Managing a small business through its growth phase can be a tricky proposition, and the road forward can be filled with peril. If you want your small business to grow into a big business, you cannot afford to leave anything to chance.
Having a comprehensive growth marketing plan in place may not guarantee success, but it could shield you from a devastating failure. Here are seven steps on the road to growth marketing success for your small business.
1. Define your objectives
You cannot walk down a path that is not visible, so laying out your growth marketing objectives should be your first step and your number one priority. Think about where you want your small business to go and envision a strategy that will get you there.
2. Hold regular brainstorming sessions
Brainstorming is one of the most effective ways to manage the growth of your small business, so gather your colleagues and bounce ideas off of one another. Operate under the ‘no ideas are bad’ principle, then whittle the submissions down to action items that can actually be implemented.
3. Prioritize your best ideas
Now that you have plenty of ideas from the brainstorming session, you can prioritize them and build on the best submissions. This prioritization is a key step on the road to growth marketing success.
4. Test your marketing campaigns piece by piece
Testing is a key part of any growth marketing strategy, so break your best ideas down into their parts and test each piece extensively. Evaluate the performance of those ideas against one another and let the winner emerge naturally.
5. Implement your best growth marketing strategy
Once your testing has been completed, it is time to pick a winner and implement the best marketing campaign. Continued testing will be essential here, so keep measuring your results weekly.
6. Analyze the performance
Evaluating the performance of your growth marketing strategy is essential, as is analyzing the results of your testing. How did your tests go? Did your marketing plan live up to expectations? The answers to these questions will be critical to your growth marketing success.
7. Repeat the process
Once you have developed a smart growth marketing plan, you do not have to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch. Now that you have a winning formula, you can systematize it and put it into practice again and again.
You have worked hard to build your small business, and you have invested everything you have in bringing your vision to life. But now that your startup is off the ground, you will want to manage its growth in an intelligent and comprehensive manner.
Smart growth marketing is all about creating a winning formula and putting it in place. The step by step process outlined above can help you manage your small business growth more effectively, so your small firm can be a big one someday.
