6 strategies to drive your growth and your business strategy – and watch it succeed!

After all, starting a business is one thing – growing it and watching it go from strength to strength is a whole other level of operations.

Whether you’re launching the newest and most promising of startups, have bought a franchise or started the small business of your dreams, having a solid growth strategy will ensure your company sees long-term success.

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Understand your target market

Members of your target market typically share similar characteristics, personal interests and behaviors and understanding these will help you to efficiently market your product. To gain insights on your target market, you’ll want to:

• Define your ideal customers. This includes age, income, gender, location and other demographics as required. Understanding this can give you a strong base to work from and help to build the rest of your research.
• Gather survey data on your market interests, preferences and dislikes, which can help to create products that better solve consumers’ problems and fit their needs.
• Create ideal customer personas that outline behaviors, expectations and your target customers’ needs. These can also describe the challenges your customers face, which can in turn help to customize messaging to better relate to specific types of people.
• Look at social media to see who your target market is following and how they use different platforms, including how they engage with competitors and which types of content they like or share the most.
• Use Google Analytics to see if your content is working for you and your target audience. For example, you’ll want to look at the pieces of content that are most popular with your customers, including blogs and social media posts.

Analyse the competition

Understanding the competition will help you to better determine the right products for your target market. A SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – analysis will go a long way to an effective competitor analysis.

• Research who your competitors are: the best starting point is to see who offers the same products and services as you.
• Monitor social media: see what the public is saying about your competitors. This gives you insight into your customers’ opinions and expectations.
• Ask your customers: This is one of the smartest ways to gather information. If you gain a new customer, ask them who they used before you and why they’ve switched. You’ll want to understand why they weren’t happy with their previous supplier and then use this to help your operation improve.

Some lessons you’ll learn during your analysis that’ll help improve your business plan include:

• New ideas for sales and marketing
• How to better engage your audience on social media
• What competitive pricing for your industry looks like
• The most common content types that your audience interacts with
• What niche markets are out there
• Which competitors have greater market share compared to others

Identify your value proposition

Your value proposition outlines how your products and services help your customers. This increases your startup growth because it helps your target audience understand the value of each product or service you offer. It also helps consumers differentiate your company from competitors.

Establish long-term goals

Long-term goals give your business consistent direction and motivation and are a key to a successful business model. They also give everyone at your company a path to follow for success by reducing confusion around your business plan. They’ll help your company focus on both small and major tasks throughout each year, which can increase productivity. Ensuring your goals are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely – is necessary for the success of your long-term goals.

Build your dream team

We all know that teamwork makes the dream work and the right team will do more for you than almost any other strategy. Build a team that shares in your vision, understands the goals and is motivated to achieve them – and watch the successes come!

Develop a startup growth plan

We’ve saved the best for last, and we know that Empiraa is the tool for you here! Startups fail more than they’re successful. To help ensure your business is on the road to a prosperous future, you’ll need to develop the right startup growth strategies. These detailed plans come together by combining your target market, value proposition and goals, everything that we’ve just covered here.

Check this out for some assistance writing SMART Goals, as well as practical examples.

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