How to grow business ideas?

If you're struggling to grow your business, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Sure, it's hard. But, what's the alternative? A life-sucking 9-to-5 job? Surely not. Okay, maybe you're longing for the security of a guaranteed paycheck. But, at what mental or emotional price will that come?

The truth? If you buckle down, clear your mind, and just look at things in perspective, you can easily identify ways you can grow your business and make more money quickly. While hundreds of business growth strategies likely exists, the following 15 will take your business to the next level quickly and efficiently.

Roland Frasier, a business growth strategist, has a unique approach to scaling businesses. As a principal of Digital Marketer and Native Commerce Media, and CEO of War Room Mastermind, he knows a thing or two about the online marketing world.

Frasier, who builds and scales seven, eight and nine-figure businesses tells me that there are loads of ways to grow a business quickly. But, only 15 core strategies that will truly make a real impact on your bottom line. Some are time intensive at the outset. That much should be expected. But, the benefits and profits will ultimately make them well worthwhile.

Like anything else in life or in business, you have to put in the time if you're looking to reap the benefits. Don't focus on the short-term outcome of your work. Look to the long term. Build sincere value and look to help your customers. Genuinely care. That should be the foundation. After that, it's simply a matter of taking action and putting in the work to scale.

Related: 7 Mental Shifts That Allowed Me to Become a Millionaire at 22

The first way to quickly grow your business is by building a sales funnel. If you don't have a sales funnel, you're making a monumental mistake. Sales funnels can help to automate your business. It helps you to scale and grow quickly and easily. Sure, there's some front-end work involved. Obviously. But, once those processes are in place, it's smooth sailing from there.

Frasier says that every sales funnel needs to be carefully conceptualized before it's created. Consider the different funnels first and foremost. Whether it's a free-plus-shipping offer or a high-ticket coaching funnel, it's important to build your automated selling machine to quickly scale and grow your business.

Manually tracking transactions is hard. No one wants to do that. It gets too cumbersome as the business grows. If you want to scale quickly, use a customer management system. There are plenty to choose from. But, it really depends on your line of work. Of course, cloud-based software like SalesForce is always a viable option.

Quickbooks can help you with the accounting. InfusionSoft can also assist with sales and marketing. There are plenty of CMS systems, most of which integrate with other cloud-based services. Find what works for you and utilize it.

Related: How to Become a Millionaire by Age 30

When going to market, and you're really looking to get your offer to the masses, you need to research the competition. Frasier says he uses two platforms to conduct his research. The first is Similar Web. The other, AdBeat. Both provide competitive intelligence. It's your chance for x-ray lenses into all landing pages, ad copy, and other stages of the funnel.

This allows you to uncover any advertiser's online strategy. Find the ads that have been running for the longest and emulate those. That's the quickest way you scale any business. If it's proven and it's working for your competitors, it's likely it'll work for you.

Loyalty programs are great ways to increase sales. It costs up to three times more money to acquire new customers than it does to sell something to an existing customer. Other resources pin this number anywhere from four to 10 times more. However, any way that you slice it, acquiring new customers is expensive.

Frasier says that building a customer loyalty program will help you retain customers. It might also help you attract new ones as well. If there's a clear incentive to spend more money with you, it'll pay off in the long run. Build an attractive loyalty program and make it accessible to your existing customers and watch sales skyrocket over time.

Analyze new opportunities in your business by understanding your demographic better. Understand everything from distribution channels to your direct competitors, and even an analysis of foreign markets and other potential industries. There are likely dozens of new opportunities you could pursue immediately with the proper amount of analysis.

Related: 25 Common Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs

One of the most best and most effective ways to grow a business quickly is to build an email list. Clearly, that means you need to have a lead magnet. Why else would people subscribe to your list? And, with a lead magnet, comes the necessity for a sales funnel. Look into companies like Aweber, ConstantContact, ConvertKit, Drip, GetResponse and others for building and managing your list.

Strategic partnerships with the right companies can truly make a world of difference. It could allow you to reach a wide swath of customers quickly. Identifying those partnerships might be easier said than done. But, look out for companies that are complementary to your own. Contact them and propose opportunities for working together.

In the ecommerce business selling products? Why not use Amazon's FBA service? In the business of selling services? Why not use Upwork? In the business of renting vacation homes? Why not leverage AirBnB, InvitedHome, HomeAway or other global platforms? Find a platform that's reached saturation and use it to grow your business quickly.

Doing licensing deals is a great way to grow your business without too much added effort. If you have a product that you can license to others and share a revenue of, that's an ideal way to grow quickly. Taking a popular or successful product and bringing it to a company with a large footprint can help you achieve market saturation quicker.

Related: I Started Saying 'No' to These 6 Things. My Life and My Business Got a Lot Better.

If you have a successful business, and you're really looking to grow quickly, consider franchising it. Although franchise costs are high and moving to a franchise model is complex and takes a lot of marketing know-how, it could make all the difference if you're truly looking for quick growth.

Look into diversifying your offers. What complementary products or services or information can you offer in your business? In order to grow, you need to think about expansion. Identify new opportunities within your niche. Uncover the pain points. What else can you sell to your clients. Where else can you add value in the exchange?

Related: 9 Steps to Increase the Value of Your Business

Growing a business takes significant effort. If you're dealing with razor-thin margins, consider building passive income streams. This way, you don't have to worry so much about keeping the lights on, so to speak. Passive income will afford you the opportunity to make mistakes and not have to lose your shirt. It'll keep you in business and provide a basis to grow and market and scale quickly by giving you ample resources.

Sometimes, acquiring other businesses is a very quick way to grow your own business. If you can find competitors or businesses in other industries that would complement your own, you could use them as platforms to scale fast. Take a look within your industry and even outside of it to find potential for potential opportunities.

Analysing metrics, minimising costs and focusing on new B2B marketing efforts is critical in helping businesses to thrive, not just survive. This article will define growth strategy and explore why having one is so essential, uncover the core components of building a sound growth strategy, and discuss four marketing methods from the Ansoff Matrix that could help businesses grow.

A growth strategy is a plan to increase a business's size and value. It's holistically defining how you will win a race against your competition and identifying the most efficient way of reaching that result. What's more, it's applied to almost any area within marketing, and even in other departments such as sales or product-led growth.

A good strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy, and coherent action. Diagnosis considers the entire process, studying your competition, and understanding your benchmarks and metrics. This includes marketing analysis of customers and understanding how to drive engagement within each audience. A well-built guiding policy defines, articulates and communicates the process and the ideal destination – what actions are required to meet each milestone. Finally, the coherent action gets into the finer details like tactics, operations, and governance. A good growth strategy will consider all three elements and their components.

Today, growth strategies look a little different and follow an evolved outlook, like the Ansoff Matrix – one of many that we use. If you've studied growth before, you may know of the popular Four Ps. These are Product, Placement, Promotion and Price. Where the Four Ps focus on audiences, channels & pricing, the Ansoff Matrix is more effective for a broader view of markets and uses the older Four P framework within each of the 4 Ansoff quadrants.

Over time, the technological developments of SaaS and e-commerce altered how we plan strategies due to the impact on creative formats, the availability of new channels, new audience penetrations and new tools, all resulting in new skills. But, while the tactics and definitions have changed, the ultimate goal of creating sustainable growth remains the same.

The Ansoff Matrix is used to identify potential organisational or brand strategies. The matrix is built in a way that helps business owners understand their current system better and helps them analyse the risks associated with adopting a new plan. Each time you move into a new approach with varying tactics to achieve growth, risk increases.

Ansoff's Matrix has two axes: one focuses on the product, and the other on the market. Sales, development and marketing teams work similarly, with one department investigating which products to offer in the future, while the other considering whom they want to serve. The goal is to use marketing as the foundation of your strategy but harness data, design, and product to work as a single interactive unit for long-term success.

Market penetration is considered a low-risk strategy. A company using market penetration will attempt to expand the sales volume of their current products in their already established markets to increase their total market share.

Often confused with market development, market penetration encourages brand loyalty and customer retention by using marketing material to engage customers using existing products or services. You can do this through price reductions or bundles, for example, that lure customers away from competitors or create higher-quality creative content that generates more quality leads. Or, you can explore ways to target existing customers and audiences through new products and services.

Market development is a high-risk strategy that can yield significant returns. You should only consider this strategy when you already possess enough capital and resources to do so. Unlike market penetration, market development is about expanding or retargeting. This could mean taking an existing product to a new audience or market, or even altering your product into something new and shifting your focus to new customers all together.

To create a market development strategy, you should conduct extensive market research to identify market segments – small batches of people in a larger population grouped by labels. You can build these segments around identifiers like location, age, income, or industry. Once you've selected your ideal market segment, you need to create a marketing and branding strategy that advertises your existing product or service to attract a new type of customer. Try attracting new customers and markets by finding further uses for a current product or adding new features and benefits. Within SaaS, market development has become a collaborative effort between product and marketing teams. Internal alignment is essential for this strategy to work, as every new product or service needs to be on-brand and in line with messaging goals.

Product development is a strategic approach to growth that focuses on creating and commercialising new products. It's not about expanding your customer base by targeting new markets. Instead, it's improving your product line to attract more clients in your existing market segment.

Imagine a dessert restaurant that only serves ice cream. Expanding their menu to include waffles could increase existing customers' buying rates from their business. To determine new products, you should undergo extensive consumer research focusing on demands and competitor analysis. Product development requires a solid cross-functional collaboration between teams to be successful.

Diversification is the riskiest of the four growth options. This strategy involves introducing a new product into an entirely new market, in which you may have minimal experience. This could include deploying products in new geographic areas and translating the benefits of your products to the local population. Without support from growth marketing experts, failure is a distinct possibility, although the potential of a high payoff may be worth the risk.

Implementing a diversification strategy in an industry facing an extreme financial downturn or a company losing significant market share within a core part of their business may help prevent further damage or closure. When markets are challenging, and competition is fierce, many companies choose to protect their core business while simultaneously exploring new possibilities.

Aligning your growth strategy with your marketing efforts can help you understand your next move. At Kurve, we've developed a process that we call Kurveology to guide us through the growth marketing strategies to help scale our clients' businesses.

Start by developing and defining the unique qualities that differentiate you from your competitors, emphasising the most relevant customer segments and how your product's unique attributes best meet their needs.

Always begin with the essentials. Research and study your consumers to understand their pains, fears, and worries, and link that to your service and how your products can help solve their pinch points.

Then, consider your brand, where you want to go, whom you want to target, and how you appear. Understanding your customers is essential, but defining your company is vital.

You need to create a story that resonates with your audience. The SaaS market is saturated with an abundance of information and voices. To break through the noise, you need to use a sophisticated strategy that says the right things, to the right people, and at the most opportune time.

Things to consider while strategising:

Conducting research on the state of your industry and competitor analysis is the best way to determine if your desired growth is both necessary and feasible. Understanding your competitor set within the context of marketing allows you to differentiate your products and services in a similar customer segment, this includes:

The knowledge and facts you uncover in this step will shape the targets and KPIs for your marketing strategy evaluation to better understand the outcome.

Following competitor and industry analysis, develop a messaging framework based on your current brand positioning. This will include a map of common customer challenges, how they impact business, and then think about how your product might solve them.

Executing your marketing strategy starts with identifying how and where you're going to place your message that will be most effective for generating leads or driving sales. For SaaS businesses, some of the top distribution channels and methods include:

With all of your planning, resourcing, and goal-setting complete, you're ready to execute your growth marketing strategy and deliver results for the business.

Ensure that your onboarding process is closely tied with the customer's buying cycle, aligning internal teams like marketing and sales to ensure an efficient onboarding process. Continuously compare results to your forecasted growth goals to see if your projected outcomes are still achievable or if anything needs to be adjusted.

With your campaign complete and your strategy reaching the end of its cycle, it's time to analyse your results against your original KPIs, individual channel performance KPIs, and growth goals. What went well? What didn't go so well? What can you do better next time?

You can now revert to step one and develop a new, more informed strategy for your next growth marketing drive using your established metrics and numbers.

There are several different growth marketing strategies that you could use to increase your market share. Some of these strategies include:

A viral loop funnel requires just one satisfied user to share with others instead of needing as many leads as possible at the top of your sales funnel.

Businesses that use milestone referrals offer rewards for hitting specific benchmarks. In many cases, "milestones" are metrics like the number of referred friends.

Some traditional strategies are rigid and follow a defined order and structure. Advanced marketing teams are now taking a slightly different approach, called growth hacking. Growth hacking is a method used to drive rapid growth. With this growth plan, you create strategies focused on speed and quick results.

We prefer to encourage collaboration between Product, Marketing, Engineering and Data to build plans based on concrete evidence, rather than anecdotal, with accurate data-based measurements, instead of buzz and perception.

Without a sound growth strategy built on data and expert industry knowledge, your business is in jeopardy. To ensure your company thrives, you need to create a unique growth plan that aligns with your ambitions, products, and brand position.

Using the Ansoff Matrix to guide the planning process can help identify new marketing opportunities while reminding you of the potential risks and dangers that new strategies can bring – especially when implemented poorly. Pay attention to your metrics, listen to your audience, and monitor your product. Learning is your first step in defining your next growth strategy.

Small businesses need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to streamline contact management. A solid CRM houses loads of data about your customers, allowing you to maintain insight into their interests, needs, personal information, and so on. It’s difficult to compete in today’s highly competitive business landscape without a CRM in place.

Marketing automation is another piece of technology you should invest in if you want to accelerate growth. It allows you to send marketing emails, build landing pages for lead generation, score leads as they move towards conversion, and much more. And if you use an all-in-one CRM, you’ll have marketing automation already built into your system.

Small businesses need to be as efficient as possible with limited resources. You can automate tons of processes that would otherwise be done manually with the right technology—such as CRM and marketing automation.

For example, you can automate data entry by using forms to automatically capture prospect data. Automation frees up time that you can spend on higher-value tasks such as forming your growth strategy.

The customer experience is set to become the most important variable in consumers’ buying decisions. It will soon overtake price and product as the key driver of customers’ purchase choices. Do everything you can to deliver a world-class customer experience.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself how you would like to be treated. Then go out of your way to treat your customers in that same way.

Related Blog: How to deliver excellence: Customer experience best practices

It’s worth the investment and extra money you’ll spend to hire top talent. It’s an investment in the future of your business. Hiring the best employees will ensure they produce the best results for your company. It will also positively affect the customer experience.

So, don’t skimp and try to save by hiring people without the appropriate experience just because it saves you money. It will cost you more money in the long run.

It’s crucial that customers can contact you easily when they have an issue and need support. Ensure your customer support team knows your product well enough to resolve issues on the first try. And make it a priority to respond as quickly as possible when they reach out. Delivering great customer support is an incredibly important small business idea.

You should create a company page on various social media sites. The most important ones for many businesses are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Post daily and share news, new content, and other helpful information that will engage your audience. You’ll be surprised by how much traffic a strong social media presence will drive to your website.

Related Blog: 31 ways to increase brand awareness using social media

Your employees need to know your product inside and out. They need to be able to confidently answer product-related questions when they speak to a customer or prospect. Otherwise, prospects and customers will lose trust in your ability to support them and deliver a great customer experience.

Another important small business idea for growth is to create a blog. Write about topics that will educate your audience. Provide tips and tricks that will help them work smarter. Educate them on industry trends so they can be more competitive. And always be sure to share your blogs on social media.

It’s essential that you constantly grow your email list. You always need new leads in your database. You can’t grow your business without finding new leads and marketing to them. Learn best practices for growing your email list.

Put a form on your website homepage that allows people to subscribe to your list easily. Put it on other high-traffic pages as well. You can also include a link to your sign-up form in your email signature and on your social media sites so that people can find it in multiple locations.

Satisfied customers stay longer and provide a recurring revenue stream that helps stably grow your business. They also speak positively about your brand to others, which amounts to word-of-mouth advertising. Focus on improving the customer experience, as mentioned above, and you’ll maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.

Happy employees work harder, have higher morale, and stick around longer. Employee turnover has a horrible effect on your bottom line. Keep them happy by asking them how you could improve the workplace. Implement their feedback, tell them about it, and they’ll see that you truly care about their wellbeing.

Your CRM stores loads of personal and professional data about your contacts. With this data, you can maintain deep insight into their interests, pain points, past buying behavior, and more. Your relationship with your customers should be a partnership. Getting to know who they are and what they need will help you convey that to them, which will increase customer satisfaction and help you grow.

You need to train new customers on how to use your product. The extent of that training depends on your product. But if customers can’t successfully use your product, they will leave you for a competitor.

Many miss this small business idea, but its key to growth. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly important. It helps you develop a positive reputation as a company that gives back to the community it serves. People increasingly take that into account when comparing vendors. Get out and volunteer, donate to charities, and tell your audience about it.

Branding is one of the most important things for business growth. You need to use consistent branding so that consumers recognize your brand when they see it. Read about how to create a brand style guide.

Your vision statement is where you want to be in the future. Your mission statement is how you plan to get there. Create these documents and share them with all your employees so that everyone understands and is working towards the same goals.

Create a value proposition that highlights the unique value that your product brings to the market. Research your competitors and identify areas that you excel in, which they don’t. Then focus on those areas in your lead generation outreach, email marketing, social media posts, and any other customer interactions.

How do your employees talk about your company and your product? It’s important that everyone speaks in the same way when interacting with your audience. Consistent messaging ensures that you don’t create confusion in the market. Create messaging documents with talking points and share them with all your employees so that everyone describes your business and product in the same way.

Service level agreements outline the type of service you will deliver to your customers. They are contracts that you must adhere to. Using them gives customers peace of mind as it tells them what they can expect.

You can also use service level agreements to hold employees accountable for meeting the required level of service you have committed to. It’s a small business idea that will generate trust among your customers.

Customers need to be able to reach you on the channel that they prefer. Offer customer support via email, telephone, social media, and online live chat. Your customers vary, and so do their preferences. Offering multiple support channels ensures you are catering to the unique needs of every customer.

Map out the stages of your sales funnel. Understand what prospects need at each stage to move to the next. Monitor leads as they pass through those stages, so you can identify bottlenecks when they arise. This helps you keep leads flowing through the funnel on their way to becoming customers.

First, you need to define the customer journey and the associated stages of the sales funnel, as mentioned above. Then, you will know which type of content is needed at each stage to move leads on.

You wouldn’t send a new lead a how-to guide. And you wouldn’t send a customer an introductory one-sheet that tells them about your business. Mapping content to the sales funnel allows you to deliver the right content at the right time and increases engagement.

You can personalize your interactions with prospects and customers when you store so much data about them in your CRM. You can greet them by name when they call as you’ll have that information right in front of you. You can personalize your marketing so that it’s more relevant to them. Personalizing your interactions will help you close more deals and grow your business.

Sending email newsletters is a great small business idea. It’s a way to keep customers informed about new developments at your company. Send online newsletters periodically to alert customers about new products, special offers, new content, and more. Keeping customers in the loop will keep them satisfied.

Prospects will trust the word of your customers more than they will trust you when you tell them how great your product is. Find satisfied customers and ask for testimonials. Then post them on your website and share them on social media. It’s a great way to drive more conversions and grow your business.

Industry influencers are people with a high profile in your industry that others look to for advice. They normally have huge followings on social media. Try to engage with them so they will share your content or mention you in their posts. It will put your brand name in front of loads of new potential customers.

Brand advocates are customers, employees, or anyone else who advocates for your brand. This normally takes place on social media. Your customer may post about how great your product is. That’s a brand advocate, and when you find them, you need to nurture them. You can be alerted when someone mentions you on social media by using social listening tools.

This is a great small business idea that many fail to recognize. People want to hear how your product will benefit them and make their lives easier. They don’t want to hear a technical explanation of the feature that will deliver that benefit. Ensure your whole team knows how to speak in terms of benefits and doesn’t overly focus on features.

User guides and training videos help ensure your customers can use your product to the fullest. That results in more satisfied customers, which in turn results in increased brand awareness. These things are essential for small business growth.

• Do Your Research.
• Build a Sales Funnel.
• Increase Customer Retention.
• Participate in Networking Events.
• Practice Corporate Social Responsibility.
• Form Strategic Partnerships.