At a certain point in your online business life cycle, the business will reach a stage where all current options are employed to their maximum. We want to show you what strategic options for business growth that you can employ today
Online business growth is a direct product of the business lifecycle, industry expansion trends, and in the end, the owner’s drive to be more successful.
Business growth is directly proportional to success, and every business owner wants that. However, to succeed and grow your business, even more, takes time, effort, and other resources.
Read on to find out how you can apply 9 strategic options to grow your online business.
The Importance of Business Growth Strategies
Business growth is essential. Either online businesses grow, or they become stagnant and, over time, fade away.
Having a business growth plan in place makes online business owners more prepared for such unforeseen happenings. For online business owners, creating business growth acts as a cushion to unexpected circumstances in the market, economy, and the environment.
As we can see, business growth will make you prepared and will give you more freedom. We will now discuss strategies that will help you get your online business on the right path for success and continuous expansion.
Any online business can incorporate these strategies; it doesn't matter whether your online business is service-driven, product-driven, or even a consulting business. These strategies can be tweaked and implemented anyway.
Strategic Options for Business Growth
1. Have a Plan With a Developed Strategy
Regardless of the situation, if you want to grow your business, have a plan for it. Most online business owners believe in the principle that if you build it, they, the clients will come. But what if they keep coming? Are you ready for that? You must have an executable plan in place to accommodate growth if you want it.
Otherwise, you will have a lot of clients leaving, never to come back. Therefore, it’s better if you had a proactive plan in place.
There are various strategies and goal-setting methodologies available on the web that you can apply or model.
The OKR approach, for instance, was developed in the ’70s but is gaining more and more importance recently. Companies like Google, Intel, Amazon, Twitter, and Netflix are using this approach, and therefore they keep expanding.
OKR stands for objectives and key results. It is an objective method of setting goals planned in advance to achieve three to five key results or favorable outcomes that are trackable and measurable. This motivates everyone in the company to ascertain the goal been set through clear communication and collaboration. This is done no matter whether the company has a top-down or bottom-up management model.
Using the OKR approach enables companies to continuously monitor goals, keep everything on track and enjoy successful and pre-defined outcomes.
If you're running an online business and you need a hand in creating a business plan, we have a solution for you – LivePlan. This is leading business plan software that helps you simplify your business planning, budgeting, forecasting, and performance tracking.
2. Know Your Limits – Assess your Resources
Before saying, ‘Go Big or Go Home,’ there are a few questions that need to be addressed in all honesty to prevent chaos:
- Can your online business go big? Are you prepared for growth?
- Do you have the needed resources to grow?
- Do you have enough employees, or will more be needed?
- Can you fulfill increased demand for your service or product?
- Will your suppliers and vendors be able to keep up supply if your business expects more?
- Do you have enough financial resources to support the growth?
Establish a balance between your acquired growth and the resources available is of utmost importance. Just because you may not currently have the resources to manage growth, this doesn't mean that it can't be done. Having a plan to scale up and bring in additional help and resources will help alleviate the above mentioned questions.
3. Scrutinize the Competition
To grow your business share, you must infiltrate your competitor's market share. After all, it is a competitive market. We suggest that you determine who else is doing what you do and do it better than them. You can do it only by being faster, better, and cheaper than your competitors.
A few ways to ensure your online business stands out from the crowd are:
- Offer new customer incentives
- Improve product quality
- Provide a product that has added features or benefits to your competitors
- Reduce prices to attract customers
- Speed up the delivery time of products/services
- Increase market development by marketing and advertising to increase market penetration
- Tell a story, be unique and get creative to capture the market
Whenever potential buyers are searching for a product on Google, they’ll insert specific keywords. Ideally, you want your content to appear when users enter relevant keywords. But to find your niche keywords, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool. Ubersuggest is a free tool that will give you some basic keyword metrics and allow you to assess your competitors. It also gives you information about your competing websites seo and other features to help you identify and analyse them.
4. Identify Ways to Expand Clientele
Although you can get and most likely will get more customers from your competitor's niche market, the best market penetration will be via organic traffic.
Retaining your current customers must be a priority, done through proper customer relationship management. According to Forbes, it will cost you five times more to get a new customer than just keeping a current customer happy. Identify reasons for customer loyalty and elaborate on that. It is also feasible to extend your contact with them by upselling and introducing new products they might like. One way to encourage customer loyalty and attract new clients is by showcasing positive experiences with your products or services through video testimonials. Enhance your testimonials with any of these tools that can help you create compelling and authentic customer stories.
The offering of referral programs and incentives to existing customers will increase customer loyalty, keep them intact and attract new clients.
Another common growth strategy is through exploring other related market segments. For example, customers may need a closely related product to your current customer range that you can introduce to increase market penetration even further.
5. Investigate Market Expansion
Increasing your online business's market expansion will make future growth potential a reality. You can do this by expanding the geographic impact of your online business to nearby states and even internationally.
Another way to expand your online business market is to explore another segment of your niche market to ensure future growth potential.
6. Product or Service Expansion
Another business growth plan might be introducing new products to your current product line by adding products related to your existing product range.
Re-branding and changing how a product is offered is another strategy in business that can be used to increase product conversion. Look to add value to your product wherever you can to outdo the competition.
7. Re-Evaluate and Update Prices
Pricing is an essential factor in business growth strategy. An increase will increase your profit but limit conversions. Conversely, a price drop might increase conversions and profit. Explore the positives and negative points of both to determine which is the most feasible and where the ‘sweet-spot' lies.
Sales events, new customer incentives, and discounts are popular strategies in business to expand market penetration.
8. New Marketing and Promotion Efforts
Marketing and effective promotion are an integral part of market development. Without it, your online business has no reason to exist.
Revamp your marketing strategy campaigns even if it is necessary to increase spending. It will be worthwhile for the market penetration of your online business.
Social media marketing is a free-for-use winner and can spread by word-of-mouth promotions crucial to an online business's success.
Integrating local SEO strategies into your marketing and promotion initiatives can drastically enhance your online business's presence, especially within geographically defined markets. By optimizing your listings on platforms such as Google My Business and using keywords relevant to local customers in your content, you can draw in more local customers. Tailor your website and content to meet the interests and needs of the local audiences for more targeted, relatable marketing messages. Engaging with the local reviews and encouraging satisfied customers to leave positive reviews can be a powerful way of building credibility and increasing local traffic. Implementing local SEO not only strengthens your online presence but also forms stronger community ties, becoming part of the local market landscape in turn.
9. Consider Mergers and Acquisitions
It is a whole lot easier to buy the competition than to try and drag customers away from them. That way, you have a much more significant part of the niche market under your leverage.
Mergers and partnerships with competitors are another way to dig deep and create maximum market penetration and business growth.
FAQs
How Do I Turn My Small Online Business into a Big Online Business?
- Choose the right website for your business.
- Choose a functional website with a simple design.
- Make it easy for users to contact you.
- Start building an email list from today.
- Get more organic traffic from all search engines.
- Plan a content marketing strategy, including via social media.
- Make data-based decisions with Google Analytics and other software's designed to analyse
What are External Growth Strategies for a Business?
External growth (or inorganic growth) strategies are about increasing output or business with the aid of resources that the company itself does not internally develop. Instead, these sources are obtained through the merger/acquisition of partnerships with other companies.
What are the Best Recruitment Strategies For Business Growth?
- Create a robust recruitment strategy
- Promote a cohesive image of your brand
- Develop a diverse workplace
- Use an applicant tracking system
- Consider your unique hiring challenges
- Use diverse candidate sources
- Use employee testimonials
Conclusion
By implementing these few strategies, you will gain future growth potential this year and beyond. Just ensure you are ready for anything that might happen in the future by planning your strategic options for business growth today.
