You’ve accomplished the basics of getting your business up and running. You have a product or service that people are buying. You are selling that product or service at a price that lets you make a sufficient profit to continue your business. Now comes the more complex challenge of scaling your business and growing it to match your vision of where you want it to be while dealing with daily setbacks and obstacles.
To keep your business growing, you need to be flexible and have both good planning and organizational skills. Your business can become self-sustaining, settling into a long-term growth curve, but it takes work to ensure financial success. In order to reap the benefits, you have to work. Don’t focus on the short-term outcome of your work, remember that you are here for the long term. Follow these 5 tips on how to keep your business growing.
Provide Great Service
The foundation of your business should be to provide great service to your customers. Build sincere value, genuinely care, and look to help your customers. Customers remember the total experience with a company far longer than they remember the price that they paid. When you provide better service, your customers will be more inclined to come to you the next time they need something, instead of going to your competition. Great service includes not only the sales process, but browsing your website, social media interactions, support, and follow-up.
Create a customer loyalty program
Acquiring a new customer is more expensive than retaining an existing one. Studies put the cost anywhere from three to twenty-five times more expensive. No matter how you look at it, acquiring new customers is expensive. An excellent way to retain customers is through a customer loyalty program. Start by talking to existing customers to find out what they like about you. Then you can build an attractive loyalty program and make it accessible to your existing customers. If there is a clear incentive to spend more money with you, it will pay off in the long run.
Identify new opportunities
While completely new and risky products hold the threat to dilute your focus and confuse existing customers, it is important to consistently be identifying and analyzing new opportunities. What complementary products or services or information can your business offer? The key to answering this question is to understand your demographic better. Understand everything related to your business, from distribution channels to your direct competitors. Uncover customer pain points and discover where you can add value in the exchange. There are likely dozens of new opportunities that you could pursue almost immediately. These could be adding new but similar products or adding services that are related to your current product line.
Other opportunities might present themselves in the form of licensing deals or a franchise model. Taking a popular product and bringing it to a company with a large footprint can help you achieve market saturation faster. Look at your product line and see if you have a product that you can license to others and share the revenue. Rather than a successful product, if you find yourself with a successful business, you could consider franchising it. Moving to a franchise model is complex, but can provide quick growth for a business.
Consider expanding internationally by analyzing foreign markets and other potential industries. Instant global communication has made it easier than ever to reach new markets without rethinking your entire product strategy. You will need to analyze the best markets to pursue, as well as any markets to avoid.
Rather than licensing or franchising your business, you might look into acquiring other businesses. If you find competitors or businesses in other industries that would complement your own, you can use them as platforms for growth.
Form strategic partnerships.
Frequently the sum of the whole is greater than independent efforts. The right partnerships have the potential to accelerate business growth and could allow you to reach a wide swath of customers quickly. However, identifying those partnerships can be easier said than done. Look out for companies that are complementary to your own. You might have a product but not a strong distribution channel. You could form a strategic partnership with a distribution organization that enhances value to existing and new customers of both your solutions.
There can even be opportunities to work with your competition. These opportunities can capitalize on the unique strengths of each business that creates a win-win situation for both. This can frequently be done in the form of a cross-recommendation alliance.
Be Consistent
Much like great customer service, there needs to be the foundation of your business; consistency is a key component to business growth. You have to consistently keep doing what is necessary, day in and day out, in order to see business growth and long-term business success. It’s important that you never become complacent about business growth. Staying consistent will create long-term positive habits that will help you create that self-sustaining, long-term growth curve that businesses are looking for.
Your personal Safeguard consultant has everything your business needs to run and grow. We know that as your business matures, you can never be complacent about growth. That’s why our products, services, and advice are all here to make managing your business easier and more effective. Contact us today to see how we can help you expand your business.