business.
Impact of Product Development
- Revenue, Sales, and Profits
- Access to Talent
Business Growth Strategies and Diversification
Be careful, overlaps may happen between Diversification and Product development, which is why it’s important to opt for any of the following approaches:
Horizontal Diversification
Companies find different ways to expand into new markets connected to their existing operations.
Vertical Diversification
(Know as Vertical Integration) pursue ways to extend their reach further high or low in an existing market.
Concentric Diversification
When implementing this approach, a company will attempt to expand within related markets that are not directly connected.
One company attempts to expand its reach in multiple ways that often cause a ripple effect from their original purpose or focus.
Conglomerate Diversification
Expanding by launching new business ventures which are totally unrelated from their initial standpoint.
Impact of Diversification
- Revenue, Sales, and Profits
- Company Value
- Access to Talent
- Market Shares
- Geographic Presence
Types of Business Growth – Business Growth Strategies
Overall, the growth of your brand strategically depends on one or more of the following:
Organic Growth
Naturally, satisfied customers spread their interests into a product. Often known as the first type of growth a company experiences.
The way it works is that existing customers encourage new ones, or the growth is nurtured through a variety of ways such as the use of social media (Instagram, Facebook MarketPlace) and blog posts.
Once financial incentives come to play, that leads to Strategic Growth.
Strategic Growth
Backed by a strategy and plan of action, strategic growth can happen all on its own, similar to organic growth.
Taking many forms, digital ads reaching up till $10 million acquisition:
- Buying Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad Space
- Boosting Posts on Social Media
- Purchasing a BillBoard
- Affiliate Marketing Program
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Building a warehouse or manufacturing facility closer to a new or major market
Internal growth
Is the result of changing priorities or processes within the business to observe positive results (Profit Margins), it might involve:
- Reducing Expenses, Improving Profits
- Changing the responsibilities of internal teams to be more well aligned
- Hiring Independent Talent
Partnered Growth
When two companies decide to include each other in their own expansion strategy. Not a full acquisition, since both remain to be their own entity. One company provides the other with a product or service that is of interest to the other company’s customers. Both companies may jointly brand a product and/or a service.
Business Growth Strategies
In today’s cutthroat business environment, it’s crucial for a growing company to have a well-thought-out plan for future expansion. Finding and penetrating untapped markets is a key part of this approach because it can result in exponential expansion and a windfall of new funds.
Sales and interest from consumers can be increased by implementing growth methods such as cutting pricing or performing market research.
In order to maintain steady expansion, firms should regularly assess the wants and needs of their target demographic. Businesses may set themselves up for long-term success and profitability by applying these growth tactics.
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To read an updated version on the business growth strategies, please check our blog titled, “7 Proven Business Growth Strategies”.
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