The new year often brings around a change in our personal and professional lives. However, while we often abandon new year’s resolutions as soon as we’ve established them, we tend to be a little more focused when actioning business goals.
This means that now is the perfect time to focus on growing or expanding your company – especially as the current economic climate will likely demand this from you in order to stay afloat.
With that in mind, here are some steps you should follow to grow your business in 2023.
Refine Your Business Plan.
Your business plan serves as the foundation of your success, as it provides you with a sense of both focus and purpose. Without a business plan, you will lack the direction required to achieve your goals, no matter how big or small they may be.
As such, you can start off the new year on the right foot by working on your business plan. Ensure that it contains details on everything from your customer acquisition plan to product development. If you find it hard to put together this kind of document, consider hiring a business plan writer.
Use Social Media To Your Advantage.
Many marketing trends fall in and out of fashion – but it’s clear that social media is not going anywhere soon. In fact, the average person spends approximately 2 hours and 29 minutes on social media every day. As such, if you want to grow your business, you must learn how to leverage social media marketing for your business. This way, you can increase your reach, grow your customer base, and improve your bottom line.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ways in which you can grow your social media following. For example, you could put together a content schedule so that you are posting more consistently.
Outsource In Order To Grow.
Outsourcing is one of the easiest ways to set yourself up for success. This is because it means that you’re no longer agonizing over tasks that fall outside of your skillset, giving you the chance to focus your energy elsewhere. Furthemore, the tasks that you outsource will be carried out by a professional, meaning they’ll always be completed to a high standard.
Fortunately, you can outsource everything from social media marketing to business it support, depending on what kind of business you are running. However, the latter can prove to be particularly beneficial in the digital world. Whether you have employees working remotely or within the office, IT support helps keep your business operating smoothly.
Keep Your Employees Happy.
Your employees are the backbone of your business – as without them, you would not be able to manage your workload and retain your current customer base. As a result, their satisfaction is often integral to your overall success. This boils down to the simple fact that employees who are disengaged are less focused, less productive, and more likely to make mistakes.
Conversely, “positive workplace satisfaction boosts productivity by 31% – with unhappy workers’ performance a full 10% less productive than their content colleagues.” Fortunately, ther are many ways in which you can boost employee satisfaction and engagement, whether that be through providing them with access to training and development opportunities, curating a reward scheme, or simply offering them praise.
Paint A Better Picture Of Your Target Audience.
Identifying your target audience is likely one of the very first things you did upon deciding to run your own company. After all, everything from your branding to your product catalog is built around your target consumer in order to reel them in. However, as consumer habits change on the daily, its easy to become somewhat distanced from your original target. Bridging this distance will enable you to remain competitive and encourage loyalty.
You can get to know your customers better by hosting focus groups, where they are given the chance to discuss new products and more. Alternatively, you could ask customers to complete a short feedback form after buying something from your store (online or in person). This way, you are receiving consistent feedback that you can use to your advantage.
Go Green.
Growing your business often means growing your customer base, which means you must be able to tap into consumer trends and demands in the coming months. One of the biggest trends in recent years is a push toward environmentalism that has left customers on the lookout for eco-friendly businesses to support. In fact, a recent study has found that 81% of people prefer to buy from sustainable sellers.
There are, again, many ways you can work toward this goal in 2023 (and beyond). For example, you could replace your current packaging with eco-friendly and technically sustainable packaging or work on your waste disposal policy. Alternatively, you could work towards minimizing your businesses’ impact on the environment by switching to solar energy.
Try New Things.
When running a business, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of repeat behaviors or to use the same strategies time and time again. After all, if something works and helps you generate income, it seems like you’d be silly to suddenly change your approach. However, getting stuck in this kind of mindset can cause your business to stagnate. For example, if you do not launch any new products and instead offer the same few things to your customers again and again, their attention will quickly go elsewhere.
As such, you should be open to new things and innovation if you want to grow in 2023. This will help you stay ahead of the competition while also maximizing customer satisfaction rates.
Heighten Productivity.
Poor productivity can often squander business growth, as it limits the amount of work that you (or your team) can carry out in a given day/week. Consequently, you must be able to identify the mistakes that kill your productivity so that you’re able to eliminate them altogether or at least minimize their impact.
For example, if you find that your productivity is hampered by the fact you simply have too much to do, you need to find ways to streamline your workload. This could mean that you hire new staff or work on delegating duties instead of trying to do everything yourself. Alternatively, you might want to automate the tasks that take up a lot of your time.
Show Your Personality.
The stronger your relationship with your existing customer base, the easier it will be to grow your business. This is because they will help you to generate income through both repeat custom and word-of-mouth marketing. As a result, now is the perfect time to focus on developing a better relationship with your customers. One way you can do this is by adding a more human touch to your business operations so they feel as though they know the faces behind the brand.
One way in which you can make your business more personable is by including an ‘About Us’ page on your website. You should also make sure that you are polite and friendly when speaking to clients (online or in person). Where possible, try to refer to them by name as “It makes your words more personal and is interpreted as being caring and empathic. Naturally using your customer’s name will build strong bonds that are hard to break.”
Learn from your mistakes.
Often, your job as a business owner is to stop mistakes in their tracks. However, while we can reduce their frequency through careful pre-planning, its important to note that some mistakes are simply inevitable. In fact, its better to focus on how you respond to mistakes than on how to avoid them.
For example, if your response to an error is to try and deny that it ever occurred, this is not best practice for your business. Not only will it lead to an onslaught of customer complaints, it could also leadto problems further down the line as addressing issues gives you the chance to resolve them quickly and efficiently.
As such, you should endevor to learn from your mistakes in the new year. Each mistake is an opportunity to discover something new, and make positive change. This means that mistakes could actually be instrumental to your growth!
Final Thoughts.
As evidenced above, there are many steps you can follow to grow your business in the new year. However, perhaps the best peice of advice to carry with you in the coming months is that you must remain both focused and optimistic.
After all, focus will provide you with a sense of direction, even on those days where everything seems to be going wrong. Optimism will fill you with confidence, helping you look on the bright side and maing it that much easier to get up and get working each morning.
Fortunately, both optimism and focus can be infectious within the workplace – meaning that the more optimistic and focused you are as a leader, the easier it will be for your employees to develop a similar mindset. You can then work together to grow your business.
