The life of an entrepreneur is a true rollercoaster. You basically have to jump to make very hard decisions every other day in order to survive. Beyond survival lies business growth. It’s often said that was doesn’t go up goes down. The conclusion is the following: your challenge lies in the focus you pick and it can often be hard to know which growth strategies to use for maximum success.
Let’s analyze five creative strategies to grow your business and stay on the uptrend. We’ll be exploring the often-overlooked tactics that can make a big difference in business growth.
What are the benefits of growth strategies?
#1 – Increased brand awareness
Brand awareness is important for any business looking to grow its customer base. It’s how consumers recognize and remember your brand. In fact, the more aware they are, the more likely they’ll buy from you.
Achieving brand awareness requires a thoughtfully designed marketing plan. You have to leverage growth strategies to create a community around your company. We recommend taking the time to define your brand and its personality. It will help you maximize your efforts across multiple channels while being at the core of all of your efforts.
#2 – Improved customer acquisition
Simply having brand awareness isn’t enough. It’s important to have growth strategies to help you turn awareness into customers. You need to spend more time on your website, sales funnel and sales process. We even recommend improving consistently your efforts on this side of things to maximize your return on brand awareness campaigns.
Beyond converting customers, you should also make sure your brand creates the best customer experience. A good way to find your weaknesses is to act as if you were a customer – what would annoy you the most?
#3 – Stronger customer retention
Growth strategies can also help companies build relationships with their customers and keep them coming back. It all starts with delighting customers through a superior customer experience, building a strong brand identity and rewarding loyalty.
Never forget, it’s much easier to get a customer to come back than acquiring a new one. Always prioritize your current customers to make more efforts towards their success and they will reward you for a long time to come.
5 creative growth strategies for entrepreneurs
As entrepreneurs, we often fall for the shiny objects. We see someone having success with something and our reflex is to try to do it ourselves. In reality, we are wasting a lot of time by doing so. You need to find a tactic designed for your company and let the others try to copy you. It’s the only way to win.
Here are a few creative ways you can improve your business through growth strategies. Remember, not all strategies will fit your goals and business. Stay focused, choose one and apply it as best as you can.
#1 – Optimized customer service
Focusing on customer service can be a powerful growth strategy for businesses. You can earn renewed loyalty and build a solid competitive advantage by building strong, honest, and transparent relationships with customers.
We recommend encouraging collaboration by making customers feel heard. You can leverage AI, improve your feedback process, introduce more empathy and give more tools for your support team to make customers happy.
The way you will make your customer service better depends on your brand but you can work on two aspects. The first one is customer satisfaction and the second one is customer service efficiency. The most important thing to innovate your growth strategy is to find what matters most to your customers.
Customers don’t always know what matters most to them – it’s up to you to get creative and see the response. You want to delight customers, make them talk about you. In reality, the only way a business can truly grow is through word of mouth.
#2 – Referral program
Incentivizing referrals can be a very effective growth strategy for businesses. As mentioned above, word of mouth is a powerful agent of growth. By turning happy customers into advocates for your brand, you can acquire new customers at a lower cost than any other channels.
To build a strong referral program, you must properly incentivize your customers. Most brands reward people with money but that’s not what matters most. Your role is to be creative in making it easy for people to refer them to you.
For instance, Dropbox could offer a referral bonus when someone shares a folder and the other person has to sign up for their service. You have to be creative in the way you make referral programs, very few people like to blatantly promote your brand. They want the process to seem natural and seamless.
This growth strategy has been used for years because it’s very effective. You have to see referrals as another prospecting tool just like Instagram advertising.
#3 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves making your website more visible in search engines to generate more traffic from people searching for your products or services. It’s a very efficient growth strategy because it allows you get a constant stream of business.
In reality, a significant portion of your website’s organic search ranking comes from the technical structure and your content strategy. Your content strategy includes optimizing your keywords, internal links and meta descriptions. From experience, we recommend making a note of constantly seeking to improve your content – stay hungry for perfection.
If your business is local, you can focus your efforts on the name of your city. Improving search engine visibility locally can be very effective because you will face less competition. For instance, you can optimize your content strategy around the name of your city or even your neighbourhood to show up when people search for your company.
By investing in local SEO, you will attract new customers that are relevant to your business. You will never “only” attract people in your city but your marketing efforts will be optimized for it. In other words, you will increase your chances considerably.
#4 – Revised branding book
Branding is a powerful tool to help business owners grow very fast. Companies often forget that all their marketing efforts start from their branding book. It’s how people recognize your brand amongst the sea of competitors. In other words, it’s how you stand out from the crowd. You have to define your colors, fonts, logo, imagery and tone of voice.
For instance, your brand can evoke emotions of joy & trust. Your work is to choose what you want to stand up for. By being unique, you are creating more authentic connections with your potential clients. Let’s not forget that people buy based on their emotions and rationalize it with their logic. You must win your clients heart before you win their minds.
Here are a few creative branding growth strategies to maximize your efforts:
- Reinvent your business logo
- Improve your eCommerce photography with white backgrounds (background remover)
- Create a signature color palette that complements your logo’s colors
- Select 2 fonts aligned with your business values
#5 – Personalized email marketing
Email marketing is a very effective growth strategy to build loyalty & make your customers buy again from you. Moreover, you have the chance to nurture your clients and stay in touch with them with email marketing. It all starts with sending them important yet relevant news about your brand on a consistent basis.
Did you know that at least 99% of consumers check their email daily? Naturally, it’s not easy to convert customers from your email strategy but it is a very interesting opportunity. Remember, your email list is yours. After all, you probably spent a lot of time and energy into building it.
Furthermore, customers who receive emails are spending 138% more than those who do not. In general, you will always see the strongest ROI of all your marketing channels with emails. Why? The results are limited to your list and the cost often stays very low. In fact, the only cost is related to the email marketing platform.
To be transparent, email marketing is no easy task. You might be able to generate 5% of revenue from your list but an expert could bring 20-30%. Investing with the right email marketing team such as K6 agency can make a big difference.
Are you ready to grow?
As an entrepreneur, it’s important to constantly seek out new and innovative ways to grow your business. While competition is fierce in your industry, you must always seek new ways to grow profitably. These five creative growth strategies can help you stand out from the competition and help you reach your goals. Remember, always focus on one strategy at a time and only apply those who make sense for you. While the old adage is true that if you’re not going up you’re going down, it’s a good idea to take time to reflect once in a while even if it means slowing down your growth a little bit.