How to grow a business

I shortlisted 2 crucial aspects I believe you should be focusing on in order to prepare for growth. I think these 2 aspects are super important so I decided to go quite in-depth.

1. Your team
2. The current stage of your business

Note: in this article, we will deep dive into a couple of very important aspects for growth. The purpose of this article is to stimulate your growth mindset and hopefully trigger some important growth ideas.

Let’s kick off!

1. Your Team

Having a solid team is going to be crucial for your growth.

If you already have a capable Growth Marketing Team and feel you are in safe hands, feel free to skip this point.

However, If you haven’t got a Growth Team or if you believe your current team might need some extra help, I suggest you consider one of the following options:

a) Hire in-house

Hiring in-house is often a good choice. However it can have it’s limitation.

Let’s assume you already have a Growth Team and all you are missing is a Paid Acquisition Manager. In this case, hiring would makes perfect sense! 

However, if you didn’t have a team or if you needed to fulfil multiple roles, then adopting one of the next 3 options might be for you.

b) Upskill your current team 

This always sounds extremely appealing doesn’t it? 

Upskilling however will take time. Also, if your team is at full capacity, asking them to take on more work will clearly stretch them further and eventually have them drop other tasks overtime.

c) Hire a freelancer

The challenge here is similar to hiring in-house option. 

If you are looking to hire into a specific role then it should not be a problem. If however, you are looking to hire across multiple roles (i.e. the whole growth department) it might be tougher. Looking into the agency side of things might be an option for you.

A Growth Team in fact would need to be proficient in the following: analytics, organic, paid acquisition, conversion rate optimisation, marketing automation and more.

d) Contact a growth marketing agency

There are many growth marketing agencies out there. An agency can take full responsibility for your Growth area and work towards your growth goals.

In regards to us (The Growth Hustlers), I would not define us as a traditional Growth Marketing agency. 

We tailor our offering based on your needs and offer our team of Growth Marketing freelancers who will be working together with your team to achieve your growth goals.

Find out more about our services here.

2) The Current Stage of your business

I suggest you hold a meeting with your team with the objective of clearly define the stage you are at. This is a crucial step before you start working on your growth.

• To keep it simple, let’s say there are only 2 stages; 

• • 1) exploratory stage; where you haven’t tested anything yet. You still haven’t learnt much about what works and what doesn’t work (channels, tactics, messaging, creatives, value propositions, landing pages etc).

• • 2) scaling and optimisation stage; where you have already tested channels and tactics. You already have a good understanding of what has worked and what hasn’t. However, you now need to optimise and scale your business.

Let’s take a deep dive into these 2 different stages:

1. Exploratory stage

Assuming you already have a working website, you will want to make sure you have a solid analytics framework in place before you start working on traction testing (testing acquisition channels and tactics). 

Having a strong analytics framework is a really crucial aspect as it will enable you to measure the effectiveness of each marketing activity. 

Feel free to request a free analytics audit here.

The exploratory phase should always start by sitting down and discussing the data and the opportunity for growth.

You will want to have a good testing process in place. Your team will need to work together towards the same objective.

The initial objectives at this stage will be to learn as much as possible in the quickest way possible. (i.e. best working channels, landing pages, value propositions, tactics, personas and more). 

click on the book to buy on Amazon

(what a great book this is!)

You will want to select a few potential growth channels and allocate some budget for testing. The aim is to find out what the average CPA is for each channel you are testing and whether these channels are scalable. 

Make sure you learn something from every test you run and transfer learnings across each activity. (i.e if an Adwords search ad copy has a high click through rate…you might also want to test it on landing pages across the site).

We will publish a blog on traction testing in the next couple of weeks. 

1. Scaling and optimisation stage

This will require some advanced skills (I am not saying that the traction testing phase wont).

It’s less about acquisition testing and more about how Conversion Rate Optimisation, landing page testing, Marketing Automation and referral programs can fit into the mix.

It’s about finding the next opportunity for growth and maximising the working strategies. 

Find out more about CRO in this article we wrote: https://thegrowthhustlers.com/blog/cro-testing-is-gold/

If you were interested in learning more about Marketing Automation read this one: https://thegrowthhustlers.com/blog/marketing-automation/

In short: start considering other growth areas. Does your team have enough capacity? Or would you like to have a chat about any project based work? 

I really hope this helps. There are plenty of more points we would have to cover, so many we could write a whole book. We will publish more in the next blogs. 

I believe these couple of points will really get you thinking about growth and how to approach it.

Please always feel free to get in touch.

May Growth Be With You!