5 Strategies All Startups Must Have to Sustain Business Growth
Growing a Startup is No Easy Feat!
When you say corporate sustainability, do you instantly think of established and successful conglomerates?
Do you feel exasperated at the thought of all the expectations and challenges coupled with expanding your small business and fulfilling your corporate and societal responsibilities?
Are you constantly challenged by the sheer amount of work that needs to be done to stabilize your humble company?
Realistically speaking, not all business ventures turn out to be a success. Some startup owners face instant failure right when they are at the peak of a breakthrough.
Others overcome the initial hurdles, only to find themselves ill-equipped against more experienced competitors and unforeseen market trends.
Similarly, that shouldn’t be a cause for total surrender. Just because resources are more limited for small businesses, that doesn’t mean that the opportunities are just as scarce.
In fact, if you read further into this blog, you’ll find out that there are strategies and marketing tools at arm’s reach that just might be best suited for your business and your target demographic!
From Small Business to a Major Success
Given that a startup’s budget is not as extensive, it is necessary to use resources that are flexible, inexpensive, and accessible.
1. Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization
Why should you consider consider SEM and SEO as one of your most formidable strategies? A key ingredient to effective business expansion is to go digital and know what it means to establish an online presence. It is not enough to have a website or a social media page. You also need to understand why you included it in your growth strategies in the first place. Not all social media platforms will work in your favor, especially if your target market are hardly present or visible on the said platform.
You need a combination of both paid advertising and organic traffic to both your website and social pages. In this manner, you attract genuine followers while also balancing your online visibility with more assertive brand marketing.
2. Clearly defined buyer population.
Who are you selling to? What is the demographic for whom your products are designed? Without a clear-cut definition of your target buyers, you will fail at mapping out short and long-term marketing strategies.
You will have a difficult time envisioning how far your business can go and what types of opportunities should be your main focus. You will likely be overwhelmed by a multitude of pros, cons and possibilities that hardly give you a viable design for the type of services or goods you offer.
Whether you are selling to kids and teenagers, young adults, the working class, stay-at-home parents, or even to fellow business owners, you must identify your clientele. They are the people who will help you build your company from a humble shop to a globally respected business leader.
3. Disrupt established industries.
Otherwise referred to as market disruption, it refers to an approach wherein you operate things differently to draw attention away from established competitors to your brand. Think of it as something akin to breaking tradition.
An effective way that small businesses have harnessed this trump card is by using more eco-friendly materials for their products.
Take a good look at your products and services and list down simple to complex features that make it unique. Don’t forget to balance your list with qualities that are quite common or widespread with competitors offering similar goods.
Play around with your business model. Look around for digitally based resources that you can use, such as user-friendly contact channels, cloud-based CRM, customized emails templates, and QR Code-embedded packaging.
4. Product Innovation.
A unique selling point is a secret weapon for startups. Despite the presence of long-time brands, there will still be a great many customers who will seek something new or out-of-the-box. They will want to scour through ads and e-commerce profiles in search of a product or service that ticks all the boxes on their personal checklist of exemplary customer experience.
Your brand may not be as popular as your toughest competitor, but never lose hope in the idea that you still have something fresh to bring to the table. Each customer has a set of distinct preferences, and through extensive customer research, surveys, buyer feedback, and competitor analysis, you will determine what exactly makes your products stand out.
5. Systemized Chain of Command
A smooth-sailing internal work process will leave a ripple effect of positive gains in terms of earning customer trust and generating higher sales and revenue. By improving business workflow, it becomes easier to pinpoint where errors may have occurred in case a customer complains about the packaging, structure, or overall quality of the product.
You can also regulate the chain of responsibilities among your managerial team and your staff. It encompasses manufacturing, product design, and logistics to refunds and payment processing to disseminating exclusive offers to patrons and escalations and support tickets.
A more systematic workflow means having greater control of potential losses. It also means gauging the efficiency of your staff in fulfilling their roles and figuring out when to provide additional training.
Take-Home
Aspiring to reach the heights of industry giants shouldn’t be a distant dream for startups or entrepreneurs. At the end of the day, it is all about perspective, adaptability, and tenacity.
Reflect on where you are: Do you view the glass as half-full or half-empty?
Are you capable of riding the tides of change in your customer’s and industry’s demands?
How gracefully can you accept constructive criticism and harness that energy to create a new path to success?
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Thank you for reading. You can reach Kat Sarmiento here: katreenas.contentstudio@gmail.com