The day you started your business, you indirectly agreed to level up your business to achieve growth. The growth phase is exciting as it comes with increased revenues, profits, and market share.
Growth also enables you to achieve a competitive edge. However, it can also be risky for your business, especially when the growth becomes too much to handle, resulting in a total collapse.
If you do not handle it right, business growth may be difficult to control. You may face huge challenges in customer service, rising business expenses, and fluctuating demand. We want to help you avoid being in such a risky mess. Let’s discuss the strategies to use to level up your business when that time comes.
What it Means to Level Up a Business
Leveling up means taking your business from one growth phase to the next. The trick is in managing the transition to ensure that the growth is sustainable.
How you grow your business doesn't have to be the same as for the others in your industry. What matters is understanding your business growth needs and the business growth cycle.
You also need to know about the various types of business growth that include:
Organic growth – your business will expand its operations while utilizing internal resources.
Strategic growth – your focus on developing initiatives that help your business grow in the long term. For example, when you develop new products or target a new audience. The strategy requires huge capital; hence you may seek out external resources.
Internal growth – you optimize internal business processes to increase revenue. The strategy relies on using internal business resources to achieve this growth.
Partnerships, mergers & acquisition – it is one of the most risky yet rewarding growth strategies. It can help your business break into a new market, increase your product and services, and expand your customer base.
Leveling up your business is simple and there’s no standard formula to do it. However, you can use the following steps and strategies to scale your business to achieve sustainable growth.
1. Define Your Growth Strategy
A growth strategy is a detailed plan that outlines the actions you intend to take to expand your operations, increase revenue and boost your market share. Your growth strategy should have components, such as specific goals, a budget, KPIs, and a timeline.
Your growth strategy is unique to your business needs. But the common growth strategies include:
Customer Growth and Retention Strategy
The customer growth and retention strategy focuses on two aspects of your business growth. The first is expanding your customer base through customer acquisition over a set time.
Here you target new customers and convince them to buy your products and services. The process begins by generating new leads and ends once you have converted them into paying customers.
Therefore, you will be relying on the following new customer acquisition tactics:
Offering price discounts
Social media marketing
Email marketing
Paid ads
SEO marketing
The second concept entails turning your current customers into return and loyal customers. Focus on improving customer experience, satisfaction, and relationships and building loyalty around your brand.
Loyal customers contribute to an increase in your business's bottom line. Moreover, they are excellent sources of brand referrals, which will aid in your customer acquisition strategy.
Hot Tip: email marketing will help you establish meaningful connections with your clients. It will enable you to develop lasting relationships with your clients, which aids in customer retention. But that is if you personalize your email marketing to specific customer needs.
Market Penetration Strategy
You will apply the market penetration strategy when you focus on increasing your current market share. Your primary aim is to sell more of your product and services in your present market niche.
You will gear efforts to gain a higher competitive advantage using these tactics:
Offer price or product incentives to attract your competitors' customers
Give referral rewards to your existing customers to encourage them to refer more customers
Improve your CRM
Competitive pricing
Increase your SEO marketing to improve your brand awareness
Market Development
Market development is a growth strategy that aims to expand your market share by selling your existing products in a new market. It is one of the risky growth strategies you may choose to explore.
However, the reward is worth the risk. You will be gaining whole new customers in your target market. With this strategy, you may employ the following tactics:
Franchising
Rebranding your business or products
Opening up new locations across the globe
Adopt a different marketing strategy to appeal to new markets
2. Hire Better Talent
You stand a better chance of leveling up your business when you hire the right talent to help you implement your strategies. You want skilled staff members who understand the business environment and can add significant value to your growth.
Latest labor reports suggest that 76% of employers use skills-based hiring to find new talent. Hiring for skills is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and more than two times more predictive than hiring for work experience.
Therefore, you need a team with the right skills to achieve the various performance objectives. Moreover, you want employees who fit perfectly into your organization's culture. Higher employee satisfaction will improve performance, which is essential in achieving your growth goals.
Note: avoid overstraining your budget to hire permanent employees. Minimize your operation costs by hiring skilled and professional remote employees on a contract, for example, virtual assistants or online business managers.
3. Automate Where Possible
Achieving sustainable growth demands high levels of business process efficiency. Automation helps you save numerous operation costs. For example, you can save on labor, CRM, and productivity costs.
Implement the following automation ideas to help you level up.
Use a chatbot to provide timely responses to basic customer inquiries.
Use CRM automation tools like SuiteDash or Dubsado to build and nurture your customer relationships.
Implement automated project management tools like ClickUp or Airtable to coordinate your project teams.
Automate your accounting function with QuickBooks Online to better monitor your finances.
Use relevant social media marketing tools to create, schedule and post your content on social media.
Automate your email marketing using tools like MailerLite
Employ various online time management tools, such as Google Calendar, Todoist, or Notion, to plan, track, and organize your time
Use Zapier to integrate all your automation tools for better efficiency in your business processes
Note: You need automation to harness the productivity of your skilled staff members. The best part is that skilled employees don't require much training to use automation tools.
4. Focus on Customer Experience
Customers' perceptions of your business can make or break your growth strategy. Customers who trust your business will have no problem trusting your strategic plans or vision. The customers will also be loyal and good brand ambassadors.
Use CRM tools like Dubsado and SuiteDash to streamline your client experience by improving communication and relationship management efficiency.
Don't be afraid to go the extra mile for your customers. Show your clients some love with simple gestures, such as:
Thoughtful gifts
Send your client birthday or anniversary cards accompanied by a discount voucher
Send your client a thank you message after a purchase
Personalize all your client communications
Create a reward system for clients like your loyal customers
5. Build Strategic Partnerships
If you didn't know better, you would think Coca-Cola and McDonald's share ownership. The two brands freely promote each other's products on many occasions.
They are an excellent example of strategic partnerships between brands. Their long-term association has helped both brands reach a wider audience, increased customer value, and improve brand awareness.
Your business can enjoy similar benefits through strategic partnerships in the growth phase. Now would be the best time to reach out to your networks and explore ways you can collaborate.
For example, collaborate with your suppliers to minimize your potential financial challenges in the growth phase. The suppliers will extend you better credit terms for better financial flexibility.
6. Monitor Progress and Adjust Accordingly
We defined leveling up as moving your business from one growth phase to the next. But that doesn’t occur in a vacuum. That's why we recommended establishing some KPIs in your growth strategy.
Collect data at each growth stage. Then analyze it to determine which strategies are working out and the ones that need to be improved. Then adjust accordingly and make your business adaptive.
Remember to analyze external business factors and make the right decisions. For example, factor in the fluctuating inflation rates the country experiences.
Take Your Business to New Heights with Royal Assistants
Book a strategy call today to discuss how we’ll help you choose the best growth strategy for your business. Don’t let your business fail because you didn’t know how to level up. We are experts in this area, and we’re here to hold your hand to make your dreams come true.