
Business Growth Types is the expansion of a company in terms of revenue, customer base, market share, or production of more goods. There’s no universal formula for calculating business growth since each company is a unique ecosystem. Still, increasing revenue, customer base, or market share indicates business expansion.
In this article, you’ll learn why business growth is vital for each company, uncover its types and stages, and get inspired by ideas for your company.
Why is business growth significant to every company?
Business growth is an A-list objective of each company because, without expansion, a business stagnates. Only the business owner determines growth factors, so avoid following generally accepted success metrics. Your brainchild is a unique system that requires an individual approach. However, if you don’t aim to grow, all your business spheres will suffer. Let’s consider this process in detail.
We’ll start with the most obvious things. You can’t only increase income if you don’t expand your business. This may fix higher product prices, but if you’re a startup, you must demonstrate your brand value to your consumers. You should differentiate and provide a solid competitive advantage to fend off competitors. Setting higher prices may be a complete failure if that is a challenge for you. In this case, consider attracting new target markets or closing more deals.
People help businesses grow both directly and indirectly. They can buy more from you or provide valuable insights that will allow you to improve. A company that only invests in regular customer attraction gains its growth opportunities. You can get trapped in a vicious circle because customers prefer to work with constantly evolving companies. So, to close more sales and attract new clients, you need to look for growth opportunities.
Companies investing their resources into development increase their market share slowly but surely. They outperform their competitors in various spheres, which provides them with additional perks such as better terms of cooperation with suppliers.
Growing your business also affects the quality of customer care service. Companies investing in their support team improve after-sales service, resulting in high customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention. However, businesses should pay special attention to building relationships with clients since rapid growth and attracting new customers sometimes make their loyal clients wait for the answer for hours. This may result in brand switching, a bad sign for each brand since retaining an existing customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one.
In addition, ongoing growth attracts job seekers. Everyone wants to be a part of a big community aimed to develop and create a perfect product. So, such companies receive many CVs and can choose the most talented candidates to join their team.
Business growth allows companies to increase their income, expand their product line, partner with suppliers on the most favorable terms, reach new audiences, and create a team of professionals. Now, let’s explore the types of business growth.
4 Types of Business Growth
Business growth can be classified into four main types. Each type reviews growth differently and fits businesses at different stages. Let’s consider each business growth approach in detail.
- Organic business growth. This type of growth is considered the easiest but most effective method of business growth. It best fits startups and companies that have just entered the market while being less effective in the long term for established brands. Organic growth implies physical business expansion, i.e., upgrading the product lines, producing more goods, working in several shifts, large space rental, opening a new storefront, etc. With this approach, expanding your business space lets you produce more goods, meet the demand, and serve more customers.
- Strategic business growth. This approach works well for long-term goals and companies that have gone through organic growth. They invest the money earned during organic growth into strategic growth strategies. This can include expanding the product line and reaching new markets via advertising campaigns.
- Internal business growth. This approach can be implemented between the organic and strategic types. It’s not focused on production but aims to use the current resources more efficiently to optimize the company’s workflow. It can be using a marketing automation system such as SendPulse or saving some costs by implementing lean systems.
- Partnership or merge business growth. As the name suggests, this approach implies cooperation with another company for mutual benefits. Such a partnership helps companies launch a new product, produce more goods, grow both markets, and enjoy customer loyalty for another brand.
Now that you know the types of business growth, let’s consider the stages each company goes through.
4 Stages of Business Growth
Companies face different challenges at each stage of their development. Let’s examine each one closely to learn how to cope with these difficulties.
- Startup stage. At the initial stage, the goal of each startup is to survive. The company starts from the business owner who finds several employees taking several roles. Their main task is to build brand recognition and deliver their product value on a tight budget. The main challenges of each startup include ensuring that the product is competitive and can meet customers’ needs and expectations.
- Growth stage. At this stage, the startup has a business model and does its best to grow. Since scaling a business scares many entrepreneurs, they often never even risk taking action to develop, losing all the opportunities. Although looking for ways to increase the customer base is vital, it seems challenging because the startup has limited funds.
- Maturity stage. At this stage, the business reached a specific stability that no longer required such output from the owner. All the processes have been set and worked well sometimes for years. This stage allows the owners to focus on geographical expansion, building worldwide recognition, and product diversification. Despite a more or less stable growth period, maturity requires more cash flows for implementing new strategies and promotions.
- Renewal/decline stage. This is a risky one. However, it may still seem stable to the owners. They have regular income and brand awareness and may stop looking for new expansion methods. Hence, their business can decay if they don’t invest in new ideas and technologies.
Now that you know how each business functions from the moment it enters the market, it’s time to uncover several methods to help it grow.
How to grow your business quickly?
Growing a business takes a lot of work. After reaching some point in expanding your company, it can be a real challenge to find new ways of building your audience, increasing income, and producing more goods. So, in this section, we’ll share several ideas to help startups and established businesses reach new horizons.
- Hire talented marketing enthusiasts. Your team is fundamental to the company’s success since a business owner performs several roles at the very beginning. So, to reduce some workload and deal with more critical tasks, you need to find people genuinely interested in your product. Your team may include experienced specialists and marketing beginners since the latter may have many fresh ideas, the implementation of which will be within the power of skilled employees.
- Work on customer retention. Since acquiring new customers is expensive, especially for startups on a tight budget, consider retaining existing clients. Your customers will not only come back for your product but also promote it to their friends and colleagues. Develop a loyalty or affiliate program so your clients will be interested in working with your brand. Implementing customer retention strategies will positively affect your income, word-of-mouth promotion, and loyalty.
- Build your sales funnel and pipeline. The sales funnel lets you realize how a lead goes through before converting it into a client. Understanding the customer’s path allows you to discover your most successful strategies, the techniques that bring the best results, top-performing marketing acquisition channels, and why you lose clients. As a result, you can forecast sales, reduce costs, and encourage more repeat customers. The sales pipeline shows the status of the deal: lead generation, prospecting, qualification, contact, proposal, negotiations, and retention. It allows you to control the work of your sales reps and make informed decisions.
- Analyze your competitors. Consider conducting competitive intelligence research. It will help you uncover industry trends, get insights into clients’ expectations, predict competitors’ actions, analyze their weaknesses and strengths, and increase your income. This way, you’ll save money and invest in successful strategies.
- Make use of a customer relationship management system (CRM). With a CRM, you can monitor all the customer interactions with your brand at each stage of their buyer journey. You’ll get a clear picture of closed deals and deals in progress. Besides, all the data about your customers will be stored in one place so you can access client cards anytime. It will be easier for your sales reps to contact customers, make personalized offers, and work collaboratively. SendPulse provides a free CRM system to automate sales and communication with clients.
- Build an online presence. An online presence is vital for every brand nowadays since users spend hours on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter daily. You can’t miss this chance to build brand awareness and recognition for free. Demonstrate your product, share cases and testimonials, show some behind-the-scenes of your company, collect customer feedback, ask for their opinion, post content regularly, run ads, and maintain brand consistency. This will result in high traffic, increased engagement, and an optimized marketing strategy.
- Run online and offline events. Webinars, conferences, and workshops help brands attract new clients, communicate with their fans, share expertise and knowledge, collaborate with partners to create more business opportunities, and boost brand awareness. Consider hosting regular events to grow your business effectively.
Congrats! Now you know the four types and stages of business growth and have tips on scaling your business with little investment. Use Send Pulse promotional tools to increase your income, improve communication with customers, and automate routine processes!