Growing a business is always hard work, irrespective of what stage of growth the business is. So whether you are a startup, small business, or medium-sized business, much work will be required to grow your business in 2022. In order to achieve the exponential growth that you dream of for your business, you are going to need more than a desire to grow. You will need an excellent and feasible growth strategy for the new year to take your business from where it currently is to where you desire it to be.
What is a Business Growth Strategy?
A business growth strategy is a plan or set of plans that a business intends to implement to overcome its challenges and experience expansion. For an organization or business to grow, its growth strategy must be comprehensive, cover every aspect of the business, and be realistic. A good business growth strategy will encompass all the departments in the company in a holistic manner that facilitates individual and collective growth.
The best time to design a business growth strategy for the new year is before the current year runs out. However, if you are late to the party, or this is your first time designing a business growth strategy, you can still do it now and enjoy wonderful results.
Steps to Planning a Winning Business Growth Strategy for 2022
Set Your High-Level Goals
The first step to designing your business growth strategy is to identify your business’s big or high-level goals. A great way to note this is to think of your business’s end game. What is your business’s biggest goal? Do you want to be the biggest restaurant in that city? Do you want to be the biggest supplier of a particular product? If you don’t have a big goal yet, you can start by thinking of where or what you want your business to be in the next ten years. You can then break it down into smaller goals that can be achieved over a five, three, and one-year period. The most realistic goal that can be achieved immediately over one year should be your goal for the next year. You should always note that your goals must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.)
Determine Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
After setting your high-level goals for the year, the next step is to identify results that would indicate the successful achievement of your goals. For instance, if your high-level goal for the year is to be the most popular restaurant in your city, how do you plan to measure that? Would you measure it by a percentage increase in the number of visitors compared to other restaurants? Would it be based on the number of meals served? Level of engagement on social media platforms? It would be best to work with your growth team to determine accurate and feasible KPIs for your business’s goals.
Develop Mini Strategies to Achieve Goals
Breaking down your goals into smaller actionable steps will not only make them easier to achieve but also trackable. Using the same restaurant example introduced earlier, a good mini strategy would involve a plan to get more visitors than their competition in the new year. Would you have to run more advertisements? Host a few more taster events? Or increase social media interaction? You can further break down these steps into monthly activities or actions that must be carried out to achieve that goal. For instance, you can plan to increase the number of visitors to your restaurant by 20% in January by increasing social media interaction. In February, you can also continue with this goal by running a valentine’s promo. If you need help planning each month’s activities, you can make use of TCMA’s event calendar for 2022 to help you plan ahead and create better strategies.
If your goal is to increase website traffic by 15% in the first quarter of the year, you should consider actionable steps to achieve this. You might need to get more professionally written website content that speaks to your customers’ needs. You may also need to run more online ads or drive traffic to your website through email marketing.
These small actions are easier to track for success and can be easily adjusted if they are not delivering as expected.
Consider Customer Feedback
One of the best ways to experience growth in your business is by increasing your customer base. In order to do this, you need to be able to satisfy your customers in a way that wins their loyalty. Satisfied loyal customers are more likely to refer your business to their friends and family, which in turn expands your customer base. While designing your growth strategy, you should incorporate customer feedback so that you can make adjustments to your services to satisfy your customers even better. According to a survey by Barclays, 85% of small and medium-sized enterprises say that online customer feedback has been beneficial to their business.
Invest in Growth Tools
If you plan to expand your business in the coming year, you might need to invest in tools to facilitate this growth. These tools can be in the form of software that improves the lead generation process, social media management tools, or software subscriptions that improve the productivity of your employees. You should be open to trying new growth tools to help implement your growth strategies for the new year.
Test, Implement, and Monitor
Now that you have your strategies mapped out, the next step is to test out these strategies. You can do this by trying them out on a smaller scale than your actual sample size to see how they convert. If they do well during the test run, they might do great when you implement them. In some cases, they might not turn out as excellently as you imagined, but that’s the whole point of running tests, isn’t it? You can always make tweaks, restrategize, and implement until you get the desired results.
Are you in need of content and email marketing services to help you implement your winning business growth strategy? Contact Top Content Marketing Agency today for a consultation on the best services for you.