Forming and growing your LLC business requires strategic planning, creativity, focus, and more. While there is no one-size-fits-all small business growth strategy, here are some key steps you can take to grow your business.
Define the growth goals of your LLC
Clearly outlining your business goals can help you focus your efforts, energize employees, and establish milestones for your company to strive for. The exercise also equips you with a benchmark to gauge the success of your business.
Goals needn’t be overly complex. Use the SMART method to guide and focus your objectives. SMART goals are defined as:
- Specific: Identify your business goal.
- Measurable: Establish a metric – such as percentage growth – by which you can measure progress.
- Achievable: Set a goal that is achievable. Too lofty and your chances of achieving your goals are decreased.
- Realistic: Ensure your goal is realistic to your operations and aligns with your overall business plan.
- Time-bound: Set a timeframe for your goal.
Develop a sales funnel to improve conversions
A sales funnel visually maps out the customer’s journey, illustrating their decision-making process during a purchase. As implied, it encompasses a wide pool of leads and prospects, gradually funneling them toward the bottom to yield a smaller group of paying customers.
There are generally four stages to a sales funnel.
- Awareness: At this stage, a prospect becomes aware of your business and its products and/or service, whether due to an advertisement, marketing campaign, signage, or a customer referral.
- Interest: Now that a prospect is aware you must keep their interest and generate enthusiasm. Use targeted outreach and personalized experiences to drive additional engagement and action. Develop content that shows the value of your product such as webinars, videos, case studies, customer reviews, etc.
- Consideration: Now is the time to encourage a prospect or lead to act. Special offers, promotions, discount codes, BOGO specials, and more, can be offered at this stage.
- Action: During this stage, the prospect has taken action. This may include a request for more information or an actual sale.
Using the sales funnel and continuously optimizing it can help drive leads, increase conversion rates, and grow revenues.
Explore strategic partnerships
Forming strategic partnerships can help you increase awareness, reduce costs, and expand into new markets. Partnerships include co-marketing initiatives, such as events or promotions, alliances, or joint ventures. The key to a successful partnership is finding a partner who embodies your brand values and who can ensure mutual benefit.
For example, a bakery could partner with a local coffee shop to sell its products, and vice versa. Likewise, writers could team with graphic designers to win more, and potentially larger, business opportunities.
Business partnerships can bring many benefits, but you must understand what they entail and how you will manage them.
Analyze your competition
Knowing who your competitors are doing and even learning from them is crucial to gaining market share. Analyze their websites, research their marketing campaigns, and follow their social media activity.
If you’re in an industry that doesn’t afford access to your competitor’s activities, check out mentions of them in the news media or trade publications. Try talking to customers you have in common.
Invest in employee training and development
You and your team lay the foundation for an efficient and scalable business. Investing in training and development can close skills gaps, prime employees on new technologies, and ensure they are experts in your field.
Employees with the right skills and knowledge are more productive and efficient, leading to greater profitability and process improvement. Training and development can also help attract the right talent and boost retention by providing a sense of value and loyalty.
Develop good processes and systems
Streamlined and repeatable processes are key to delivering a frictionless customer experience. As your business prepares to expand, review the processes you’ve had in place since starting your business for potential efficiency gains and develop a plan for modifying or replacing them.
Good reporting is also critical. It can help you quickly measure performance against business goals and inform decision-making.
Become customer-centric
As you focus on growth and profitability, don’t lose sight of customer service and satisfaction. Both are key to the long-term success of any business. Prioritize your customer’s needs by shifting from a product- or service-centric culture to one that is customer-centric. More than putting the customer first, a customer-centric organization creates a quality experience for prospects and customers across every touchpoint in the customer journey, including marketing, website design, employee interaction, sales follow-up, and more.
Be consistent
Consistently focus on what is required to be successful every day. This mindset helps create long-term positive habits that ensure customer satisfaction and a higher return. Customers also highly prize consistency.
Innovate
Keep pace with innovations and developments in your field. Apply what you learn. Try out new marketing techniques, update your products, and adopt new technologies. Ensuring business growth hinges on prioritizing continual innovation. This requires cultivating a culture of creativity, promoting fresh ideas, and embracing change.
Stay compliant
As you grow your business, it’s important to keep pace with LLC compliance requirements, such as filing an annual report and maintaining a registered agent.
