Business Growth Strategies for Business Recovery [Video]

2020 was a rough year for a lot of businesses. Now that it’s been over a year of living in the ‘new normal’ everyone is feeling more optimistic. We want to help businesses and organisations look forward and spark some ideas for business growth strategies for business recovery. In this video our Head of Training, Jack Warne, discusses some key business growth strategies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8tFiCzNVFM

Transcript:

It’s been said a number of times by many different people over the last 12 months that 2020 was the hardest year that businesses have faced. It’s been such a challenging year that many businesses sadly haven’t weathered the storm. For those businesses that are continuing to operate and for those that can open their doors again soon, now is the right time to review strategies and ensure that the business continues to move forwards, grow and achieve business goals and targets. In this video we’re going to look at some ways businesses grew last year and discuss some effective proven tactics to help develop your digital marketing strategy. Leave a like if you find this video useful and comment below with any questions and one of the team at Optix Solutions will get back to.

There are businesses that in this past year have achieved huge success. Some of the obvious big brands include Disney, Peloton, and most obviously Zoom. Yes, these businesses are huge, and have huge marketing budgets at their disposal. However, it could also be argued that their businesses were prepared and in a position to meet new consumer and business demands. Disney launched their newest product Disney plus at the end of 2019 and early 2020. In August 2020, Disney plus reached their 5 year subscriber goal, 8 months after the platform launched. Launching a new streaming service at a time where everyone is house bound and desperate for new entertainment to consume is extremely lucky, however, the fact that the business had a product that could be scaled and sold at a fair and accessible price is also a huge part of their success.

Peloton, the high end exercise cycle business, quickly replaced daily trips to the gym. Soaring demand has led to them introducing a new product – a treadmill, that’s targeted at runners. Zoom was a relatively unknown company to a lot of businesses in early 2020, but by the end of the year, the video conference platform is used by most businesses across the globe. That’s not to say that the only businesses that saw and experienced growth in 2020 were global brands with huge marketing budgets.

At Optix Solutions, we’ve also seen success stories from our clients as well. There were 2 factors that largely helped businesses succeed and maintain growth. These were ecommerce and consistent marketing spend. For ecommerce, businesses that already had ecommerce solutions through platforms like Shopify, or Magento were able to continue selling products online, regardless of whether their stores could stay open, or not. In terms of consistent marketing spend, the way that a lot of businesses reacted to the pandemic was to immediately stop or slash their marketing spend. Stopping or minimising marketing spend at a time when the advertising space was less crowded and cheaper allowed other businesses and competitors who didn’t stop marketing to get ahead of the competition and grow and develop their market share.

One of the areas that businesses continued to focus on maintaining was their SEO, ensuring their websites were still being worked on to help improve their ranking in search engine results pages. As a result of continued SEO work, their websites now rank higher in search engines than they did this time last year for relevant search terms and they continue to get new business opportunities as a result of being discovered more consistently by new visitors.

It’s fair to say that not every business was in a position to continue their marketing efforts when the first lockdowns began in early 2020. Every business has different challenges and as a result of this, difficult decisions were made, and for many, reducing marketing spend was a quick and simple way to keep money in the business. More and more businesses now feel more confident about the future and are starting to review their situations and implement new strategies to grow their businesses along with projections they had set out in 2019 and early 2020. The key to implementing these strategies is to be clear on what your goals are and to be realistic in the steps you can take to achieve these goals.

In terms of digital marketing, there are some steps that you should be taking to help to grow your business to where you want it to be. First, you should start with your website. You should run an SEO audit. Identify any errors or issues that are having a negative impact on your website and work on getting these resolved. Your website is the foundation for any digital marketing work that you do so you need to make sure that it works, that it’s easy for visitors to use and navigate AND that it can be discovered for relevant search queries in Google.

Now is also a good time to review the products and services that you offer. For the most part, people and businesses on the whole don’t want to invest in huge projects and lengthy contracts. If you can find a way to break up the services that you offer to make them less risky for businesses to sign off on, you’ll find more businesses that will be willing to work with you.

If you haven’t done so, you should also explore opportunities to sell products online, or offer services online. There are countless examples of businesses creating new opportunities and services for their customers and clients online such as online appointments, webinars, consultations and selling their services as online purchases. This is the best time to try and create a new way for your customers and clients to experience what you do. If we ever face any new challenges again in the future, your business will be in a much better position to continue doing business throughout any adversity. 

It’s an exciting time to be in business. Companies, employees, and colleagues are ready and excited to start building businesses back up again. The first step is recognising that this could happen again and putting measures into place that will benefit your business and keep your business growing regardless of whether you’re working in the office or working from home. 

Let us know if you have any suggestions or ideas for other strategies that we missed and leave a like if you found anything in this video interesting.