October 12, 2024

Business Growth Ideas for 2013

Business Growth Ideas for 2013Business Growth Ideas for 2013 (Actually Any Year!)

Develop some aggressive ideas to help your business grow in 2013. These ideas can really be applied at any time.

Also, think about ways that you can integrate these ideas into your content marketing.

Define Your Ideal Customer

You need to be good at knowing exactly who you want to attract and engage. What problems do they have that your business can solve? What do they worry about? Where do they live or work? How can you locate them, attract them and engage them? What is their pain? Do they do something or say something that signals that they are ideal? What triggers them to have a desire to solve their problem(s)? What will they receive if they hire your company?

You need to be clear with these questions in order to develop how you will create your marketing for these all important ideal customers.

How Is Your Company Different (and better)?

Why do people buy from you rather than your competitors? Why should your ideal customer hire your company instead of your competition?

This may be a difficult question to answer for some. You could ask this question to your existing customers. Select the ones that you know well and that will provide you with insights. If you have customers that refer you then ask them what they say when they make the referral. This will provide you with great insights into how to form your value proposition.

You need to differentiate your business in its marketplace to outshine your competition.

Where Are Your Gaps in Customer Engagement?

An ideal customer is in part ideal because they have progressed through the follow stages:

  • They know your business.
  • They like your business.
  • They trust your business.
  • They are willing to try your products and services and try your new ideas.
  • They buy your products or services.
  • They provide repeat business.
  • They refer others to your business

These types of customers are truly ideal customers.

You can gain customers and you can also grow customers. To be able to grow a customer is an important business growing activity in any economic climate.

You need to develop an approach that focuses on gaining and developing customers. You need to think about how to solve their problems and to offer new products and services and approaches to help them grow their business or solve their problems.

Prioritize

It is vital that you set the priorities for your business. Trying to do it all or do too much could result in failure. Pick the opportunities and initiatives that will enable your success and be willing to close to door on some if they will be a distraction to your top priorities.

Good management defines what to work on and then puts the resources in place to be successful.

Learn to say no to the idea of the week.

Develop Multiple Revenue Streams

There are only three ways to grow: add more customers, increase the average transaction size, increase the number of purchase per customer.

It’s actually easier to sell more to existing customer than add new customers. If you are always thinking about how to better serve your customers then ask what new products or services could be added to your offering.

Consider what product packaging (bundling), pricing or promotion could you realign? What new markets or segments could you enter?

Form Strategic Relationships

This is probably one of your greatest untapped opportunities for growth. What marketing partners could be motivated to promote and co-market your business? What joint ventures would allow you to tackle new work? What vendors or suppliers could help you grow? What competitors could become cooperative partners for new venture, markets or project?

Put your thinking cap on and set up a brainstorming meeting to think out new opportunities that could be developed with strategic relationships.

Measure Performance

  • What key indicators do you need to monitor that help you to grow?
  • Are you measuring your website traffic and website bounce rate?
  • Are you measuring where sales leads are coming from?
  • Are you measuring referral business?

 Most businesses can tell you how much revenue they did last month and how much money they have in the bank. This is important but does not focus on how you can develop growth.

By tracking things like website traffic, bounce rate, sales from business referrals, cost to acquire a new customer and repeat sales . . . you can take control of the things that actually impact your growth in near real-time.

This though the items defined above as this is where all the answers reside to powerful business growth in any year.

I hope that you gained from these business growth ideas for 2013. Another powerful way to build your business is with content marketing. if you want to learn more about content marketing then I invite you to take our content marketing tutorial series.