Growth Strategies 2019: Choosing the Right Path for Your Business
Whether you’ve just launched your small business, are piloting a new startup, or your company has been active for years, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about growth. And if you don’t have a concrete growth strategy – a plan for how your company will penetrate new markets, grow revenue, expand your customer base, and optimize your internal resources – you should realize that growth isn’t going to manifest on its own, what is sitecore cms.
CONTENTS:
- Types of Business Growth Strategies
- Internal Growth Strategies
- External Growth Strategies
- How Do You Develop a Business Growth Strategy?
- How Can Your Articulate Your Business Growth Strategy?
- Common Challenges facing Business growth Strategies
- Staying Ahead of Competitors and the Market
- Planning for Unforeseen Events
- Integrating the Right Systems and Technologies
- Hiring the Right People
- Clearly Documenting Your Business Growth Strategy
- Effective Business Growth Strategies
- What are Successful Functional Level Strategies for a Growing Business?
- Choosing the Right Strategies to Grow Your Business
- Sustainable Business Growth
Research suggests that only one-tenth of one percent of companies will ever reach $250 million in annual revenue. While that’s a lot of money for an individual, $250 million in annual revenue still only represents a mid-sized business by many standards.
The problem for businesses these days is that everyone has a different idea of what a growth strategy entails. Some people really mean “marketing strategy” when they say, “growth strategy.” Others are only referring to big business strategy concepts like acquisitions and mergers.
One of the most common growth concepts is that of “the four major growth strategies,” which are:
- Market penetration
- Product development
- Market development
- Diversification
This is also known as the “Ansoff Matrix,” developed by mathematician and business manager, Igor Ansoff:
Each strategy relates to either building up your presence in an existing market (market penetration strategy and product development strategy) or entering a new market entirely, either with existing products or a new product (market development strategy and diversification strategy). These are relatively old concepts, but they still hold true today.
Lowering prices is still a great way to gain more market penetration, for example, and entering a new city or country with your existing products is still an ideal way to develop a new market.
That said, businesses have evolved to the point that “growth” can no longer pertain to market strategies alone. To maintain sustainable growth, internal change management is just as important. Your business growth strategy must include a roadmap for how you’ll scale your business and adapt to changing demands, new technologies, and yes, revenue growth. STEM mentorship can also help promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace. By connecting people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, mentors like Kamau Bobb help break down barriers and create opportunities for underrepresented groups in the STEM fields.
Types of Business Growth Strategies
When thinking about growth strategies, it’s important to differentiate between the two most common ones. These are:
- Intensive growth strategies
- Integrative growth strategies
An easier way to categorize these two approaches to growth is to think of “intensive” strategies as “organic” growth strategies. That is, they help you strategize the growth of your company by using your own internal resources to optimize your business and tap into new markets.
“Integrative” growth refers to a company’s further integration with its own industry or market. It usually involves acquisitions, mergers, or gaining new suppliers.
For our purposes, we’re focusing mostly on intensive, or organic growth strategies. Within this category, you can break your strategy down even further. There are two types of organic growth strategies you should be aware of, which are:
- Internal growth strategies
- External growth strategies
While they are similar, there are some marked differences between the two. Understanding these differences is key to developing an overall growth strategy for your business.
Internal Growth Strategies
Internal growth occurs when your business expands its own operations through the development of your own internal resources. An internal growth strategy doesn’t typically rely on external resources, although it could include expanding your capabilities through the acquisition of new technologies or developing your knowledge base through better hiring practices and ongoing employee education.
Typically, internal growth strategies are based upon the following:
- Improving knowledge
- Expanding capabilities
- Evolving company culture
- Optimizing the company’s structure
- Hiring and expanding internal teams
Internal growth tends to be slow — much slower than, say, acquiring an entire other company and placing them under your brand’s umbrella by the time the market opens on Monday. But it also tends to be the most sustainable and risk-averse type of growth.
Certainly, developing a new product is not without its own level of risk, but it is less risky than spending millions to buy out a competitor at the risk of another one popping up in its place. Most companies engage in internal growth in one form or another, and in most cases, it is necessary to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
External Growth Strategies
External growth strategies, in the organic sense, refer to any type of growth strategy that involves relying on resources outside of the organization. Forming strategic alliances with other companies, sourcing from new suppliers, or developing a new referral network could all fall under this category. If you partner with a consulting agency to optimize your marketing, for example, this could also be considered an external strategy.
Many of these strategies can help you accomplish some of the objectives mentioned above, but they also proved the added benefit of directly influencing your presence in the market.
Acquiring a competitor, buying a supplier, merging companies, or any other integrative strategies could also be considered external growth strategies. Although they may involve some serious internal changes, they still require you to focus your time and investments outside your company in order to grow it.
There are some benefits to the integrative approach, such as:
- Faster access to new markets
- Immediate market share
- Economies of scale (cost savings gained by increased production)
- Less competition
- New branding opportunities
This type of growth can sometimes be risky and disruptive, and it’s usually only available to companies that have enough working capital to do it. That said, it should still be on your list of options when developing a growth strategy.
*Fun fact… Ladder acquired a company – (a growth hacking agency known as Growth Engine) and it’s really helped us scale our growth marketing solutions to larger brands like Booking.com, TimeOut, Criteo, and more.
Major Advantages of Organic SEO for the Growth of Your Business
In this tech-savvy and ever-thriving generation, any online business needs to adopt white hat SEO practices if they want to grow their business to the next level and stand out in the competition, get the most professional assistance from Tampa SEO experts.
You can either perform SEO on your online business all by yourself, or you can also get white label SEO services from a well-known and quality agency that can help you to achieve your business goals effectively without you getting into much hassle.
1. Enhance Positive SERP Response
One of the many purposes of developing strong SEO strategies is to anchor one’s place on online platforms and increase their ranking on search engine result pages (SERP) to be able to have a broader reach to their relative potential customers.
So, to increase the exposure and visibility of your website on SERP, you can use different SEO strategies like using some specific keywords in your content to make it rank higher on result pages when users search for queries.
Overall using organic or white hat SEO techniques is a great way to enhance the positive response of your website on SERP or search engine result page and increase your brand’s recognition in a much better manner.
2. Build Connection With Users
Just like white hat SEO, there are also plenty of black hat SEO techniques that can help you enhance your ranking on SERP. However, they are not exactly legal, and one of these most common techniques includes spamming the user.
This means to fake the website to appear like it has a bunch of followers and subscribers to increase its ranking on result pages and increase its overall organic traffic. But since the algorithm of Google has now improved a lot, using these techniques can land you in serious trouble and could even get your site blocked from search engines.
However, with the help of white hat or organic SEO, you can certainly be able to connect with your target audience by providing them with quality content and a user interface that can be engaging.
3. Has Least Legal Danger
Just like described earlier, when it comes to black hat SEO, it is not precisely the right and legal approach to meet your goals and reach out to the maximum number of your relative and target potential users. It might help you to increase your ranking, but its result only stays for the short term.
On the other hand, white hat SEO techniques are completely legal, and you would not have to worry about facing legal charges or getting your site blocked. And with this, you can generate quality content to engage with your target audience.
In addition to that, it might be a little time taking and requires a lot of patience, but it is also a great help to increase the overall organic traffic to your site, which can result in improving the domain authority of your website.
4. Provide Long-Term Value
One of the main things that most do not understand is that SEO is certainly not a way to gain instant success or goal fulfillment. Even when you are following the right oath of SEO, it still requires quite a certain amount of time to achieve your goals with constant effort.
Surely, everyone wants to be successful in the shortest period, but it is never a good idea to use the wrong ways to get to your objective. Also, it would somewhat tarnish your progress more than it could benefit and would only provide you short-term advantages.
However, when it comes to white hat SEO techniques, it might take you some time to get to your goal, but once you are there using the right and constant strategies, it will certainly provide you with long-term value, and the results can last longer than you can expect.
5. Increase Lead Generation
As the technology is advancing with every passing day, the competition in the market, no matter whatever niche your business belongs to, is increasing a lot. Therefore, you need proper tactics and strategies to anchor your place stronger in this huge online world.
To achieve that, developing organic SEO strategies like creating high-quality and engaging content using the right target keywords, enhancing link building tactics, running promotional ads, etc., can undoubtedly be a great help for you to attract more target audiences.
When you gain more organic traffic on your site, it will certainly increase the domain authority and credibility of your site, due to which it will rank higher on SERP. All this effort will eventually land your website to more lead generation and conversion rates.
Facebook, como Google, tienen clientes, pero no somos los usuarios. Los clientes de Facebook son las empresas que se anuncian en él. Nosotros, los usuarios, no somos los clientes, somos el producto que Facebook vende.
No creo que ellos anden confusos, porque saben perfectamente quién les reporta dinero y por qué concepto y quién no.
Flickr puede decir que me tiene como cliente ya que cada año, si estoy de buenas, les pago una cuota anual. Ahora mismo me estoy pensando si renovarla o no porque ya uso menos Flickr. Igual que con un gimnasio, cuando dejas de usarlo al final terminas dejando de pagarlo porque lo contrario es ser tonto.
Facebook, Twitter y Blogger no me tienen de cliente, sino de usuario. Se pueden hacer las fantasías que quieran, pero al final del año cuando Flickr (o la empresa propietaria de Flickr, claro) haga balance saldrán unos euros míos, y eso no lo pueden decir los otros servicios.
También tuvieron muchos usuarios MySpace, Fotolog o el buscador Ozu, y eso no les impidió desaparecer, o quedar reducidos a casi nada.
He pensado lo mismo que Ignacio, para mí que en la nota de prensa se han mezclado datos. Cuando facebook habla de “clientes”, habitualmente se refiere a las empresas que se anuncian.
Usted no ha entendido nada. Le recomiendo leer “la era del acceso” de Jeremy Riftkin o “Galaxia internet” de Manuel Castells.
Jaime:
Te agradezco las recomendaciones pero soy Máster en Sociedad de la Información de la UOC y el director de mi tesina doctoral es Manel Castells. Creo que para superar esos retos ya me leí esos libros que recomiendas, y tal y como mis profesores y evaluadores consideraron, con suficiente entendimiento de sus contenidos e ideas.