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Written By: James Ponds
Growing your company should be a continuous process. You should never stop advancing your processes, offerings and brand because that risks stagnation which can have a negative effect on your organization's reputation. Here are six ways to help your company grow.
1. Customer Centricity
Customer centricity is the center of growing your company. You need to lay the groundwork by learning about your target audience and their needs. After you have a dedicated customer base, you'll need to continue learning about their evolving needs and interests to stay relevant. Make sure you put customers first. Ask customers for feedback and to participate in focus groups so they feel like they're part of your design and development process. Interact with them online and make sure you have a robust customer support department to smoothly solve customers' issues. When customers know you think they're important, they're more likely to be loyal to your business.
2. Employee Development
Employees also need to know they're important to your organization. If they do, they'll be more invested in helping to grow your business and your brand. Invest in educating employees on new technology, trends and brand recognition and visibility. Provide employees with opportunities to make suggestions and provide feedback to improve the business and the brand. Employees and their job performances also reflect on your business' reputation. Make sure employees who interact directly with customers and potential customers have the training and support they need to excel at their jobs.
3. Visibility
Building and growing a brand requires visibility. You don't just need a customer-centric business model, you need your customers to be comfortable interacting with your organization outside of financial transactions. Some common ways organizations achieve this are leveraging social media accounts, endorsements from influencers and sending executives to be interviewed on relevant podcasts. Being on the right person's radar can net you more opportunities for endorsements or collaborations.
4. Strategies, Goals and Scheduling
You should work on developing a solid plan for how you want to grow your company over a period of years to get an idea of the big picture. Come up with a vision and a set of goals. Then drill down into the specifics. You can create a comprehensive marketing strategy and a sales forecast to keep your business on track and leverage data analytics to see how your business has fared over time and how different strategies could help it fare in the future. Set specific time spans in which to complete goals and schedule review periods for each stage of the plan. This way, if things aren't working or you need to revise the plan you'll have a chance to make adjustments.
5. The Latest Trends
One of the easiest ways to grow your business is to embrace trends, but you need to be smart about it. Don't just go along with whatever is popular. Instead, combine modern trends, techniques and technology with industry best practices to make your brand memorable but still recognizable and accessible.
6. Honesty
It can be difficult to admit when you've made a mistake. This is no different when you need to be honest about an issue on behalf of your business. But honesty is incredibly important for connecting with your customers and being seen as a brand with integrity. A good example is hacking. With increases in technology-based businesses and financial transactions, hacking is also becoming more common. While an executive might worry that the company's reputation would be compromised if the hack became public knowledge, the reverse is more likely. Customers would probably feel hurt and betrayed if the company didn't inform them of the hack, as well as be unable to take steps to protect their information. Being honest, where appropriate, about issues your business faces builds a trust bond between your brand and your customers.
Think about what strategies may work best for your organization. Much of the time, a combination of different strategies can offer the most substantial benefits.