Setting up a business is extremely hard, with about 50% failing after five years. However, you could argue that growing a business is even harder. Once you’ve got over the initial hump, staying successful is hard.
You need to work out where to grow, and how to grow. If you don’t, initial client numbers might drop off with nobody to replace them. It becomes hard. Here are some tips to manage modern day business growth.
Redesign Parts And Improve Your Products
If you’re a product based business you need to be consistently refining your product with better parts. You know your competitors will be. If you step off the gas they’ll gain traction. Even if you feel like you have something no one else does you need to keep improving and refining.
All you need to do is send your improved design to a reputable machine shop and you should have your upgraded product pretty quickly. Machine shops are quite fast at turning around updated designs these days. You could be:
- Trying a new material
- Upgrading the design
- Adding a new product to your store
- Acting on customer feedback
So long as you keep refining what your product does and offers it’ll be harder for competitors to gain traction on you. Even if you’ve patented a unique product, it still pays to be forward thinking. There are only a few businesses out there that have a perfect product.
Even the biggest businesses out there are constantly adapting and changing their business products to stay in line with what the market. Redesigning, offering new takes on existing products and ensuring that you innovate will stand you and your business in good stead for the years ahead.
Supplementary Products Can Help
Supplementary products are items that make a unique product easier to use. For example…if a company sells a thermostat, they might offer a wall mount too. That’s supplementary because it’s not needed, but a lot of people would like the thermostat to be placed on the wall so you can imagine you’d get some sales.
Small supplementary products can give you a few more sales while also offering general opportunities to improve your business. It also shows that you’re thinking about your customers because you’re offering more products that solve their problems, and products that make your base product even more usable. It can be hard to get this right but if you do you’ll reap the rewards for years to come.
Aim For Multi Stream Growth
Growing a business takes time. Sometimes it’s easier focusing on one stream at a time such as social media, or google. Other times it’s important to focus on all of them. This might mean hiring some help, especially if you’re not sure about how SEO works or pay per click.
If you own a storefront or a physical location you’ll also have to look at how you can pull in more passing trade. Again, it’s tough growing in multiple areas at the same time but it’s necessary if you want to be able to pull in more customers.
You can make some streams bounce off each other. For example, you can use social media to link back to your websites as much as possible, hopefully helping traffic. At your physical location (if you have one) you can give out cards with your web address on there, hopefully helping with web traffic.
Sticking with social media, you can also link your media accounts. This way you’ll have Facebook linking to Twitter and vice versa for example.
Offer Free Extras
Offering something for nothing has been a tried and tested method for years. By one get one free is still a usable marketing trick that forces people to buy. Take electric bikes for example.
Some manufacturers have started offering free back up batteries when you purchase a bike. These are lithium ion batteries and can be expensive, so it’s a good deal.
Also, people struggle with electric bike batteries running out so here, businesses are offering a desirable item that also solves a problem. Free extras work better when the main item is expensive, such as an ebike.
However, it also works with smaller items. When you’ve bought items on Amazon, the chances are that you’ve had a parcel with an extra you didn’t expect.
Sometimes extras are thrown in to make the purchaser feel good, and to garner a good review. Free extras are not only done to entice a sale, but to ensure good feeling in the aftermath.
Ella Marcotte
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