If you own a business, one of the most important things you would be working on is your business growth. This is what you (should) do on a daily basis. No matter how hard this may be, it is essential for your business goals and objectives. You need real strategies and you’ll find 5 of the most important ones in this article.
Strategies for Business Growth
As a business owner, you need to develop strategies for growth and downsizing. This is because there are times that your business needs to increase its reach and there are other times your business need to downsize in order to make the most of your business strength and less of its weakness.
Here are the strategies for business growth you should employ for your business.
1. Market penetration.
This is a business growth strategy for increasing the number of sales of your products and services to current (existing) market segments without changing the product. This requires that you develop strategies that would allow your business to sell more of its offering in the market you are already in. This involves more research for more client discovery and selling more of your business products and services.
2. Market development.
This is a business growth strategy that is used to identify and develop new market segments for current products. This is required for your business to capture new customers for your existing products. For example, Starbucks could consider identifying and developing its products for some African markets that they didn’t exist in before. Your business can also identify new markets that your products have a potential market for
3. Product development.
This is a business growth strategy that businesses use to offer new or modified products/services to existing market segments. This strategy can be carried out by conducting series of market survey to get the opinions of your current clients. You will then use their opinion effectively to develop modified products/services. To develop new products for an existing market will require more market research.
4. Diversification.
With this business growth strategy, businesses either start up or acquire other businesses outside the company’s current products and markets. Which means, sometimes in your business lifecycle, you need to diversify into new products and new markets. However, this is risky. So you need to make sure your strategy for entering a new market with a new product is top notch.
5. Downsizing
This is the reduction of the business portfolio by eliminating products or business units that are not profitable or that no longer fit the company’s overall strategy. This is required in order to focus more on your business strengths (cash cows) and eliminate your business weaknesses (dogs)
As you may have noticed, these required business strategies are not something you do once. They require consistency and more learning. They require an all-round strategy.
