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Growth is what all businesses are striving for. You want to increase your business’s value, but it may have slowed down or even levelled out. If you’re to start growing again, your business growth needs a boost.
Some might hold back out of concern for the cost that change will incur. Yes, doing something will come with some cost. But, you can’t grow without making changes.
If your growth has stalled, you need to kickstart it. Not everything needs to be expensive though. These 3 tips can boost your business growth, without needing to break the bank.
Invest in marketing
Marketing is how you bring customers to your business. Your brand is how you’re seen and a major factor in customers’ decisions on where to spend. Yet, frequently it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Yes, this one is about spending more. But it’s worth it. Marketing growth strategies are what you need to implement to convince customers old and new to spend money.
Giving your marketing efforts the attention and funding they deserve is an important step in boosting your growth. No matter how good your product, no one will buy what they’ve never heard of. Do your research and find out what’s working for those competitors who are selling.
Perfecting your sales pitch is about understanding what your customers want and pivoting your message to fit that. If you want your business to grow, you need to convince your customers that you’re the best option for them.
Thinking about how you present yourself is very important. If you don’t put much effort into your brand, why would customers think that you’ll put effort into your product or service?
Marketing is also about looking after the people who’ve bought from you before. Making them feel important keeps them coming back to you. Build trust in your brand, and you will build a customer base.
Improve operations, improve productivity
Many businesses develop inefficiencies in their operations as they grow. Taking the time to discover and correct these inefficiencies can give your productivity a massive boost
As the teams you start with grow and split, the communications between them can fray. Sometimes you end up with a needlessly complex management system that grew organically, but doesn’t really work.
Delve into your business’s organisation and structure to truly understand how it all fits together. Ask yourself, if you were to design it again from the ground up, what would you do? Seeing the differences between these two gives you ideas of what you need to work on.
The aim here is to make your operations more efficient. Often, your employees know when what they’re doing is pointless. This not only wastes their time but can lead to demotivation.
Making these improvements frees up their time to get on with the important stuff, helping them to become more productive. It also eases communications up and down the management structure.
Your employees will feel more engaged when they can understand the motivations of the Board and feel like they can give feedback. Businesses that keep their employees engaged and listen to them will find it easier to grow.
Integrate tech in business growth
Technology is a part of everything we do. Businesses should be making the most of the tech available to them, but many don’t. Tech offers you many avenues to improve your business’s growth.
Just like a business’s organisation, its tech systems tend to grow organically too. Many businesses also have IT overlaps and breakdowns that reduce productivity and waste money.
Almost every business could utilise more technology in their day-to-day operations. As an example, automation can be applied across the board, reducing backlogs.
This could be automating stock updates between your warehouse and your website. It could be using a chatbot to ease the strain on customer services. It can also be used in your marketing efforts to enhance your marketing and track campaigns.
One thing that’s often forgotten about, and a core part of Digital Transformation, is data. Every business collects data, but it often just sits there. There are plenty of uses for the data you already have, from market research to generating statistical models.
We know that understanding your customers is important. Their sales data can give you much deeper insights into what they want and what works. It can even help you understand how they would react to certain changes in your strategy without trying them first.
To summarise
Improving your business growth is as simple as rethinking what you’re already doing. Often, you don’t need to go big to gain plenty. Tightening up your business and reassessing your brand will go a long way toward giving you a boost.
These tips stretch across 3 different fields, and it’s ok not to be an expert in all of them. Seeking advice from those who are is a great way to make sure your business grows.
A Part-time Marketing Director could be just what your business needs for tip 1. Making your operations more efficient is the role of an Operations Director. While digital transformation could benefit from an IT Director.
Boardroom Advisors offers part-time director-level support with flexible contracts that suit your business’s budget.
Article shared by “John Courtney” is Founder and Chief Executive of BoardroomAdvisors.co which provides part-time Executive Directors (Commercial/Operations/
John is a serial entrepreneur, having founded 7 different businesses over a 40-year period, including a digital marketing agency, corporate finance and management consultancy. He has trained and worked as a strategy consultant, raised funding through Angels, VCs and crowd funding, and exited businesses via MBO, MBI and trade sale. He has been ranked #30 in CityAM’s list of UK Entrepreneurs.
