Growing a business is a lot like growing crops in a garden. Most of the work goes on before the seed actually pokes through the soil and grows into a plan. From picking the right seeds and preparing the soil to ensure the optimal amount of water and sunshine, there’s so much involved in preparing seeds for growth. And the same is true with your business. If you want your business to flourish in the months and years ahead, it all starts today.
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5 Key Factors for Growth
Any number of factors can impact your ability to grow. Having said that, the following elements have the ability to supercharge your growth factor in the coming months:
Reframe Your Value Proposition
You probably think you have a compelling value proposition. The question is, who finds it compelling? If you’re honest with yourself, you may discover that you’re the only one who finds your value compelling. To everyone else – customers included – it misses the mark.
The problem with most value propositions is that they’re overwhelmingly self-serving. When in reality, they should be focused on the customer and their pain points, needs, wants, desires, etc.
If you really want to engage customers in a powerful way, try reframing your message to follow the Story Brand approach.
The Story Brand approach uses this formula: A character (customer) has a problem (pain point) and meets a guide (your brand) who gives them a plan (to solve the problem) and calls them to action (asking for the sale) that helps them avoid failure (what’s at stake) and ends in success (benefit of taking action).
Emphasize Customer Experience
High-growth companies emphasize the customer experience above all else. Because at the end of the day, customers don’t remember what you did for them; they remember how you made them feel. Here are some quick tips for prioritizing better customer experience:
- Gather, listen to, and apply customer feedback. Optimize your feedback loops in such a way that customers feel respected.
- Provide as much self-help content and self-service features as possible. Customers want to be able to answer their questions quickly. A failure to provide adequate service on this front will only hurt your ability to engage customers.
- Give your sales and customer service staff more freedom to wow customers. By arming them with knowledge and providing resources to attend to customer needs, you reduce so much of the friction that typically frustrates your customers.
Now is the time to show your customers that you care. Prioritize their needs and they’ll reward you many times over.
Invest in SEO
Visibility is one of the fundamental keys to growth. And one of the driving factors in modern visibility is a robust search presence. To better understand this, consider that more than 78 percent of all clicks go to one of the first five Google search results. More than 95 percent of all clicks go to a search result on the first page. In other words, you need to rank well to generate organic search results.
If you aren’t already heavily invested in SEO, now is the time to reallocate some of your resources to this aspect of digital marketing.
Don’t have the internal resources to excel with SEO? Consider hiring a Long Island SEO company to streamline the process on your behalf. This will dramatically improve your chances of ranking well on Google.
Strengthen Your Finances
While massive companies have enough resources to offset massive amounts of debt, smaller businesses can’t absorb nearly as much debt without constricting their cash flow. By eliminating bad debt and building up cash reserves, you can strengthen your finances and put your business in a position to react to new opportunities in real-time.
Train Your Staff
Your staff needs you to support them in as many ways as possible. This includes strategic training that plays to their strengths and helps them overcome their weaknesses. Training should be a mandatory and recurring part of every employee’s weekly schedule. Any investment you make in this area is going to generate a healthy return over the long haul.
Putting it All Together
Every business has different growth goals. But if you emphasize the factors outlined in this article, you’ll almost certainly set yourself up for long-term success. Remember that most of the work takes place on the front end. By patiently addressing these key elements now, you can enjoy unlimited growth potential tomorrow.
