With the New Year upon us, it’s that point of 12 months if you’re putting the ultimate touches in your marketing strategies for the 12 months ahead.
But have you ever got your broader business growth plan sorted for 2024?
Your marketing strategies are super-important, especially at the moment of 12 months. But should you want to grow what you are promoting and sustain that growth, you would like to take into consideration your long-term goals.
To assist you to get your plan together for 2024, our Growth Marketing Specialists at Damteq have written this text that explains exactly what goes into creating a solid growth strategy.
So, let’s get into it.
What is a Growth Plan?
First things first, what actually is a growth plan?
Well, it’s exactly because the name suggests. A growth plan is the strategic steps and actions you would like to take to reach your goals and grow what you are promoting. To create a comprehensive growth plan, you would like to optimise the core areas of what you are promoting in order that they work in harmony. Things like your operations, finance, marketing, sales and recruitment need to come together to form a holistic and full-encompassed growth plan.
You need to discover how these areas of what you are promoting are performing and the way they need to be optimised to assist you to reach your growth goals. Once you’ve got a solid growth plan, you should use it as a roadmap for reaching what you are promoting goals and achieving growth.
Why Do You Need a Growth Plan?
Putting a solid growth plan together and sharing it with the people in what you are promoting ensures that everyone seems to be collectively working towards the identical goals and understands their roles and responsibilities in keeping your growth strategy heading in the right direction.
As a specialist growth marketing agency, we’ve often had recent clients say, “We’ve been investing heavily in our marketing and trying to recruit like mad, but as fast as we grow, we get set back.” Quite a lot of these clients may have the identical problem. They underestimate what goes into creating sustainable growth.
Sure, you’ll be able to deal with upping marketing spend and hiring more people, but there’s more to business growth than that.
Even should you’re investing massively into your increasing sales and recruitment, without solid financial processes or training resources, profits can get overspent, people will leave, and also you’ll find yourself right back where you began – expect you’ll be months behind your competitors.
That’s why having a growth plan is so essential. It helps you discover the steps you would like to take to grow and systemise different areas of what you are promoting to achieve and sustain your growth.
How to Create a Growth Plan for Your Business
Set Your Goals and Objectives
The first step in creating your growth plan is setting realistic, long-term goals for what you are promoting growth and the shorter-term objectives that may assist you to get there.
For example, in case your growth goal is to grow what you are promoting by 150% over the following 5 years, the short-term objectives might appear to be this:
- Launch a recent services or products that fills a gap out there in the following 12 months
- Increase MRR by 20% over the following 12 months through targeted campaigns and promotions
- Improve customer retention rates by 15% inside the following 2 years through higher customer support and loyalty programs
- Expand into recent geographic markets inside the following 3 years, reminiscent of international markets or regions inside your country that haven’t been tapped yet
- Increase investments in areas like recruitment, training, and worker advantages
By creating realistic goals and breaking them down into more digestible, short-term objectives, you’ll be able to make a clear and logical plan to grow what you are promoting.
Conduct Your Research and Analysis
Analysing what you are promoting performance and conducting market and customer research is important for creating a strong growth plan.
Quite a lot of businesses gloss over these steps or ignore the findings of their research and just do what they did the 12 months before after which wonder why they’re not growing. To create a solid growth plan, you would like to analyse your strategies and performance, conduct competitor research and evaluation, and look for ways to optimise what you are promoting processes.
Here’s a short list of just a few of the sorts of research you would like to take a look at:
- SWOT analyses of what you are promoting
- Competitor research and evaluation
- Market and customer research
- Measuring and understanding your marketing performance
- Analysing website traffic and engagement
- Looking at your financial profile and efficiency
- Analysing the best way you’re employed and optimise your operational processes
Understanding the information behind each of those areas gives you a higher idea of where what you are promoting is performing well and where you’re struggling so you can create a clear and efficient growth plan for 2024.
Map Out Your Strategy
Once you’ve set your goals and carried out your research, it’s time to start putting your growth strategy together – here’s what you would like to take a look at:
- Set your priorities: To achieve your goals, you would like to prioritise the fitting actions. If your plan is to reach specific revenue and staffing goals, then prioritise actions related to marketing, sales, recruitment, and training. But remember, to sustain your growth, you’ll also need to adapt your operational and financial processes as you grow.
- Create a detailed motion plan: With the planning done, goals created, and priorities set, you would like to map out the particular actions you’ll need to take to reach those goals. Focus on the shorter-term actions and projects that may assist you to reach your long-term goals.
- Allocate enough budget and resources: There’s no point doing a great deal of research, planning, and impressive goal-setting just to fall at the primary hurdle since you haven’t invested enough time, money, or resources into making it work. Set a realistic budget, and allocate enough time and staff resources to make your strategy work. Make sure to often review performance to ensure your resources are directed to the fitting places.
- Keep your strategy flexible: Business is unpredictable. Even with extensive forecasting and strategy creation, sometimes things don’t go to plan. That’s why you’ve at all times got to be flexible together with your growth plan and adapt it when needed. If your KPIs show your strategy isn’t working, change it!
Create a Realistic Goal Timeline
Don’t underestimate how long it’ll take to reach your goals.
We’ve seen it so again and again; businesses want to skyrocket their growth inside just a month or two and lose sight of the larger picture. Sustainable growth takes time, and should you make knee-jerk changes to your strategies since you’re not seeing results immediately, then you definitely’re never going to grow what you are promoting. Be realistic together with your goals. Think of your plans for long-term growth and break them down into smaller, short-term actions you can progress through.
Track Your Progress and Optimise
Tracking your progress and optimising as you go helps steer what you are promoting in the fitting direction, and it’s a smart way to stay up to the mark and keep you heading in the right direction to reach your goals.
Even with the best-laid plans, you’ll be able to sometimes go a little astray. That’s business for you!
But should you’re not tracking your progress, it may be weeks or months before you realise you’re astray, and by that time, it’s too late to recuperate and reach your goals in your original timeline.
Keep taking a look at the information and your processes, and ask yourself: Are sales going up? Are expenses under control? Are we completing the short-term actions that may help us reach our goals? If you notice any issues, you’ll be able to fix them before they turn into major headaches.
Need Help Getting Your Growth Plan in Place for 2024?
If you wish to get your Growth Plan together for 2024 but don’t know where to start, get booked for a Free 1-to-1 Strategy Workshop at Damteq’s Fareham HQ!
In your bespoke, 90-minute session, you’ll sit down with our Founder, Adam Smith, and a few of our Business Growth Specialists, who will analyse your current strategy and assist you to construct a strong growth plan that may assist you to overcome your marketing challenges and achieve sustainable growth in 2024.
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