How To Grow And Scale Your Business Broken Down Into 3 Steps
You’ve started a business, launched a product, and made your first sale, so now what?
How can you cost-effectively repeat that process?
By learning to scale your business.
When it comes to succeeding as an entrepreneur, there are three crucial steps to growing and scaling your business.
First, you must learn from the experts about the techniques, tips, and tricks they use in their strategies.
Immerse yourself in their experience and expertise, learn about their proven methods, and use those insights in your projects.
Look, being an entrepreneur is exciting but also challenging, so don’t try to recreate the wheel when you can learn from others who have been there and done that before you.
Second, and this one may be obvious, but you need to take what you already know, pair it with expert insights, and turn it into a product or service that you can then provide to the world and make an impact.
You can build a knowledge business based on your life experiences, work history, or hobbies, which you have unique insights into.
Turning your expertise into a business is easier than you think if you utilize all the tools available and allow you to make life-changing impacts for your audience.
Finally, and this is important, is learning to scale your business. Scaling your business means repeating what’s working to grow without adding expenses.
In other words, scaling efficiently increases revenue opportunities, resulting in a higher return.
Understanding The Difference Between Growth And Scale
One thing to keep in mind is that scaling your business isn’t just about revenue.
It’s about doing things to maximize your efficiency in all phases, grow your audience, and increase your customer satisfaction, all with an eye on long-term sustainability.
Understanding the difference between growth, which can be described as increasing the number of customers and revenue, and scaling, which takes growth and emphasizes increasing growth without adding expenses simultaneously.
Growth can also be problematic, such as discovering issues with delivering your products or, if you’re running a service on top of your knowledge business, simply running out of time to help everyone.
Scaling can help you provide the same quality and impact as you would when you grow but with better resource allocation.
Take the example of a service call for your customers; think about providing more calls to a wider audience without hiring more people. Group calls, webinars, videos, and live Q&A are good scalable options, and afterward, only one-on-one calls are offered.
Scaling your business is about adding manageable growth so that you can provide the best service to your audience and enhance their experience.
This will provide you with long-term opportunities to continue to serve their needs.
If you’re looking for answers about how to scale business growth sustainably, then in this guide, you’ll learn how to scale your business by:
- Building a foundation for success
- Master strategies to find and nurture new customers
- Develop a strategy for long-term sustainability
So, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for solid strategies for growing and scaling a business, keep reading.
By the end of reading this, you will understand how to grow and scale your online business.
The process will be broken down into three steps: build a robust business, find and nurture new customers, and ensure longevity to maximize your impact with your knowledge-based business.
Ready to get started? Let’s gooo.
Step 1: Build Your Foundation For Success
The first step in building a foundation for success is defining your goals, the people you plan to serve and provide solutions for, and the growth you’d like to achieve.
And you want to take a very smart approach to defining your goals.
It’s easy to imagine making a product that helps people in your niche and seeing it fly off your sales page, making you a ton of money, but if you’re not strategic about who and how you will do it, your expectations may be a bit lofty.
Instead, take a logical, detailed approach to setting your goals. There’s a system for goal setting known as SMART goals.
SMART goals are a system for determining what you want to achieve, what is attainable, and how you can make it happen.
SMART goals can be defined as:
Specific: Your goals should be clear and specific, defining the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.”
For example, simply stating that you want to increase your sales should be more specific.
Instead, make it specific, such as stating that you want to increase sales by 10% next month.
Measurable: Your goal should be something you can measure.
In the example above, simply saying you want to increase sales isn’t enough.
Having a measurable goal, such as increasing sales by 10% in a month, is much easier to track and determine its effectiveness.
Achievable: Dreaming big and having lofty goals is fine, but they may be less feasible, especially in the short term.
Setting SMART goals includes considering short-term wins to build momentum and avoid frustration.
For example, instead of saying you want to double sales in one month, a more achievable goal is to set a smaller percentage that is easier to accomplish, like increasing sales growth by 10% over three months.
The goal here is to set smaller, winnable goals that motivate you to act in that same direction.
The benefit of smaller, achievable goals also means that if you fall short, you can refine and change course without investing too much time and other resources.
Relevant: Your goals should be appropriate and align with your larger priorities and objectives and with what you’re trying to do right now.
Think about your goals in a way that makes sense for you to devote your time to them right now, and consider how they act as a building block to help you move toward your success.
An example would be planning.
If your focus is on growing long-term sustainability, your goal should be increasing customer retention rates by X over the next 90 days, then adjusting and repeating after another 90 days.
Time-bound: Without accountability and deadlines, things fall by the wayside. It’s simply human nature that we accomplish more when we have a sense of urgency.
So, set a deadline so that you can start prioritizing your resources and time for the tasks at hand.
If you’re trying to grow by 10% over 90 days, that’s a good start, but add a more relevant timeline. Instead of saying 10% growth over 90 days, give it some teeth, reverse engineer your growth goals, and build a more detailed timeline.
For example, take 90 days and determine how many new customers you’d need every week to achieve your 10% growth. Set your amount—perhaps one new customer a week—and have that goal every week until the 90 days are up.
Having definable goals allows you to assess the effectiveness of your growth efforts and provides valuable insights into how you’re using your resources.
Think of your goal setting like a marathon.
If you focus on the distance, it can seem insurmountable. But if you do the training and focus on certain milestones or even just one foot forward at a time, you’ll find it easier to make the long haul more achievable.
So, step one in growing and scaling your business is to build a strong foundation based on setting SMART goals.
Step 2: Master Strategies For Customer Growth
Any knowledge business’s lifeblood is connecting with customers to increase revenue opportunities.
The best way to do this is to create personalized products that serve a need.
The key to a successful, sustainable business is developing strategies that help you identify your audience’s needs and design products that answer those challenges.
The better you develop personalized solutions, the greater your opportunity to find and nurture your customers for long-term growth.
To solve their challenges, you’ll want to get to know your audience, their preferences, desires, pain points, and behaviors.
You can do this in several ways, from creating surveys and polls to hosting live events like Q&As or AMAs–Ask me anything–that help you engage with your audience.
You’ll want an open forum to discuss common problems and solutions and really listen to what is said.
The more you can connect with your audience, the better you will be at providing personalized solutions, which will help create trust in your brand.
Another thing you’ll want to do is spend more on your digital marketing to reach a broader audience.
Spend some time researching what channels give you the best return on your ad spend. That way, you can create new campaigns without spending too much and making a costly mistake.
You can use paid ads to drive traffic to your sales funnels and website using PPC ads where you attract attention with relevant keywords and phrases that help drive people to your sites, social media advertising, content marketing, and affiliate or influencer marketing.
Paid Ads: Paid ads are pop-ups and other ad formats that appear before a search result visitor who is looking for a specific keyword or phrase.
Once they click the ad, you pay based on criteria about the cost of the keyword–which is based on the value of the word, how many other advertisers are using it, and the number of times that particular word or phrase may be typed into a search query.
These types of ads work because they can put your site in front of people who are searching for the phrase you included, but once you stop running your ad, that traffic can disappear.
Also, these ads can become very expensive, so it’s a good idea to research and set a budget before you begin.
Social Media Ads: As opposed to PPC ads that appear as a result of a search engine query, social media ads are those on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others.
The good thing about social media ads is that they don’t cost as much as PPC ads, you can make them very niche-specific and highly targeted, and they are more engaging than a text box at the end of an online search.
Social ads also allow you to introduce your brand in more engaging ways that may be more attractive to your potential audience.
Think about Dollar Shave Club.
They used creative marketing, including social ads, to disrupt the male grooming industry with viral posts, content, and ads that skyrocketed their subscription-based model, leading to a $1 billion sale to Unilever.
I’m not saying you will sell your business for $1 billion.
Still, the point is that creating affordable, engaging ads that yield results is easier through social media channels than just anywhere else.
Content Marketing: The biggest overhead with content marketing efforts will be creating and publishing content online.
You can use a few hacks to become proficient in these efforts, including outsourcing your content creation and publication to third parties like freelance copywriters, videographers, graphic designers, and more.
Blog posts, YouTube and other video content, and webinars are great ways to use content to build trust in your brand and drive long-term organic traffic growth that helps find and nurture leads.
Affiliate and Influencer Marketing: A very cost-efficient way to grow your brand, making it an extremely scalable option, is to create affiliate programs and connect with influencers to drive traffic and promote your products.
Affiliate marketing includes creating a product others promote for you in exchange for a commission.
Think of it as having an outsourced sales team promote your products to their audiences.
This is a great way to expand your overall reach. The only downside is that you don’t control who receives your product pitches and how often they appear to them.
Influencer marketing is a way to expose your products to a different audience through a social media influencer, who is a person who already has an audience that knows and trusts them.
Joe Rogan is a good example of influencer marketing. One of the top podcasters in the world, when Joe Rogan recommends something, his audience, who already trusts him, jumps the needle.
Step 3: Develop Long-Term Growth Strategies
To sustainably scale business growth, you must develop a strategy to nurture your existing audience and acquire newer ones.
Nurture Your Tribe
Creating relationships with your audience will not only help you expose your brand and grow, but by engaging with them and providing personalized solutions to their needs and challenges, you’re developing a long-term, sustainable platform for success.
The key here is to be audience-centric.
Providing content that continues to focus on solutions for your audience’s needs is a great way to build trust and foster brand loyalty, setting you up for future opportunities.
Offering additional resources, email marketing, webinars, one-on-one calls, and live Q&As are all great ways to interact with your audience while gaining valuable insights into what products you can offer next.
The focus is creating and fostering a community that aligns with your knowledge-based business.
For example, if you’re providing solutions to new entrepreneurs, start a conversation on one subject, such as lead generation, and engage with your audience.
Add more to the discussion and address participants’ questions quickly.
Another way to nurture your audience is by providing a loyalty program.
Think of loyalty programs as incentives for your audience’s trust and participation in your brand.
This is a tool for when you have:
- built a community
- have been engaged with your audience for some time and have developed trust
- want to provide more solutions and reward your audience
Over time, you can grow your community by offering more intricate information, but let your audience help guide the conversations; that way, you can gain great insights into what they see, want, and need.
Acquiring New Audiences
The next step in growing and scaling your business is to find new audiences, raise your awareness, and expose your solutions to them.
Finding new audiences can be challenging, so start by thinking about who you already engage with and think about individuals to target with similar segments and preferences to create a new campaign to reach.
While your toddler parenting ebook would be great for new parents and has been received well, pivot to find and discover new audiences.
Consider pivoting your parenting tips to address new dads and how to deal with a toddler having a difficult time.
Or tips for moms of active boys on how to keep them occupied.
The key is to niche and find new audiences that can benefit from your expertise and knowledge.
The next step in developing a long-term strategy is to do your research.
As you strategize how to grow and scale a business, especially a knowledge-based one, you want to dive into what has been performing well for you; maybe it’s social media ads, short-form videos, infographics, or you have great email open rates.
Next, you want to analyze what didn’t perform well for you. Maybe your targeting was off, or your Calls To Action (CTAs) weren’t direct and strong enough.
Using insights into these two areas, what is performing well and what is not, you’ll input this data into your next messaging and advertising campaign.
Using these insights, refine your messaging, CTAs, and other key metrics to target future audiences better.
Optimize Your Strategy
Finally, to grow and scale your business, you’ll want to refocus and refine it. Think about sharpening the blade of a kitchen knife.
Over time, that blade gets dull, and while it still does work for you, taking a few minutes to sharpen the blade makes it much easier to do the work.
Like the kitchen knife, your long-term strategy should be refined constantly to perform well.
You’ll want to tweak and change your strategy, but do it backed up by data. Analyze what’s working, double down on it, and A/B test everything.
A/B testing is the process of testing your messaging for optimal results. You can do this with ads, messaging for a launch, or CTAs.
You would have two similar messages, targeting whatever you’re trying to test and seeing which performs better.
Once you determine what performs better, double down on it, and A/B test another version.
You must continue this process for the length of your product offerings, messaging, and ads.
For more tips on growing and scaling your business, consult industry experts and determine what systems and processes work for them. With the Mastermind Business System, you can access industry leaders and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs instantly.
Even better, you can get life-changing advice FREE for 14 days by test-driving the Mastermind Business System today.
