Growing your business is a proven approach for increasing your market share, maximizing profits, and safeguarding your business against economic fluctuations. Theoretically, the larger you get, the more opportunities you can pursue and the more revenue you can generate.
However, growth comes at a cost. The expenditure needed to hire more staff, larger premises, invest in new products, and widen your horizons to new markets is considerable, no matter how you look at it. This is why sustainable growth is so difficult to achieve because the balance between the cost of expansion and the increased revenue it provides needs to be constantly weighed up.
Having said this, there are a number of tips and tricks you can use to grow your business without spending too much money. As long as you are tactical with your expansion, you can reap the benefits of a larger company on a budget of a smaller one.
Here is how to grow your business without breaking the bank:
Get a specialist to optimize your website
If you want to grow your business on a budget, you are going to need to find innovative methods for expanding your market share and sourcing more customers. Traditional advertising like billboards, radio and TV adverts, and magazine ads are all expensive and inefficient because they don’t pinpoint your target market accurately enough.
Instead, focus on fine-tuning your website for seo by consulting an expert like ALT Agency. Search engine optimization helps you attract people who are highly likely to buy from you, and as long as you keep on top of your SEO-friendly content, you can keep attracting new customers continuously.
While not necessarily cheap, this approach is far more efficient than other forms of advertising. It also helps you quickly develop a strong customer base of people actively searching for a product like yours, rather than passive consumers flicking through newspaper ads.
Find out what other problems you can solve for your customers
When you are trying to expand, chances are you will need new products or services to supplement your current ones. The temptation here is to go off in new directions and find a whole new customer base to appeal to.
Although this could work in certain cases, it is a lot of work with no guarantee of reward. In fact, by diluting your product range and diversifying your marketing message, you risk alienating your current customers.
When planning an expansion, the best phrase to remember is if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Find out which products are selling the strongest, and work out why that is. Chances are, this product is solving a particularly big problem for your customers. Pursue this line of inquiry further and find out if there is a larger problem that a new, related product of yours could help solve.
Evolution, not revolution, works best when you want to grow on a budget, so pay attention to what is currently selling and expand on it.
Keep staff and office space to a minimum
If you want to grow your business without breaking the bank, you’re going to need to show some restraint when it comes to hiring more staff and expanding your work premises.
While it is tempting to believe that you need lots of staff and a huge office to encourage growth, it can often have the opposite effect. The increased cost attached to staff salaries and rent will take a significant cut out of your bottom line and actually prevent you from making more money. If your sales dry up for whatever reason, you are left more vulnerable than ever because you have more bills to pay at the end of the month, with no guarantee of more sales.
Focus your attention instead on low-hanging fruit. Fine-tune your marketing techniques, solidify your brand identity and shore up a solid group of repeat buyers. This will safeguard your company’s health so that when you do take on more overheads, you can confidently pay for them.
Don’t compete for the same positioning as your competitors
If you want to expand, you’re going to need to increase your share of the market. It can be easy to assume this will only come by encroaching on your competitors’ market share and tempting their customers away. This might be part of the story, but it isn’t the most forward-thinking approach.
Instead of competing for the same shrinking market share as your rivals, focus on building out into new areas of the industry and creating your own niche. It will be harder for other brands to compete and set your brand aside as a market leader without costing huge amounts of money.
