Truth be told, every entrepreneur wants to see their business grow; however, growing a business isn’t as easy as ABC. This is why nine out of 10 startups fail. It’s a hard and cold truth, but this should not discourage you to pursue growth for your business.  

Growing your business requires you to work harder and smarter. You have to plan for it. So whether you’re an early-stage or established brand, here’s how you can learn from successful businesses on how they implement their growth strategies.

What is a growth strategy?  

It is a strategy aimed at winning a larger market share, even at the expense of short-term earnings. There are four types of growth strategy that you can apply to your business, according to Igor Ansoff, the father of strategic management. 

1. Market Penetration

This is one of the most popular business growth strategies. Simply put, if you want to penetrate the market, you have to sell more to your existing or current market. You can achieve this by doing the following: 

• Lower your price or provide discounts and promos in order to sell more of your products.
• Revisit your marketing efforts and evaluate which is effective or not in reaching your customers. 

Improve your distribution channels. If you’re only selling your products through retail outlets, you should start considering selling online. Digital is the future, so you must learn how ecommerce works. If you don't have an ecommerce store yet, you can create your own ecommerce store for free here on GlobalLinker. Just click the online store and start creating your own. 

Local brands such as Jollibee have been spending a lot on marketing in order to keep up with the competition and to penetrate their markets. Their online videos have been getting viral consistently.  

Also read: 4 online marketing strategies to promote your business

There are other ways to penetrate the market. But, you have to know your competitors so you can tweak your efforts and provide something unique and helpful to your market. Your value proposition is definitely important!

2. Market Development

This type of growth, on the other hand, is about selling your existing products to new markets. With this strategy, you can do the following: 

• Open new branches of your business 
• Tweak your marketing efforts to target new demographics or customers
• Develop different pricing strategy to fit your new market 

Despite the early failures of Airbnb, they were able to reach 190 markets to date because of embracing the fact that different markets have different behaviors. They have localized their product and added different languages to cater customers from different countries.  

This is something you can learn from the success of Airbnb. Just because a strategy works in your current market, doesn’t mean it will work for your new target customers. You have to learn and understand their behaviors and use those when offering your products to them. 

Don’t be afraid to implement such strategies. With careful planning, you can minimize the risk as you apply these strategies to your growing business.  

Also read: 5 keys to Airbnb's marketing success that you can learn from

3. Product Development

This strategy involves improving your product and developing more products to your target market. With this strategy, you can do the following: 

• Add new features to your product or services
• Develop new products that your target market will truly love 

It’s all about innovation. If you fail to innovate, your business will die. This is how Nokia was booted out of the market. Nokia was able to sell products and was even ahead of the competition. But when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Nokia was not able to keep up with the competition. Apple changed the rules of the game by offering fantastic features that the market truly loved. Even up to now, Apple continues to innovate. Customers are willing to follow long queues just to be at Apple’s product launch and be the first to buy their newest product. 
 

This strategy is important for software or service companies; you have to constantly up your game by improving your product. That is why connecting to your customers continuously is important to understand their pain and challenges which you can use to improve your products.  

4. Diversification

The risk is high in this growth strategy. Diversification involves entering new markets with entirely new products. This is how business tycoon and the late John Gokongwei Jr. succeeded in business. Not only did he manage to create a successful trading merchandise, but he also successfully ran other businesses such as Cebu Pacific, Robinsons Land, and JG Summit Petrochemicals. He also had a fair share of failures like running Sun Cellular, a telecommunication company, which later on was sold to PLDT.  If you follow this strategy, you should be ready to experience failures and losses. 

Also read: Want to grow your business? Follow these tried & tested productivity tips
 

These are the strategies you can incorporate in your business this year. But remember, just because it works for a successful company, doesn’t mean it will work for you too. You have to study, plan, and develop a growth strategy for your business to succeed. 
 

Bottomline: Don’t be afraid to implement such strategies. With careful planning, you can minimize the risk as you apply these strategies to your growing business.  

In our next article, we will share how you can develop a successful growth strategy for your business. Stay tuned. For now, let’s declare that 2020 is the year of business growth!

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