Every business wants to grow. Doing so requires having a small business growth strategy. In it, you’ll define the steps you should take to get the results you want. Every plan will look different, depending on your industry, size, customer base, location, and more.

To help you determine what should be in your strategy, check out these insights.

Identify Your Market Opportunities

Growing requires new customer acquisition, and you’ll need to understand how large your prospective market is. That includes anyone in your service area that may need your products or services. It also involves knowing the competitive landscape.

For example, you run a local HVAC business that has a service area of 30 ZIP codes. Within that geographic area, you can support residential and commercial customers. You can estimate that there are 100,000 homeowners and 30,000 businesses. That’s your big-picture market. Then you’d need to factor in that you have five main competitors, which may reduce this by half if they already have a significant market share.

Make a New Customer Acquisition Plan

Now that you know the opportunity, your small business growth strategy should define how you’ll attract new customers. You’ll likely use many digital marketing tactics, including paid search, an optimized website, social media marketing, email marketing, and more.

Launching these campaigns can be daunting, so working with a digital marketing firm to manage and execute these will save you time. It will also put experts in charge. As a result, you will see more website traffic and conversions.

Improve Customer Retention

In addition to new customers, you need to retain your existing ones to grow. Depending on your vertical, customers may need your products and services regularly or less frequently. Either way, you’ll want to develop a customer retention strategy. Consider how you can incentivize them and build loyalty. You can do this by:

• Creating a customer loyalty program
• Improving customer service
• Continuing to communicate with them via email

By doing these things, you’ll keep customers satisfied and trusting.

Introduce New Products and Services Based on Research

In many cases, growing means expanding. However, you shouldn’t add a new product or service just because. Rather, you’ll want to rely on data. First, you can hear directly from current customers through surveys about what they need. Second, you can look at your industry’s trends. Third, keep an eye on competitors.

With this data, you can make better decisions. Also, regardless of the demand for something, it has to make fiscal sense. Thus, you need to understand the potential margin and profit you can make before you make a move.

Identify What You Need to Grow

Before starting a growth phase, you’ll need to ready some things. If you experience new customer growth, you have to be able to keep pace. That often correlates with hiring more staff, increasing production, or finding new ways of sourcing materials.

Without this foundation in place, your growth will stall before it gets going. You can lose those customers you tried so hard to acquire. So, be sure you can deliver on growth prior to executing strategies.