When you are seeking to grow your business, make sure you first understand the various ways that you can grow. You can get more of the market share, you can expand your offerings, and you can form alliances with or acquire other businesses.
1. Market Penetration – This strategy involves increasing your product’s market share. This can be done in a number of ways, from improving sales pages and conversions to offering more products to existing customers.
2. Market Expansion – When you studied your target audience, you may have identified complementary audiences who may want what you have to offer. You can choose one of these audiences to start marketing your offerings to in order to expand your market. This can be risky but it can also pay off big.
3. Product Expansion – Creating new products is a good way to grow. But, first realize who your target audience is, create audience personas, know their demographics and then create the new product. This is going to be a way to expand your market by giving your customers more of what they want.
4. Diversification – Another great business growth strategy is through diversification. What this means is that you’ll look at your offerings and see if there is something you can add on, to add value to what you already offer. For example, if you have a weight loss site, you could add an app to your menu offerings.
5. Know Your Value Proposition – Whenever you want to grow your business, it’s important to go back to the beginning and reassess what your value proposition is. This is a combination of what makes your product better than someone else’s, what the product features mean to your audience, the points of difference between your product and the competition’s, and why it’s useful to your audience.
6. Identify Your Ideal Customer – Anytime you want to grow it’s important to do a study about your ideal customer. In fact, studying your ideal customer periodically is imperative to your success. Why? Because while your audience may stay the same, such as “women between 23 and 33,” the group as a whole changes their ideas about what is right and wrong.
7. Know Key Performance Indicators – For each business the key indicators are different, but knowing them will help you measure success and judge how to be even more successful. A few that you might track are conversion rates, site traffic, bounce rates, and so forth. Each activity you do to improve your business has a different KPI to track.
8. Acquisitions and Alliances – One really great way to grow your business is to acquire other businesses or form an alliance or joint venture with a complementary business owner. The joint venture option is a great way to grow your business fast.
If you want to grow your business, put in the work necessary to get to know your audience, and do an income stream inventory to find out where your money is coming from. Then look at where you can either add products, create more value, or develop a new audience.