Did you know that only 50 percent of startups survive more than five years? Unfortunately, many startups fail to achieve product-market fit. Without a smart growth strategy in place, startups have no clear roadmap towards long-term success.
Growing business is one of the most challenging situations you will face as an entrepreneur. In order to successfully grow your business, you will have to accurately gauge your current performance as well as your limitations. Attempting to expand operations too quickly has historically sunk innumerable, otherwise perfectly good, businesses.
let’s take a deeper look at what entrepreneurs need to do in order to put together a startup growth strategy that is going to enable their startup to experience sustained success and growth.
Identify Your Target Audience
The second step towards building a realistic growth strategy is identifying your target audience. Without a clear understanding of your audience, you are more likely to iterate on the wrong product enhancements, build the wrong marketing messages, and more. These miscalculations can cost your startup thousands of dollars.
Create ideal customer personas that outline behaviors, expectations and your target customers’ needs. You’ll also want these to describe the challenges your customers face. This can help you customize messaging to better relate to specific types of people.
Look at social media to see who your target market is following and how they use different platforms. You’ll also want to look at how they engage with your competitors on these sites and which types of content they like or share the most.
Study the Competition
This is a vital consideration for businesses at all times, regardless of their expansion plans. If you don’t have a firm understanding of what your competition is doing then you will naturally find it much harder to compete with them effectively.
Make Your Value Propositions Clear
It’s incredibly important to understand what your business offers to customers. More importantly, you need to be able to clearly explain to your potential clients why they need you and why they should be giving you their money.
Make Sure You’re Ready to Convert
You should now have a good understanding of who your target audience is and what makes them click. You should also be pretty confident in what your business offers and have a fairly good idea of how you are going to market your business to your target audience.