Main Growth Strategies to Apply in Your Company
For many entrepreneurs and managers, expanding and growing a business is just as challenging as launching it.
The growth strategies needed to achieve the desired results depend on several factors, such as the business model, investment capacity, internal processes, and company culture.
If you’re looking for growth strategies for your company, this article will help you explore the key elements you need to start with the right foundation. Let’s dive in!
What Are Growth Strategies?
When a company wants to expand its market presence, increase sales share, launch a new product or service, or boost its production capacity, it must do so through planning, methodologies, and control systems.
These are growth strategies that ensure the outcomes of such initiatives are positive.
Strategic thinking involves setting goals, timelines, investments, testing, resources, responsibilities, and limits.
Why Should Your Company Apply Growth Strategies?
For a business to evolve in a healthy and sustainable way, it needs to grow.
And that growth must be controlled to some extent.
That’s where growth strategies come in — they help you equip your business with the best resources, conduct experiments and tests, outline plans, and pursue growth while protecting your company’s financial health.
Many companies make the mistake of ignoring the risks, which can jeopardize their cash flow when growth or expansion occurs without a strategic plan.
Business Model vs. Growth Strategy
Your business model is one of the main factors that influences the type of strategy you’ll choose for expansion.
After all, sales dynamics, internal processes, and even product or service delivery can vary.
Different models like B2B, B2C, and SaaS benefit from different market forces, audiences, and tools.
It’s worth looking for growth strategies specific to your model and deepening your knowledge with examples from your industry.
Main Growth Strategies and How to Apply Them to Your Company
So, where do you start when it comes to business growth strategies?
Here are the main ones:
Validate Your Business Model
Conduct market research and benchmarking.
Regardless of your growth or expansion plan, you need to ensure it’s viable.
To do that, researching the market, its needs, and opportunities is essential.
You can gather these insights by talking to other companies and experienced partners or by conducting focus groups with consumers in your target market.
This information is like gold when it’s time to create a plan and define key aspects such as timelines, budgets, and goals.
Read more – Benchmarking in Marketing: What It Is, How to Do It, and Examples
Know Your Target Audience
Your audience drives your business.
Without attracting and converting consumers, sales won’t happen — and company growth becomes impossible.
So, during growth planning, study your target audience in depth.
First, will you continue targeting your current audience, or does the expansion require reaching new consumers?
Then, does your expansion plan meet the needs and desires of that audience? Will there be demand to support this growth?
Knowing your audience will also guide your communication channels, marketing efforts, sales approach, and even your product or service model.
Check out this article – ICP, Persona, and Target Audience: Don’t Confuse These 3 Concepts
Understand Their Pain Points and Offer the Best Solutions
Once you understand the market and your audience, you’ll arrive at a key point of any business expansion: your offer.
With insights into market opportunities and consumer needs, your company can fill those gaps by launching a new product or service, serving an unexplored region, or improving a current solution.
Study the Competition and Define Your Unique Value Proposition
After understanding the market and how competitors are acting, it’s time for internal analysis.
To stand out in an expanding market, you need to be clear about what makes your company or product different.
Why should consumers choose you over the competition?
Some examples include: price, convenience, variety of purchase/payment methods, use of technology, personalized service, guaranteed quality…
And which of these factors matters most to your audience?
Without a clear differentiator, you won’t be able to communicate the benefits of your product effectively — and your competitors’ pitches may win.
Develop New Products
As mentioned, if you understand the market, you can grow by launching new products or services beyond your current offerings.
This strategy benefits from an existing customer base and strong market knowledge.
You can develop complementary solutions based on your customers’ needs.
Pay close attention to market demand and ensure your company’s purpose aligns with this type of growth.
Improve Existing Products
Another growth strategy is improving your current products or services.
As the provider, your company knows the pain points, customer feedback, reasons for purchases (or drop-offs), and more.
Use this knowledge to your advantage — show customers you’re listening and deliver an upgraded product or service.
Not only will this improve customer satisfaction, but it may also help you reach new markets and audiences.
Expand Your Business Operations
If you want to reach a larger audience, generate more sales, or operate in new locations, expanding your business footprint may be the right strategy.
For example, if your company is well-established in a major city, you can use that credibility to expand to other regions in the state.
Some common approaches include: franchising, opening new branches, or launching an e-commerce platform.
Always invest in market and audience research for the new region, as the landscape may differ from what you’re used to.
Invest in Marketing
Marketing plays a critical role in business expansion, as it communicates your new positioning or operations to the market.
That’s why marketing planning should be revisited when developing a growth plan.
Discover the Best Marketing Channels
Whether you’re targeting a new audience, entering a new location, offering a new product, or scaling production, it’s essential to understand the best communication channels for your goals.
Explore tools like social media, email marketing, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, website blogs, in-store signage, promotional campaigns, and more.
For example, if you run a brick-and-mortar store and want to start selling online, you’ll need to invest in digital marketing.
In that case, you must also understand where your audience is, how they consume, and which channel will reach them best.
Beyond research, test different approaches and allocate your budget to the channels that yield the best results.
You may also like: 8 New Sales Channels to Test in 2022
Invest in Digital Marketing
We just mentioned a fully digital example above.
But even businesses that rely on offline sales or in-person services can greatly benefit from digital marketing actions.
With the internet playing such a major role in everyday life, very few consumers skip online research before making a purchase.
Investing in SEO, paid ads, social media content, lead generation, and email campaigns are just a few examples of how digital marketing can drive business growth.
Have an Optimized Website to Attract Clients
Optimizing a website means analyzing both its structure and content to identify improvements in both areas.
With an optimized website, you can increase traffic, provide relevant content to your audience, boost your brand’s online relevance, and improve conversion rates.
And content optimization (SEO) must be paired with conversion rate optimization (CRO) to increase the chances of turning visitors into leads or customers.
Learn more about this topic in the article on our blog: “Website Optimization: Should You Focus on SEO or Conversion?”
Prioritize Customer Satisfaction
You may attract the right audience and convert your first sales.
However, if your customers are left dissatisfied after the purchase, your business will struggle to scale and grow.
Besides not returning to buy again, unhappy customers can damage your brand’s reputation.
To ensure a low churn rate (customer dropout) and positive reviews, prioritize the quality of your product or service.
Make sure to offer a positive experience from beginning to end.
Structure Your Sales Team
If demand for your solution increases, your sales team needs to be ready to handle that volume and maintain the same service standard.
Imagine yourself as a customer ready to make a purchase but not receiving the attention you expect.
You’d quickly become dissatisfied and turn to another company, right?
So, train your team for this new sales dynamic, reassess the tools and processes being used, and if necessary, invest in automated support systems or new sales reps.
Look for Partnerships
Business partnerships should also be part of your company’s growth strategy.
A good partnership can offer market insights, access to new sectors, and attract a more qualified audience.
To ensure a solid alliance, make sure your partner aligns with your company’s goals and has a trustworthy track record with clients.
Expand Your Team and Improve People Management
Investing in your team is critical for company expansion.
Even with great planning and growth strategies, without focusing on people management, nothing will move forward.
Based on your goals, evaluate whether you need to invest in new training, new leadership, or expand your workforce across departments.
Examples of Successful Growth Strategies
To better understand how growth strategies play out in real life, here are three cases worth exploring:
When Facebook launched in 2004, it didn’t have the influence or popularity it holds today.
It was just one of many social networks trying to stand out.
To gain attention and grow its market share and user base, the company adopted a gradual growth strategy.
First, the focus was on promoting the platform within its area of greatest influence — Harvard’s campus, where Facebook was created.
Once a solid user base was established there, they expanded to other universities using the same Harvard strategy, since those audiences shared similar interests and needs.
Only after reaching a broader user base did Facebook open the platform beyond students and begin developing features and functionalities to meet the needs of new audiences and generate additional revenue streams.
Google, another tech giant, is a great example of a well-planned growth strategy.
Initially, it was just a search engine for the general public — a B2C model.
Over time, with evolving consumer behavior, Google saw a major business opportunity: to monetize through a B2B model, allowing other companies to advertise on the platform.
That’s how a new product was born — AdWords, now known as Google Ads.
After creating this tool for a new market, Google kept improving it, eventually adding features like the display network for partner sites, Google Shopping, search ads, and user experience upgrades across all tools.
Amazon
Amazon is another excellent example of how to dominate a market through growth strategies.
It began by offering an extensive selection within a specific niche: books.
This allowed Amazon to stand out in the online marketplace with a much larger selection than other websites — and especially more than physical bookstores, which had limited space and couldn’t match the variety.
Then, using the same model, Amazon expanded into new categories like DVDs and electronics, ultimately becoming the e-commerce giant we know today.
Conclusion
Growth strategies are closely tied to your business model, the opportunities available, and the challenges your company faces in its specific market.
Did the tips we shared help you better understand your company’s landscape and how to plan your next steps?
Let me know if you’d like this article adapted into a visual format or translated for international publication!
