Dominating your local market? It’s time to start thinking bigger. In the business world, playing it safe by keeping your venture small-scale won’t help you grow.
If you’re eager to start scaling up, though, it can be hard to know where to begin. But whether you’re a beauty salon owner, a freelance digital marketer, or an eCommerce entrepreneur selling fast fashion online, branching out and aiming higher is key to your business’s ongoing success.
Stay with us as we take you through the key elements to focus on when scaling up your business.
Stick to your Business Plan
As a savvy small business owner, when you first set out on your new venture, you would have created a business plan. The blueprint for your business’s successful trajectory to world domination, the creation of a business plan is essential for any aspiring entrepreneur when first starting out. Outlining your business goals and objectives, important milestones to reach along your journey to success, and perhaps most importantly, the steps you’ll need to take to get there, your business plan is a vital point of reference throughout your entrepreneurial venture.
For this reason, it’s critical to pause, reflect, and refer back to your original business plan as you start to scale up. Doing so will keep everything in perspective and help you stay on course while growing different elements of your business. Referring back to your business plan will also remind you of what matters most to you – what’s most important about your business. What are your core values and key objectives? What’s your business’s brand mission? Keeping your business’s original goals front of mind when scaling up is essential – after all, it’s why you started in the first place.
Increase Your Audience Reach
Starting to scale up? If you’re dominating your local market, it may be time to go global. But how do you take your business to new, never-before-reached audiences? If you’re eager to expand to international shores, one thing’s for sure: you must mix up your marketing. This means you’ll have to do things differently to boost your audience reach. Of course, staying true to your original brand mission is still key. But you’ll need to learn about your new audiences and what appeals to them, if you want to be able to reach them.
For this to work, you’ll need to do some audience research. As a business owner, knowing your customer is paramount. How can you get new customers to engage with your product if you don’t know what their interests are? Critically, your new audiences may not have the same values or interests as your current customers. They might not care about the same things. They might not even want to use your product in the same ways, or for the same purposes. That’s why drilling down deep and getting to know the new market you’re trying to break into is essential. What makes these people tick? What do they care about? Perhaps most importantly, what will make them interested in your product? Appealing to a previously untouched audience is all about learning and understanding how their minds work.
Implement an SEO Strategy
As mentioned earlier, scaling up your business involves reaching the right audience. That’s where SEO comes in. When scaling up, you’ll want to put your business in front of as many new eyes as possible. A large part of this involves increasing your online presence and boosting your search visibility when potential customers seek out your services online. What does this mean for you? You need to start ranking in search engine results. Implementing a solid SEO strategy is one of the best ways to do this.
There are different ways to use SEO to boost your business’s visibility and search engine rankings. For starters, on-page SEO – involving elements of keyword optimisation, and technical SEO to meet search engine ranking preferences – is a tried and true strategy. There’s also off-page SEO, and an emerging practice known as link building. The process of building backlinks – links to your website appearing on third-party sites – link building is growing in popularity due to its effectiveness. Admittedly, this strategy is still somewhat of an enigma to many of us – unless you’re an SEO expert, it’s hard to know how to go about it. If you’re not sure, working with a backlink service provider is an easy way to boost your search rankings through quality backlinks.
Grow your Team
Lastly, when your business is starting to scale up, you’ll need more people to help you do all the work. If you’re a licensed beautician with your own beauty salon, for instance, you may be used to servicing all your clients yourself. But with the growing popularity of services like lash extensions, lash lifts, brow laminations and other high-maintenance beauty treatments to help stay low maintenance, your salon may start to need extra pairs of hands to keep on top of your growing roster of appointments.
Once your business starts getting too busy for you to manage on your own – a true reflection of positive growth – it’s time to start seeking out new staff. Consider posting on jobs boards, or if you would prefer someone else to do the hiring for you, enlist the assistance of an employment agency to get the right team members on board to help you continue to grow your business.
Scaling up a business is never a bad thing: bigger goals, higher revenue, and more success – it’s what every aspiring entrepreneur dreams about when first starting their new venture.
But what some people forget is that there are several things you must consider when aiming to scale up your business. You’ll need to grow your team, as well as increase your search engine visibility, and also put in the work to reach new, previously untouched audiences. Most importantly, while you’re scaling up, stay true to your original business plan and remember the reasons why you started in the first place.
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