The role of an entrepreneur is both challenging and rewarding. Building a brand from the ground up may be one of the most difficult undertakings you will experience, but the satisfaction that comes when you achieve your goals is unmatched. The problem with so many small businesses, and why a large percentage of them fail in the first few years, is that owners do not understand how to plan for or manage growth. First, you must have a product that people want. Then, you must be able to market it and convince people that this product is better than the competitor’s. Then you have to be prepared to scale if demand increases. Hundreds of other tasks can go wrong that will derail a young company’s future. Learning to promote growth in your business is a very important skill to acquire. 

If you want to promote growth for your brand, then here are 7 steps that you should consider taking.

Optimize for Search Engines to Promote Growth

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tool that businesses use to increase organic traffic to their websites. The primary goal is to move a particular webpage to higher rankings on search results pages so that users are more likely to see that webpage and click on it. Research shows that the top three or four results of any search query for engines like Google receive the vast majority of the traffic.

Many components of SEO can result in a better ranking for a brand’s web pages, such as:

• Technical on-page optimization
• Heading optimization
• Keyword research and implementation
• Backlink building
• Google My Business profiles
• Local SEO
• Meta descriptions

There are plenty of benefits when you integrate SEO principles with marketing objectives, which is why so many digital marketing firms offer SEO as a service. 

Develop Your Leadership Skills

At some point in your brand’s journey, you will be tasked with leading people. Maybe the company started with just you, but if you hope to grow in the future, then adding to your team will eventually become necessary. However, ineffective leadership on your part can lead to a dysfunctional company that is withheld from success.

Developing leadership skills is an essential objective for small business owners. You can pursue this goal by attending leadership conferences, hiring a business coach, or taking online courses about executive leadership. 

Invest in Recruitment to Promote Growth

People are going to be your most important resource as you grow. But the RIGHT people are going to be the difference between reaching your potential and falling short. Unfortunately, many small businesses do not invest the time, resources, or marketing effort into searching for top talent to join their teams. 

Recruitment marketing can be used as a tool that can optimize the kind of talent that you attract. If you don’t have the time or energy to put into recruitment yourself, you could always partner with an outside firm to reduce your workload. Then, you come in and evaluate the candidates that the recruitment firm vetted first. 

Choose the Right Marketing Channels

Communicating with current customers and potential customers is a huge part of building an audience. The methods you use to advertise the brand itself and the product directly impact your growth potential. That means the right decisions must be made to use business resources efficiently to spread the word and convince audience members to purchase the product. 

Choosing the proper channels of communication is half the battle. The perfect marketing piece is useless if no one that you are targeting ever sees it. Thorough audience research should reveal the habits of your target audience and where they are most likely to interact with the brand. In many cases, the medium is the message, so spend time finding the proper channels when developing marketing campaigns. 

Consistent Product Analysis/Development

Consumer needs can shift on a dime. What people want in 2023 may be completely different in five years or even in one. That is why product analysis and development are key to creating a plan for growth in the future. 

Product development may include changing the items or services that you are already selling so that they meet new needs. It can also mean adding entirely new products or services to your offerings. How your brand reacts to consumer needs will depend heavily on ongoing audience research and data collection, so make sure your company has practices in place for these processes. 

Competitor Research

Your target customers are not the only group that you need to know well. Both direct and indirect competitors in your industry should be well-researched by any brand that wants to get ahead and maintain success.

Researching the competition can reveal a lot of helpful information. First, you can see how they market their products and if it is effective. Second, you can see how the audience interacts with that brand on social media. Third, you can discover what gaps there are in meetings customer needs. Exploiting the shortcomings of your competition, or seeing what they do and doing it better, can help you earn a greater share of the niche audience, propelling you to the top of the field.

Outsource

The final step that we will discuss is outsourcing. Your company has a finite amount of resources, including time and manpower. As the brand grows, how you use those resources will change. The load can become too great for your team to bear themselves. 

Outsourcing is when you rely on a third party to conduct certain operations. You could migrate to the cloud so that you don’t have to maintain your own servers. Customer service operations can benefit from a call center that handles the incoming call workload. Accounting can be handled by an outside firm so that your team is not weighed down with logistics. Outsourcing frees up crucial resources so you can focus on growth. 

Everything Starts with a Strong Business Plan to Promote Growth

Writing a clear business plan that states your goals, describes the company, and crafts a plan for the path forward is the starting point for adopting the steps listed above. It can keep the team organized and on track with the brand’s objectives while acting as an advertisement for potential investors. As you consider adopting the various practices in this article, make sure they align with your business plan or at least can fit in smoothly. This will result in less upheaval when changes are implemented.