Growing your business comes with its own exciting moments and challenges. However, it can be challenging to know how to grow and what strategies you can implement to help you do so. Many growth strategies can be placed into two categories: planning and education. In this article, I will cover these categories and will give you four effective ways to grow your business revenue through them.
Planning
Planning is like reading a recipe before you cook a meal: it will help you to get the result you want.
1. Create a Five-Year Plan
Every business needs a long-term plan when growing their revenue. Take a look at your business plan and think about where your business is at the moment and where you would like to be in the next five years. Use this plan to strategize your next moves and to plan clear goals. Based on your five-year plan, think about what you and your employees need to do during each quarter. Make sure the ideas are clear like the examples below.
- Learn more about email campaigns
- Promote products to people over 50
- Research and buy up-to-date accounting software
- Start a social media marketing campaign
After this, set regular strategy meetings with yourself and team members. Use these moments to address how close your business is to the goals you have set, and to work out which parts of your strategy need to be changed. Your goals should not change drastically but as the market evolves, allow for flexibility and adapt your plan if needed.
2. Plan for Emergencies (Like a Pandemic)
Okay, so it’s unrealistic to act as if there is going to be a pandemic every year, but businesses can plan for rocky moments. Every business needs an emergency plan because there are so many possible business emergencies. What should you do if there is a decline in the market? How will you tackle finances without having to make employees redundant?
Plan ahead so that when something out of the blue happens you won’t be caught off-guard. Use the pandemic as a tool for the future. Here are some of the obstacles business owners have had to consider during this time:
- How can we still run our business if we need to close the shop for a month?
- What do we do if our supplier can’t deliver our goods as quickly as before?
- How can I help my staff to work remotely and well?
Think about how the pandemic has affected you, your business, and your employees. Note down all of your hardships and turn them into a future emergency business plan. This means even in tough times, your plan will allow you to continue to grow your business revenue.
Education
Whether you have been in your industry for a short while or for decades there will always be something to learn.
3. Your Target Audience
Once you have found your target audience, study them. Collect as much information about your customers as possible. Create questions to gain a profile of them, such as:
- What do they like about your business?
- Are there other interests do they have?
- What trends do they follow on social media?
- Do they read articles, books, watch videos online, or all of the above?
- Which social justice campaigns mean the most to them?
Use questions like this to study your target audience. Your answers should give you an idea of which type of person buys from your business. Once you have studied your audience, use the information to think about the best ways you can sell to them.
4. Never Stop Learning
The world of business is constantly changing. Every year brings new and innovative ways to grow your business revenue and develop positive interactions with your customers. The question is, what do you need to study to continue in an upwards direction?
The way to reach an audience effectively keeps changing. For example, before the world had the internet at its fingers, it was fine for a business to have a simple website to gain customers. This is no longer the case. The only way to stay ahead of the game is to keep learning. In this sense, study the market. Think about what is currently going on in the world and how your customers engage with it. This could be anything from news headlines to internet trends.
There is always a new online trend. Trends like the Until Tomorrow Challenge or the Ice Bucket Challenge are always going viral. Study the current online trends and challenges. Take a look at your customers and study how they engage with them.
Using strategies like planning for the short and long term and planning for rocky moments will help you to grow your business revenue. Think about how you could put these strategies into place regardless of which stage your business is in, and continue to study your customers and their habits to reach them consistently. With time, effort, and effective implementation of these strategies, you can grow your business revenue effectively.