Introduction
Attaining sustainable business growth is no easy task. There are multiple factors, both tangible and intangible, that affect the success of a venture. However, if there is one factor that dominates all others, it is time.
This makes growth strategies so dynamic. What worked for another last year might not work for your business this year. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy.
The solution?
Focus on broad methodologies that can help you create tailor-made strategies for your business.
In this post, we reveal to you the top 10 growth strategies of 2021.
10 Tips To Grow Your Online Business In 2023
- User Data Privacy
- Integrated Marketing Communications
- User Experience
- High-Quality Content
- Data Analytics
- Multi-Channel Revenue Stream
- Automation
- Experimentation
- Document Your Process
- Networking And Collaborations
The core of growing your online business lies with your audience. The more comprehensive idea you have of your audience and target market, the better your sales opportunities will be. This means no matter what strategy you choose, everything anchors to your audience.
Following are the top 10 strategies you can use for growing your startup in 2021.
1. User Data Privacy
Source : osano
Your audience is more data-conscious than ever. No wonder why there are so many national and international data privacy laws mushrooming in the internet space. This means extracting consumer data to support your marketing campaigns will be harder but not impossible.
You need to get creative here.
You need to ensure that you comply with all the data privacy laws, be it GDPR or CCPA. Here is a thorough California privacy rights act guide for your better understanding. You can utilize a third-party vendor to automate this process. Cookiebot is a great tool.
The next thing you can do is leverage the power of personalization. Although your consumers are reluctant to share their personal information, they expect a personalized brand experience. The best part? They are willing to share their information in exchange for a superior brand experience. But you need to create transparency in this process of data exchange between customers and your brand. This way, you not only get hold of valuable data but will also be able to create trust among your customers.
2. Integrated Marketing Communications
Consumer attention is one of the most scarce commodities. If you are not optimizing the interactions your consumers have with your brand, you are losing money on the table. This makes an omnichannel approach towards your marketing an essential success element for growth hacking.
But a word of caution here.
You need to be strategic about your marketing content distribution. Create and optimize your content formats for specific channels. Integrate SEO (search engine optimization) and paid marketing channels like social media channels and communication channels like Whatsapp for your system.
3. User Experience
No matter what you do, if you are optimizing a web experience that creates the least friction for your traffic, your growth machine will not open. Contact a web design Tampa professional for recommendations on how to improve your website Here are a few things that you can do.
a) Accessibility
Create for accessibility. No matter how good your content or offer is, if your users cannot access it hassle-free, nothing matters. If the user gets frustrated in accomplishing a task, redesign the steps.
b) Site Speed
Yet another is the site speed. Ideally, your website should not take more than 3 seconds to load. However, if it does, optimizing your image sizes, reducing plugins, and integrating cache are a few things you could consider.
4. High-Quality Content
Source : Happyscribe
If you have to build a brand and expand your business, compromising on content is not an option. The content you create for your audience is king. However, with almost every business adopting content marketing, gaining an unfair advantage is more competitive than ever.
You need to get strategic here. Invest in different types of content formats: blog posts, infographics, gifs, and videos. The point here is to be helpful and distribution channel optimized. Here are a few considerations you should have.
a) Video Content
While you create videos, optimize the length. Use branded colors. A quick hack is to integrate subtitles in your videos. You can use a subtitle adder for automating this.
b) Blog Posts
Create blog posts that optimize the content design. Ensure you have enough white space, contrasting texts, bullets, and a cohesive content structure that makes it readable and more comprehensible for your audience. Don’t forget the visual elements on the blog, use a logo maker, apply colors, and work on the UX of your site.
5. Data Analytics
Source : Seerinteractive
Data is the oil that keeps your business running. Without backing your operations on data, you will not only lose ROI (return on investment) opportunities but also keep investing resources in your business’s unyielding domains. This makes data analytics key to unlocking your growth.
You can utilize both qualitative and quantitative data for your business. But at the core, the purpose of your data analysis must be to drive audience and competitor insights.
SEMrush and Survey Monkey are great tools to do audience research.
While the former gives you insights into your existing audience and competitors, and the second tool is all about collecting feedback from your target audience and customers.
6. Multi-Channel Revenue Stream
The business landscape is volatile. No matter how sustainable your product or business model may be, crests and troughs are an indispensable part of the game. This makes creating multiple revenue channels critical for smoother business operations. In the long term, this will give you more stability to run your business. Here’s what you can do.
a) Develop a Flagship Product
This could be a product for which your brand is known. But creating such a powerful product needs developing a USP (unique selling proposition), a ‘why’? You can start the discovery by mapping the features of your competitors and audience needs and filling out the gaps in the market.
b) Create An Affiliate Marketing Program
The second promising revenue stream is to create an affiliate marketing program. However, it needs to be strategic to work. For example, promoting products of your indirect competitors can create cluster effects and make you generate more.
7. Automation
Source : cflowapps
The task board of a business is never empty. There is always something or the other that needs to be finished. While prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and value can take you a few steps further, it cannot give you the performance you strive for.
Adopting automation tools creates streamlined systems, decluttering your way for improved quality work. Here are a few areas that you should consider automating today.
Workflow automation must be the first process you should consider for your business process automation. Creating a unified system of work not only ensures you have a smooth workspace but improves daily productivity. Zapier is a great tool to achieve this.
The next in line should be your customer support. Great customer support is key to a sustainable relationship with your customer, translating into longer LTV (lifetime value) and retention. But, at the same time, it is immensely unproductive.
Automating this process not only brings value to your customers but creates more room for product development. You can use a knowledge base like Confluence or Zendesk are great options here.
8. Experimentation
Source : Optimizely.
Growth hacking is all about rapid testing and experiments. If you are sticking with standard industry practices, the possibility of exponential growth is as likely as a miracle. This makes split testing so incredibly important. Here are a few quick hacks and tools that can help you get started.
The first element that you need to start your split test with is to collect data. This makes tools like Hotjar incredibly powerful. This tool generates heatmaps and scroll maps that give you audience behavior insights on your website. Using these data, you can create multiple versions of your web pages to test on your consumers.
Another powerful tool here is Optimizely. This tool allows you to test multi-variable A/B tests. From dynamic pages to ad campaigns and geography, you can optimize every element.
9. Document Your Process
One of the most critical factors that create an agile work system is process documentation. Think of it as your business success guidebook. Documenting all the actions and results of your process right from day one creates functional, fast solutions for problems that are repetitive and occur in high frequency. This can save you time, resources and keep your process lean.
Confluence is a great tool to do this. The tool has powerful features like tags, pre-built templates, powerful search, access control like private or public, and much more. This means all the information you need to learn about a product is available to each team member in real-time. The best part? You would hardly need any supervision of any senior team member.
But only integrating the tool would do no good to you if you can’t imbibe certain principles of creating your documents. Ensure that your content is actionable, illustrative, and detailed-oriented. Add screenshots and embed videos wherever required. Structure logically. It is only then when you can witness the true value of a knowledge base system.
10. Networking And Collaborations
Depending upon a single sales channel is not a sustainable strategy for growth hacking. Instead, your sales pipeline needs to be robust and expansive at the same time. Here’s what you can do.
a) Hosting Events
Investing in hosting events like webinars and meetings in your industry can create more awareness of your brand and help you generate more sales opportunities.
b) Partner Programs
The second-best strategy is to create a partner program for your brand. You can collaborate with indirect brands that extend the functionalities of your product to generate more sales opportunities. This will improve your brand presence.
Final thoughts
The above tips will give you traffic and sales spikes, but growth hacking is not a sprint. It is a marathon.
This means you have to keep on researching for new opportunities. Keep your audience at the heart of everything you do and keep the feedback loop active. Stay curious and innovate your process. You will find success just around the corner.
Remember, success comes to those who keep looking.
Gaurav Roy
27 July 2021
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