Growing a business is a massive challenge, even on the best of days, but it’s absolutely a manageable task. You just have to know the fundamentals and how to find what you need.
There isn’t any real secret to growing a business: It’s about understanding the customers you serve and improving your products and services to fit their needs. To do that, you’ll have to become an expert in understanding your audience. Once you know what makes them tick, you can take clear actions to stand out from the pack, appealing to specific audience personas.
After you build a positive reputation, the business can start to grow, creating a lovely little cycle of business development and innovation that expands your audience.
Let’s explore how you can make it happen.
Focus on your audience
Understanding the needs and wants of your audience is one of the main tools any business can use to help guide them in the right direction. Basic demographic information like age ranges, income levels, and general interests can help you develop general personas. Once a persona is in place, you can start testing your marketing materials to see what works and what doesn’t.
As you become more familiar with your audience through market research and analyzing digital metrics, it becomes easier to identify what resonates. Once you develop that knowledge on the marketing side, you can apply it to product development itself. When you start using customer data to make business decisions, you can develop a formal system where marketing informs product, and vice versa.
Distinguish yourself
As you identify what customers need and what they respond to, you can take steps to separate yourself from the competition on multiple levels. With an understanding of customer behaviors, you can start developing a brand positioned to deliver a clear, consistent message across every touch point. Then, you’ll need a product that satisfies customer demand, and that product will definitely need strong positioning capable of living up to the brand promise you’ve established.
Products will vary, but developing strong product positioning will help you provide a clear answer to the question: How does this help an ordinary person?
Strong product positioning helps ensure an average customer can quickly understand why a product is worth their money, and oddly enough, it’s a strategic exercise many companies don’t spend enough time working through. Being able to clearly explain the benefit of a product, or a specific feature, provides a huge advantage on its own. If you can find a memorable way to say it, you can distance yourself from the competition through storytelling.
Stay Authentic
People know an advertisement is trying to sell something to them, and we’ve trained ourselves to filter out the noise. Unless it’s something catchy or relevant to an individual, most marketing materials are generally ignored. That’s why authenticity is so important. Being able to relate to another human in a meaningful way helps build trust that leads to a lasting connection (and return customers).
By filtering all business efforts through a lens of authenticity, brands ensure product and marketing efforts stay true to the original promise. Consistently reinforcing your brand positioning helps establish a strong connection with your audience, fostering customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business—benefits any company can leverage for long-term success.
As you continue to prove your position in the market, others will be drawn to what your loyal customers already know.
“A successful approach I have taken both personally, and for the brand I’ve built, is to always take the ‘us and we’ vs. ‘I and me’ approach,” said Lance Lambert, chief marketing officer at Grove Bags, a cannabis industry packaging manufacturer. “Legalization didn’t get to where it is by individuals only looking out for their own best interest. It has been a collaborative effort from the start. Putting focus on what you and your brand can do to make this community better is a must.”
Ask for help when it’s needed
Nobody is an expert in everything, and sometimes a small business may not have the expertise in a specific area. However, there are several agencies and experts available to assist any business to perform any number of tasks.
“The most effective relationships are ones that can start small and scale over time,” says Jesse Burns, chief marketing officer at Grasslands, a full-service marketing and public relations agency. “It’s also important to continuously educate clients on cheap and easy ways they can amplify and echo the work the agency is doing on their behalf.”
Competitive analysis, product positioning, demand generation, business development, digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are just a few of the services an agency can provide. Once you have an established audience, you can look for ways to grow it. These external resources are often enthusiastic experts who enjoy helping clients succeed.
“Getting to the core of a brand’s story and remaining consistent in messaging across channels while growing is no easy feat, but it is essential when creating any go-to-market or PR strategy,” says Alexa Oliphant, account director at Grasslands. “Working with a PR agency that knows how to strike the balance between consistency and flexibility in storytelling—while staying on top of trends—is an invaluable asset for brands looking to find their target audience and keep them engaged.”
Bonus: What isn’t anyone else doing?
To truly maintain a growth mindset, a business needs to continuously look at the marketplace to identify upcoming trends. But as you identify trends, the real fun comes when you ask the question: What’s missing? That simple question is what guides businesses to underserved audiences and amazing innovations that can lead to accelerated growth.
There are many innovations over the decades that were initially criticized. People thought the lightbulb was an impractical idea. A horseless carriage was once considered a “passing fad.” In 2007, a little company called Amazon was heavily scrutinized when it invested billions of dollars in infrastructure, technology, and supply lines. Fast forward to today, those investments paid off in a huge way.
When you take the time to analyze the data you have, you can find emerging markets to explore, leading conversations and providing new products to serve that audience. As a business continues to pioneer new products and services while finding new customers to help, it creates a pattern of delivering the unexpected, leading to a surprised and delighted customer base.
