6 key areas to focus on that drive lasting business growth

Make this year the year you buckle down and make some critical changes to drive lasting growth in the six key areas covered below.

Before we get started, you might be looking for an extra cash boost to achieve your growth goals in the new year. Look no further than our loan finder to easily explore business financing solutions tailored to your needs.

Let's dive in:

1. Customer communications

If you’re still slapping content together hoping it will stick, this is the year to start looking more closely at your audience. Figure out how to resonate on a deeper level, and remember: it’s all about them. So your style of communication should be guided by data.

Brainstorm and test different types of content—as well as the presentation and scheduling of that content—and allow the test results to inform your decisions. Even seemingly simple things like a new colour palette or CTA change could make a huge difference to your conversion rate.

If you don’t have personas created for your brand this is also a good time to set up profiles of your typical customers so you can better understand their needs and plan out a more meaningful communication strategy with them.

Once you’ve researched, created detailed personas and set up relevant experiments, don’t forget to come back to analyse the results and let it decide how you’ll communicate to your key audiences moving forward.

2. Alignment between sales and marketing

Often, sales and marketing don’t talk to each other often enough and lack consistent, effective communication. This means both teams are missing out on conversion opportunities and higher quality leads.

Ideally, sales would inform marketing on what makes a quality lead so that marketing can work on attracting more of them. This makes everyone’s job easier: selling becomes faster and marketing more effective. But without the right processes in place, short-term priorities take hold and teams go back to operating in isolation.

Keeping communication open between teams is a good start, but you’ll also want to prioritise a consistent feedback loop (potentially a weekly or monthly meeting) between sales and marketing to step through the recent results and future roadmap, in order to maximise growth and conversion opportunities.

3. Personalisation

Personalising your communications is a great way to retain existing customers while reaching new ones. Rather than treating each customer as a number, the goal is to make them feel like an individual with unique needs, desires and challenges that you can help solve.

The first step is understanding who your customer is, and then communicating to them in a relevant way. For example, having different email templates for people in different states or industries.

A few tips on personalising your communications:

• Study your customers in detail and learn all about their biggest pain points
• Humanise your brand (i.e. be approachable and authentic) and ensure your method and style of communications is relevant to your key audience
• Recommend new products based on your customer’s previous interactions and purchase history

4. Data

Many business owners make decisions based on their personal opinions, past experiences and gut instincts, and while understandable, this doesn’t always result in the best outcomes.

A proposed strategy is not guaranteed to solve the problem it’s supposed to, and implementation takes time and requires resources.

Why not test your strategy before implementing it? By dipping your toes in first by sending out to a small & limited audience, you can get a feel for how things will pan out and potentially save a bunch of time and money. Use the data you receive to determine whether your strategy should indeed be actioned, tweaked or re-evaluated.

5. Your team

Your team is your biggest asset and crucial to success. It’s more important than ever to look out for your employees’ wellbeing and their mental health, especially following the pandemic.

Employees who feel genuinely supported (not only as professionals but individuals) do their best work, are more motivated and feel more connected to their team and company. They will give you their all and be present with you during each milestone.

6. Profit growth

Of course, the biggest goal for business owners year in and out is to become more profitable. You’re here to make money, and a healthy business can keep operating at its full potential.

Whether you need to buy new business equipment, upskill, implement a new process or build out teams, working smarter rather than harder can help boost productivity and efficiency, which in turn helps you to build momentum.

Preparing for achievable milestones

With a few ideas on where to focus in the new year, it’s time to put pen to paper and create achievable goals that will further define your strategy. Creating SMARTER goals can help you turn your business plans into reality.

SMARTER goals are:

• Specific: Is your goal clear and defined? What challenges might you run into?
• Measurable: How do you know you’ve succeeded?
• Achievable: Is it realistically possible to achieve this goal?
• Relevant: What will achieving this goal mean for you/your business? Is it worthwhile?
• Time bound: Should you create a timeline? If so, how much time do you need?
• Evaluated: Are you on track? What’s working and what isn’t?
• Reviewed: Are you hitting a wall? If so, this doesn’t make your goal inherently flawed, it just means you need to re-think how you’ll achieve it.

Whether it’s to grow, solve cash flow issues or grab that new asset you have your eye on, get in touch for all your business finance needs.