Ah, business growth. We all crave it. We are all looking for ways to make it work. It’s easy to get carried away with all the latest tools and ideas while growing your business, but not every opportunity that comes your way is best for your business growth. So, how do you know which business growth opportunities will have the most impact?
Let’s clarify some things. As an entrepreneur, you want to develop the most potent growth strategy possible. And that involves knowing how to filter out the opportunities that aren’t serving you. Yes, those exist. We’ll delve deeper into finding these growth insights and prioritizing your business strategy, but first, let’s talk about the importance of narrowing down your focus.
Narrow down your focus on your growth strategy
You can easily feel overwhelmed with so many growth tools and tactics available. This is why it’s best to focus on just a few primary tools when growing your business. Have you ever heard that “less is more”? Here’s why.
The strategy you employ, and the tools you use, pave the way for you to achieve your business goals. According to HubSpot research, 88% of marketers use up to 10 different tools. And honestly, that’s a lot!
All of these growth tools cost you more than just a membership or licensing charge, whether you realize it or not. In most circumstances, having more tools implies spending more time integrating, administering, and reporting.
Regardless of how many tools you employ, you need to ask yourself: does each one correspond to a specific objective or challenge within your business strategy?
It’s critical to outline your marketing plan and goals before getting caught up in all available options.
How to find growth insights?
When reviewing your business growth strategy, you need to identify whether the time and resources you devote to your company are having a direct influence on its growth and profitability. If not – you might be doing something wrong.
Also, you’ll need to monitor and track essential aspects of your organization to maximize the opportunities available to you while also identifying and mitigating dangers.
Here are four steps to finding profitable growth opportunities:
Analyze current situation
A situation analysis is a thorough study of your company’s market position that considers both internal and external elements.
It investigates your company’s present and potential customers, as well as how they react to your goods and services.
Analyze your current situation by looking at where you are, including what’s working for you and what isn’t. Once you’ve done that, then you define your short- and long-term objectives and benchmarks for success, as well as identify growth opportunities.
Look at your data
Create a system for tracking and regularly reporting all relevant data. Make sure to report on trends that arise from your findings.
Ensure that all company processes, such as marketing, sales growth, market share, product quality, workforce, training, and budgeting, are covered in your data collection.
Look at the customer journey
As you review your current business strategy, make sure you can recognize your customers’ demands and that you’re creating products and services that suit them.
Personalizing your services and encouraging your consumers to submit feedback are two ways to obtain insight into your clients. And, once you’ve got the customer insights and collected enough data, you can map your customer journey.
Make sure to have growth strategies in place to nurture existing consumers, such as sending them a newsletter (btw, Insights Lab has a pretty cool newsletter to subscribe to for great marketing insights) or informing them ahead of time about promotional events. Simultaneously, look for ways to get more work and expand your customer base.
Identify the areas that need fixing
To determine whether or not your marketing efforts are successful, keep track of where your clients are coming from.
Don’t be scared to try new things. If something isn’t working, change your strategy and spend more time on the things that produce the best outcomes. Then, analyze the data you’ve gathered, form conclusions, and offer recommendations based on your findings.
Make a business strategy for seeking out opportunities to demonstrate your company’s strengths. If weaknesses are critical drawbacks to your success, develop a plan for overcoming them.
Prioritizing the next steps
The first step to prioritizing the next efforts in your growth strategy is assessing your current processes to determine which areas need improvement. Then, create a business growth strategy, decide on your primary goals, and manage aggressively.
You can also look at the Impact x Effort matrix, which is an effective tool for assisting organizations in translating strategy into action.
One of the most crucial advantages of using this matrix is that it forces teams or individuals to prioritize work based on what would assist them reach their ultimate goals the most. Basically, prioritizing in this manner helps teams in determining the most productive uses of their time.
But don’t forget to use common sense. You need to see how each action plays in the context of your business. For example, you may want to grow your newsletter subscriber list. Still, it’ll be hard to reach potential subscribers if your website isn’t getting enough traffic if your social channels don’t have much traction. So, perhaps it’s a better idea to first focus on building those other areas.
You might also want to keep a list of unprioritized goals or objectives so that you can revisit them while you work on the things you’ve prioritized in your plan.
Duration, challenges, and pitfalls of implementing growth strategies
Of course, all situations differ, but in our experience, it takes roughly a year to build the foundations of a small business. Still, most entrepreneurs require at least two to three years to reach profitability and for business growth to start expanding and flourishing.
The timeline all depends on if you’ve identified the best growth opportunities and have clever business strategies in place. Understanding the importance of a growth strategy is a no-brainer. The difficulty lies in doing it correctly.
Some things to avoid include a strategy without goals, inadequate training, not enough resources, ineffective communication, and lack of follow-through.
It’s critical to recognize the biggest obstacles to growth strategy implementation and communicate them to those in charge of disseminating and implementing any new strategy. In addition, understanding how businesses can get in their way is critical to ensuring that you don’t make the same mistakes and, if you do, how to correct them.
What can help you find the right business growth opportunities?
For ambitious entrepreneurs like you, our friends at Insights Lab have created Growth Finder, a unique service that helps you find the best opportunities for your business given your specific situation.
Growth Finder provides you with mission-driven, data-focused, and actionable information to help you uncover the insights that will drive your success and growth strategy.
It will help you understand what kind of analytical structure you’ll need to meet your company’s goals, as well as where you are now versus where you could be in the future.
Growth Finder also gives you insight into how you stack up against industry standards, what specific areas you need to work on, and what tools and processes are still required to collect and monitor data to examine your goals.
Choose the right thing, at the right time, and in the right context
It’s critical to consider if you want to strengthen your company’s position or expand. If you decide that growth is your top priority, you must plan wisely to succeed.
Growth comes with its own set of hazards, but it can bring stability, security, and long-term rewards with the correct growth strategy in place.
After you’ve examined your company’s present strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and dangers, as well as how well it’s prepared to handle them, you can go on to the next step: developing a growth strategy for your business.
Any growth strategy’s success hinges on its timing. Determine whether or not the moment is right by seeing if you’re able to expand and have the resources and mechanisms in place to continue operating your current business while looking for new opportunities.
