7 Steps to Increase Business Growth

As a growth agency the most common question we get asked is "How do I increase my business growth?".  This is our 7 step process to help increase your business growth.

What do all businesses have in common? They want to grow! This could be in terms of revenue, size or popularity. To implement growth, you need a strategy in place.

Our 7 steps to increase business growth are :

1. 1. Establish the vision and strategy

   2. Work through the growth strategy

   3. Develop the technology stack

   4. Lead generation preparation

   5. Lead generation activity

   6. Lead conversion

   7. Customer retention

Let's go through each stage in some more depth.

1. ESTABLISH THE VISION & STRATEGY

The first step  is to understand your business' vision and strategy. Who you are as a business and what you want to achieve is the driving force behind all you do. Whilst there are plenty of frameworks out there, we have found the Collins-Porras framework is the most effective for driving business growth. Construct your company's DNA and set your Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (we promise it'll make sense in the framework!). With these elements in mine, this will help you be able to push your business in the right direction.

Get started by using our Collins-Porras worksheet to start your vision process.

2. WORK THROUGH THE GROWTH STRATEGY

Now you have settled on a vision and strategy, the next step is to set some foundational principles for your business. Firstly, establish who are your buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictionalised versions of your ideal customer. By creating this persona, you then use this to inform and influence the marketing efforts moving forward. What platforms would they use? What times would they engage? What forms appeal to this demographic? Getting your buyer persona right is key to a well informed and targeted marketing strategy.

Next, consider your buyer journey. These are the steps that your customers take as they look to make a purchase from you. As your customers move through the various stages of awareness, consideration, and decision, they will want different types of content. Every part of the journey is as important as the others, so you need to engage and delight your customers at every step, including post-purchase to help retention.

Finally, set yourself some clear goals and KPIs, informed by your vision and influenced by your buyers. Ensure these targets are known by your business, it's important that everyone knows where you are going to help invoke a growth culture within the business. With a clear focus and the team driving towards your vision, you are heading in the right direction.

3. DEVELOP THE TECHNOLOGY STACK

Utilise technology to help grow your business. One thing every business should consider is a quality CRM to help you with your marketing, sales and customer service. As a HubSpot partner we do recommend Hubspot, but there are others available such as Zoho CRM and Insightly to name a couple of other popular options. The benefits of having a robust and organised customer relationship management system cannot be understated. A CRM will help fine tune your business practices including streamlining your pipeline, automation on admin processes and having access to important analytical data.

Empowering your business with the appropriate technology stack does not stop at a CRM, there are plenty of potential implementations to help your business grow such as AI tools like chat bots or automation and workflows. Similar consider your current website, does it communicate the correct feel and flow towards your vision, and for the customer experience is it optimised for the best customer journey with easy navigation and load times? Develop your technology stack to help streamline your business but also to improve the experience and benefit the customer.

4. LEAD GENERATION PREPARATION

Before we get started on lead generation activities we need to make sure that the ground work has been done.

Start by completing a content audit. We find a lot of businesses have far more content than they give themselves credit for. Knowing what content you already have, what is working (or what isn't!) gives a great starting point to start filling gaps in your offering. From there you can start to prioritise what you need to get in place to delight the potential leads coming in. 

Once you have an understanding of any missing elements or any potential issues, you can start prioritising what to work on first. If you identify your current website as a weakness, we would recommend focusing on that first. here's not much point in putting effort into sending people to a website that isn't working.

You can then look at creating content in order to assist the lead generation effort with a campaign in mind. For example, you may want to create assets such as an e-books, videos, podcast or blogs. Focus on creating content that is going to bring value and provide a purpose for your audience so you can start that relationship building process and start nurturing those leads.

5. LEAD GENERATION ACTIVITY

Start looking for some potential easy wins to help boost your lead generation. This could take the forms of CTA's on existing blogs or a quick email campaign to boost awareness.

Then it's time to consider some more strategic elements of lead generation such as search engine optimisation, PPC campaigns or other marketing activities such as social media, LinkedIn, or even things such as direct mail. All of this activity will be planned based on the information from the growth strategy.

If you're looking for more ideas or ways to perform your lead generation activity, our Growth Generator details every step of the customer journey, as well as tools and platforms you can utilise at every stage.

6. LEAD CONVERSION

Now your campaign is up and running we want to make sure it is optimised for conversions. This could involve running A/B experiments on landing pages, investing in PPC campaigns, and regularly reviewing what is performing.  If you find something that works with a particular page or campaign, implement that in other areas.  Converting leads is all about experimentation, reviewing the data, and then doing more of what's working.

Another element of lead conversion is looking at how existing contacts and/or customers are being marketed to.  Nobody has their customer's all at the same point so consider setting up email campaigns to nurture leads, but offering useful and interesting content that applies to their current stage of the buyers journey.

Lead conversion and optimisation can be significantly aided by marketing automation.  This involves using software such as HubSpot to do marketing processes like sending emails after form completions or sending reminders to leads (or the sales team). Think of it as a way of making your marketing processes way more efficient.  This gives you more time to focus on content creation and adding value to your customers.

7. CUSTOMER RETENTION

Once you've got your customers we want to help you not only retain them but keep delighting them.  Word-of-mouth referrals are generally recognised as the best types of leads, turn your customers into delighted advocates of your business.

There's a few different ways to approach this. Utilise your CRM to create systems to collect customer feedback. This could include ticket processes,  building knowledge bases and designing feedback surveys for a few examples. The use of customer reviews and testimonials can help boost purchase intentions as well as help positive brand awareness. Converted customers and retained customers is what business growth is all about. 

By following our 7 step process you'll be well on your way to boost business growth and be ready to start the process all over again to keep increasing growth. 

Inspired by our methods and ready to grow your business? Our free eBook "Building a Business Growth Engine" is a great place to start...