10 Amazing Secrets Of Business Growth – Unveiled!
Sustained business growth is something most entrepreneurs and proprietors dream of.
It is a phase in a business’s life cycle that involves increased profits, asset growth, and expansion opportunities – vertical and horizontal.
A jump in demand, a need for additional outlets, or a surge of traffic towards your webpage. All these are small, yet significant signs of business growth. These can, in turn, lead to expansion into new businesses, acquisitions, a potential Initial Public Offering- all elements that propagate further growth.
These signs are the strongest indicators of an entrepreneur or a proprietor taking the correct steps towards their business’s health.
Why Is Business Growth Important?
Business growth acts as both a positive reward and an important lesson. It shows that you’ve been doing things right. It gives you important data so that you can double down on the experiments, techniques, products, and services that have succeeded in the past.
Business growth also serves as a reminder to not rest on your laurels. The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is take it easy after experiencing a bout of success.
Business growth helps the company move steadily towards its creators’ vision. Amazon, for example, rode the momentum afforded by its ebooks growth to expand towards other goods and services, and eventually throughout the supply chain.
In this article, we look at 10 secrets of business growth.
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The 10 Secrets Of Business Growth
The truth is, these aren’t secrets at all- at least to those who experience business growth. Oftentimes, the most enlightened answers are also the most obvious ones. Here, we list these ten ‘secrets’ out. These situations, factors, techniques, and teachable moments are all contextual when it comes to business growth.
1. Pay Careful Attention To Your Data
A business without data is like a ship without a rudder. Data should serve as a pillar of your business’s decision-making. Without data, most of your decisions will either run on intuition or a shot in the dark.
Both are risky and, without data, can lead to the downfall of your business, potentially quicker than the time it took to start it in the first place. Business growth cannot happen without numbers.
Market research, consumer information, sales, and financial numbers, these are extremely crucial for business growth.
2. Observe Your Customers, Always
There is no better indicator of how well your business is doing than by observing customers and consistently proving great customer experience.
- How many clicks have your page gotten?
- What is your customers’ perception of your outlet?
- Are they satisfied with your products?
These and many more customer-centric questions need to be answered in order to experience business growth and take your company to the next level.
3. Brace For When The Business Growth Stops
Business growth is temporary. Entrepreneurs who make future predictions based on temporary growth charts are often disappointed.
Much like a product, business growth has a life cycle. The spike in sales will calm down once your product stops being relevant/ new. Your aim should be to lay down the tracks for future business growth, at best.
If not, your aim should be stabilized prosperity. The former can be achieved by innovating more and exciting your target market. The latter can be doubling down on what you have already and making it better year on end.
Ideally, you can achieve both.
4. Make Active Efforts To Retain Your Company Culture
Experiencing business growth as a small company can often create identity challenges. To cope with increased demand, for example, a small business may begin hiring to the point that it isn’t small anymore.
The influx of new hires, divisions, and roles can often lead to discomfort amongst employees, especially the older ones who are used to the small business culture. This is where HR and organizational culture plays a big role.
Retaining the inner values of your organization, while hiring new personalities can be challenging. This is also why a ‘culture round’ during interviews is vastly important.
At the same time, including a culture session during orientation and hosting town halls often can retain that feeling of being a small organization, while growth happens.
However, this is temporary. Eventually, most successful organizations mature, and that ‘small company’ feeling transitions away.
5. Reevaluate Your Marketing Efforts
While it was still the underdog in the 2000s, Apple’s advertising focused on making it appear like it was better than the ‘big guy’- Microsoft.
Their Get A Mac campaign is a prime example of that. However, once Apple became the ‘big guy’ those ads stopped. Current Apple ads focus on, well… Apple!
Similarly, as your organization experiences business growth, your marketing strategy will have to change. Maybe your problem at your product’s nascent stages was to make people aware of your product.
However, post a bit of business growth, your marketing strategy may involve trying to explain why it is better than its competitors, etcetera. You may also have to delve deeper into digital marketing and consider marketing automation to scale your efforts.
Moral of the story: with business growth, your marketing will also grow, in a different direction at least.
6. Deploy New Job Roles Within Your Organization
As mentioned above, the influx of new hires is directly proportional to business growth. At the same time, don’t limit it to new hires for existing roles. New roles should be created to support your business growth.
A new ‘business development’ role or a role that focuses on business expansion can help you ride the wave of temporary success into continued maturity. These roles can also help entrepreneurs align their current business with their larger vision.
7. Invest Heavily In Research & Development
Don’t underestimate the value of R&D. The next phase of your business, after you experience growth may involve new and improved products and services.
This is where R&D plays a key role. All the data you collect from your customers and consumers is useless if there is no one to act upon it. Your research and development team is a core stakeholder for that data.
They, along with your business development team act as the architects of your company’s future and growth.
8. Hunt For A New Office Space
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of business growth. However, with the global lockdowns in place, this may even seem trivial, if thought about.
But office space, or lack of, can greatly affect your company growth. For example, 46% of WeWork members credited the office-space company for helping them enter new markets in 2019.
On the flip side, not having enough desks and chairs to house your employees can become an unneeded HR issue. It is easy to overlook the little things when your company is experiencing massive growth. However, it’s important to be mindful of these little glitches and fix them on time.
9. Preempt & Evaluate Buyout Offers
Business growth for a small company can put it on the radar of consumers as well as the big guns. Facebook tried to do the same with Snap, multiple times. Zuckerberg and Co. failed but came up with competing features on their own platforms.
The answer to whether or not you want to sell your business lies completely on you. It depends on your vision–the clearer that is, the better your answer will be.
It is impossible to outprice and out-tech the big boys. They simply have more resources. However, a clear vision and a knack will help you expand your business onto other areas that can keep you competitive, even if new, wealthier competition arises.
10. Reward Your Employees
This is sort of a no-brainer, bonus point. However, you need to know that your business growth was not a one-man job and your team made it happen. From the people making the larger calls to those on the field–everyone acts as part of a well-oiled machine to generate business growth.
An offsite field trip, a day (or two) off, or mid-year bonuses. Recognition never goes under-appreciated.
50 Marketing Tools For Business Growth
New and established entrepreneurs both are always on the lookout for effective marketing tools for business growth. Starting an online business is fine, but growing it is the real challenge.
There are so many tasks that are required to be completed, and the more time and money you spend on them, the slower your business growth. That’s where these tools come into the picture.
They help in simplifying and optimizing your tasks with lesser time and effort, ultimately speeding the growth of your business.
Here’s a list of 50 marketing tools for business growth that you can use:
Fleep: Fleep helps in Improving team communications with the help of a single interface. You can manage tasks, share files, and deliver messages, all at the same place.
Ubersuggest: You can Improve your SEO rankings and even generate keyword ideas for content marketing with the help of Ubersuggest. Get backlink data, keyword suggestions, and top SEO pages from it.
Flipboard: Use Flipboard to create your personal magazine by curating content from various authentic sources that you like and trust.
InLinks: You can use InLinks to optimize your content around the semantic search by using data that is easy for search engines like Google to understand.
Screaming Frog: Identify website errors and important SEO related information with this essential set of SEO crawling tools from Screaming Frog.
BrandYourself: BrandYourself can help you protect your online privacy, improve your online reputation, clean up your social media, and even boost brand awareness.
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RankActive: Improve your SERP rankings, track your online presence, and even get information about your competitors with this highly effective tool, RankActive.
Wishpond: One of the best marketing tools for business growth is Wishpond, as it helps in creating contests, promos, landing pages, and also popups.
Trello: Trello is a great online collaboration and content management tool for scheduling online content, and strategizing with team members. You can use it to assign tasks, create deadlines, track progress, and collaborate on projects even remotely.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule Headline Analyzer helps you in creating compelling headlines after analyzing the quality, perfect number of words, and the balance of emotional and powerful words.
Zoom: One of the most popular remote cloud-based conferencing services, that includes live chat and multi-screen functionality, Zoom can help you execute your meeting virtually. You can even record both the audio and video of your meetings.
Chanty: Chanty is a simple and fast AI-powered team chat too to boost communications. It allows you to quickly connect with others via a private, public, group, or one-on-one conversations.
ContentKing: Use ContentKing to segment your content with SEO auditing and real-time content tracking.
SEMRush: SEMRush can help you in increasing organic traffic, identifying backlink opportunities, performing a technical SEO audit, getting competitive analysis, tracking your position, and even more.
Whatagraph: Whatagraph helps you in automating visual marketing reports for social media, PPC, email marketing, and SEO to improve campaign performance.
Fintenza: You can use Fintenza to evaluate the quality of traffic with advanced website analytics. Its bot detector can identify bad traffic along with its source and type.
SpyFu: SpyFu can help you study your competitors and improve your site rankings with a proper keyword overview of monthly searches, ranking difficulty, and also profitable related keywords.
Google Trends: You can use Google Trends to explore trending topics and compare how keywords relate to each other. Use it to view the latest trends, search volume, data, and visualizations in your country.
Bitly: Use Bitly to shorten URLs for social media platforms that have character limitations like Twitter. It can also help you track marketing strategies using analytics.
ProProfs Survey Maker: ProProfs Survey Maker is a great tool for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction by creating surveys, polls, pop-ups, and quizzes to capture feedback.
Moz: You can use Moz to increase rankings, traffic, and online visibility with rank tracking, site audits, backlink analysis, and keyword research.
Hotjar: Analyze your site visitor behavior using metrics such as scroll maps, click maps, and heat maps with Hotjar.
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AgoraPulse: Use AgoraPulse to manage all your social media accounts in one place. Engage with followers, schedule content, and get reports to measure your performance.
Kajabi: Create online courses with Kajabi by consolidating multimedia content assets.
HubSpot: One of the most important marketing tools for business growth, HubSpot provides marketing and sales tools with CRM and CMS for email marketing, generating leads, blogging, building landing pages, creating workflows, and social media monitoring.
Text Optimizer: You can use Text Optimizer to explore connections between keyword phrases and semantically related terms for creating better-optimized content.
PicMonkey: Use PicMonkey to create and edit images with collages, overlays, and filters for Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
ContentCal: This cross-channel collaboration tool, ContentCal can help you in uniting teams and creating engaging social media content.
Ahrefs: Ahrefs provides great tools such as competitive analysis, content explorer, site audits, and keyword explorer for optimizing your site.
Also Asked: Use Also Asked to create your content around common questions that are being asked by people.
Hashtags.org: Hashtags.org can boost your visibility by helping you discover the most popular hashtags for your niche.
SocialOomph: Use SocialOomph to upload multiple posts simultaneously, improve engagement rates, schedule posting times, and optimize campaigns by reviewing analytics.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite helps you in combining all your social accounts into one platform to schedule and create engaging posts, and automatically publish them.
Nightwatch: Nitchwatch is an advanced monitoring and rank tracking tool that can help you in identifying branded keywords, backlinks, and measuring online visibility.
Buzzsumo: Use Buzzsumo to get insights about high-performing content in your niche, monitor your performance, identify influencers, and generate ideas.
Cool Tabs: Cool Tabs can help you in curating content related to your niche for better engagement, monitoring social networks for mentions of your brand, and using analytics to enhance campaigns.
Bit.ai: Bit.ai is a great knowledge and workplace collaborative platform for teams or individuals from any place at any time. Create notes, documents, knowledge bases, wikis, projects, client deliverables, and training guides with it.
Sprout Social: Build relationships, engage your audience, increase your social reach, and measure campaign performance with Sprout Social.
Easelly: Easelly is an intuitive infographics program for creating engaging and appealing visuals from scratch or using pre-built templates.
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Skype: Share messages, photos, documents, and files from any device with Skype along with user-friendly voice and video calls.
Canva: With Canva, you can easily create engaging visuals such as flyers, social media headers, Facebook post images, blog images, and featured images with custom dimensions.
Time Doctor: Time Doctor is a time tracking and task management software that integrates with communications, accounting, and project management software.
Buffer: Buffer is one of the best marketing tools for business growth as it can grow your social media audience, boost authentic engagements, and tell your brand story to people. It includes planning, scheduling, and even analytics to improve campaigns.
Hosted PBX: Hosted PBX is a Private Branch Exchange that provides organized telephone switching systems that are accessible over a cloud network and help in cutting down software and hardware costs.
Bitable: Take advantage of the power of video for creating informative, entertaining, and engaging, short videos and sharing them on social media with Bitable.
Shift: With Shift, you can streamline apps, accounts, and workflows by toggling between them without having to log in and out.
Hosted VoIP: Hosted VoIP is a complete internet phone service and can handle any volume of calls received.
GanttPro: GanttPro is an online project management system that is based on Gantt chart software. It shows you how tasks and projects are progressing in visually appealing charts.
Google Calendar: Google Calendar is a great time management AI-enabled tool for helping you get more organized. It provides features like calendar updates, meeting bookings, and syncing across multiple calendar devices and apps.
Flock: You can share information such as files, documents, and pictures and also connect with your team via online messaging with Flock.
In Conclusion
Business growth is akin to a mandatory checkpoint, or even a rite of passage, every successful organization goes through. It acts as a reward for all the hard and smart work you’ve put in, as well as an opportunity to do more of that in other areas.
There aren’t any well-kept secrets to achieving business growth, or what to do when you experience it. However, this article consists of some insights that can help you get closer to business growth and ride that wave smoothly if you ever come by it.