Starting a business is easy, but making it a success is difficult. In fact, 90% of startups fail. If you want to be in the remaining 10%, you should know how to grow a business.
How to grow a business in 6 simple steps
There are plenty of growth strategies you can adopt to grow your company and expand your business. My aim in writing this post is not to provide you with a mammoth list of strategies, but rather list six of the most important, easy-to-implement action points that can help you grow your company successfully.
- Know your target audience.
- Make them an offer they can’t refuse.
- Keep tabs on your competitors.
- Turn your website into a lead-generating machine.
- Use social media to reach your prospects.
- Be aware of your balance sheet.
Let’s look at how each of these six steps can get your business ready to grow.
1. Know your target audience
The first step in learning how to grow a business is to have a clear idea about who your target customer is. Once you are clear about who is most likely to buy your product or service, you need to know what their requirements and pain points are. This will help you personalize the overall customer experience to create repeat business.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to know your audience is through research and surveys.
You can interact with your audience to leave a positive impact on them and build a strong bond. Always give a listening ear to their reviews and deliver sound suggestions.
Undoubtedly, knowing your target audience well is certainly a stepping stone to the journey of growing your company successfully. It will help you make further business decisions easily.
2. Make them an offer they can't refuse
Once you know your target customers’ requirements and pain points, make sure your product or service has everything to solve those pain points or meet the requirements. Then craft a captivating pitch. Make your offer so compelling that your audience cannot refuse.
Make sure you are always ready to go the extra mile to deliver exceptional customer assistance.
This way, you can leave a positive and strong impact on your audience. They will not only choose you but also refer your company to others.
3. Keep tabs on your competitors
When you are aware of how the leading companies in your field make sales, it can help you in three ways:
- Understanding how your target audience uses and rates your competitors
- Finding out the strengths and weaknesses of your competition
- Getting a push to come up with practical strategies for your target market
To ensure that level of awareness, you need to keep a tab on your competitors. It can be done in various ways:
- First, create a list of brands that you think are the closest competitors of your business or who hold the potential to move into your marketplace.
- Once you’re done with this, subscribe to their company blogs to fetch information about their culture, new products, features, hires or any partnership launch program.
- Follow them on social media to stay updated.
- You can go to the trade events and seminars that your competitors also attend regularly.
Other than these suggestions, you can opt for online tools that can help you do the competitor analysis.
Remember, unless you react to the insights you get from the analysis, you derive no value from it.
Find out why your competitors have become the leading names in the industry you are working. Only then will you be able to alter your approach to stay ahead of the competition.
4. Turn your website into a lead-generating machine
A proper strategic approach is needed to optimize your website to generate leads for you. Here are a few ideas to grow a company successfully using this approach:
- Include your business’s contact number on every page of your website.
- Add feedback and reviews along with photos of your clients and customers.
- Explain your offering in a video and add this to your website. Make sure your video captivates, engages and educates your visitors.
- Install a live chat option.
- Offer something free to visitors through pop-up ads.
- Use a simple font in the website content, add images, and do not forget to keep white space between content to maintain a nice and elegant design.
And one thing you must remember, whatever approach you take for making your website a lead-generating machine, you need to test the changes from time to time. Check Google Analytics to find out which of your approaches works best for your business, with real-time insight, historical data and conversion funnels.
5. Use social media to reach your prospects
In social media, by sharing content that adds value to your audience and interacting with them, you can build your brand reputation successfully.
But what about reaching new customers? Is social media equally useful in reaching new customers? Of course it is.
Just start the process by searching for keywords and hashtags that are relevant to your business. Once you type a relevant hashtag in social platforms, you will find a number of people talking about the same topic. You can engage in such conversations, share your expertise and get noticed.
This way, you can find out influencers who are talking about the topics relavent to your business. Influencers often have a large group of followers. So engaging with such influencers on social media can give you great exposure and help you reach more prospects.
You can host a contest, share valuable content, post captivating videos and use a call-to-action to drive attention of your target audience in social media.
Remember, when it comes to reaching prospects through social media, it is less about selling yourself and more about solving your audience’s problems.
To do this, stay as engaging, communicative and reliable as possible.
6. Be aware of your balance sheet
Your balance sheet consists of detailed information about the income and cash flow of your company. It gives you a quick view of your company’s assets, liabilities and equity.
In a nutshell, a balance sheet helps you understand the financial health of your business.
This insight will help you understand whether your business qualifies for any bank credit or loans. And when you are aware of your company's financial health, you can make wise decisions for further investments that will eventually make your business viable and sustainable.
How to grow a company successfully
Your business is like your baby. So you owe it to yourself to make it big. If you know your audience better, offer irresistible products/services, keep a tab of your competitors, use social media and your website to reach prospects, and know your balance sheet well, success will follow. This is how you can grow a company successfully.
