4 Step Plan for Small Business Growth

With these four strategies, you will be able to make a detailed growth plan in the future, keep up with the trends in your niche and, most importantly, stay competitive.

In 2016, the number of businesses in the UK has hit astonishing 5.5 million. In order to survive in such a competitive landscape, you need to carefully plan every aspect of your business growth. Only this way will you be able to nudge your business in the right direction, focus on its most significant aspects and increase revenue. Most importantly, you will manage to keep pace with the industry changes and adapt your efforts to them.
Here are several invaluable steps you need to take when building a small business growth strategy. 

Target Demographics Segmentation

To attract and retain more customers, you need to establish a personalized approach that will help you stand out. However, this is downright impossible if you don’t know who your customers are. Precisely because of this, you need to do a thorough research on your ideal customers and create your average buyer persona. 
With a wide range of sophisticated and yet affordable audience segmentation tools, including SEO tools, user surveys and social media tracking tools, targeting audience has never been simpler. By choosing the right platform, you will be able to determine who your customers are, what their average age is, where they are located, as well as what their interests, behaviour patterns and buying motivation are. Once you take these parameters into consideration, you will be able to understand why your audience needs your product and find an adequate way to market to them. 

Obviously, the segmentation of target demographics is critical for your further business growth. Therefore, if you aren’t ready to invest a great deal of effort and resources in it, maybe you should consider hiring a marketing agency to do that instead of you. 

Create Strong Value Proposition

A value proposition is a statement that clearly points out all the tangible benefits a customer might get from using your product and tells them why they should buy from you. When creating your value proposition, you need to keep in mind that it is first impressions that most commonly determine whether your potential customers will convert or not. According to some recent studies, 48% of consumers say that this is the most critical time for businesses to earn their loyalty. Given these facts, it’s obvious that you need to come up with an authentic value proposition. 

One such example is Uber’s “Tap the app, get a ride” value proposition. In just a few sentences that follow this statement, this company managed to highlight the simplicity of their service and point out how superior it is when compared to taxi services.

Determine what your Primary Objectives are

When planning their business growth strategy, one of the most common mistakes startups and small businesses make is focusing on too many goals. Always keep in mind that, regardless of your company’s size, you should never initiate more than three projects at the same time. In other words, you need to identify what your primary objectives (PO) are and organize your projects in accordance with them. Logically, as your business grows and your priorities change, your strategies will develop parallel with them.  

Measure your KPIs

All major aspects of your business growth are measurable. After all, only by estimating your efforts will you be able to assess their effectiveness. That’s exactly what KPIs stand for. Namely, Key Performance Indicators play a vital role in your business growth, telling you how efficiently you are achieving your key business objectives. There are several invaluable KPIs every small business needs to take into consideration: 

• Cash flow forecasts show you whether your sales and margins are appropriate.
• Gross profit margin determines your total profits after accounting for the costs of the goods sold. 
• Funnel drop-off rate reveals the number of your website visitors who abandon sales funnel prior to making a purchase.
• Revenue growth rate, as its mere name says, represents the pace at which your income is growing.
• Inventory turnover is a measure of the number of times inventory is sold or used in a particular time span.

Conclusions

As you can conclude from these examples, there are several paths to growth your small business may take. So, your paramount should be choosing the one that meets your needs the best. With these four strategies, you will be able to make a detailed growth plan in the future, keep up with the trends in your niche and, most importantly, stay competitive.