It’s fair to say that the last few years have presented several notable challenges to businesses in all sectors. The first major challenge came in early 2020 in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, the virus forced millions of businesses to adapt to government movement restrictions and lockdowns. The move to hybrid and fully remote roles needed to take place quickly to ensure business continuity. This was achieved thanks to cloud computing services (which facilitate remote working) and video conferencing and team management platforms to ensure that effective collaboration could occur remotely.
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Today, the major challenges posed due to the pandemic have largely ceased. However, the modern economic climate is now characterized by high levels of inflation, an emerging cost-of-living crisis (which is reducing consumer spending power), and high energy prices.
In this current environment, it can be difficult for businesses to consider growth strategies. For some struggling firms, the key goal is to remain as a viable business concern. However, it’s still achievable to take steps to ensure sustainable business growth in 2024. In this article, some key strategies and tips will be explored that can allow a wide range of businesses to enjoy sustained growth.
Focus on your target market
In any business, regardless of your sector of industry or what you produce, it’s vitally important to have a deep understanding of your target market. Simply put, this is the group (or groups) of consumers that you’re aiming to sell your products or services to.
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Firstly, your firm must undertake comprehensive market research to fully understand the preferences and buying behavior of your target market. This can be achieved by undertaking primary market research or by utilizing existing research that has been published by marketing research experts (such as Mintel).
In addition, it may be beneficial to hold customer focus groups with members of your target market when launching new products. This can help to ensure that your target market will be likely to purchase the product, as your research and the feedback from the focus group will help to fine-tune the product to their preferences.
In short, if you have a deep understanding of your target market, you will be able to tailor your offerings to their needs and likes. This can help your firm to gain substantial revenue streams and repeat customers that will drive your business growth.
Provide exceptional customer service
Modern consumers expect exceptional customer service when they make purchases either online or in physical stores. If they encounter any difficulties or issues when using your products, they will expect a swift reply to their queries and rapid resolutions.
Consider that consistently poor customer service can damage a business in numerous ways. It can negatively affect the brand image of the company (which can also hurt sales figures across a product range) and increase the rate of customer churn (where customers stop making repeat purchases). These are just two negative impacts of poor customer service; in reality, there are many more. Thankfully, customer service can be improved relatively easily to ensure that repeat custom is cultivated and brand image is boosted.
For companies that operate from physical stores, all customer-facing staff should be trained in the best practices of customer service. They need to be attentive and helpful, helping customers to make purchases and being available to answer any queries and questions.
In the world of online business, chatbots are now playing a key role in customer service. This advanced form of AI can understand messages from customers and then direct them to specific FAQ pages that effectively answer their questions or queries. Advanced chatbots can facilitate the rapid resolution of common questions or customer requests, which increases the likelihood of securing continued business from the customer. However, it’s important to recognize that human customer service staff are still required to resolve complex queries and manage complaints.
Manage your cloud operations effectively
When a business is seeking to achieve growth, it will likely need to increase its online operations. Additional cloud-based applications, platforms, and software will need to be rolled out to support online business growth and promote effective operations.
However, as the number of online applications increases, there’s a need to control these digital assets more effectively and monitor traffic requests and security in the cloud-based environment. If your business uses Kubernetes to run your cloud-based business systems, it’s important to use a k8s ingress controller to manage your APIs and clusters of programs. This helps to provide a unified control plane to manage and monitor your online systems, ensuring that they communicate effectively together and work to the highest levels of efficiency.
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Such systems benefit from increased security monitoring, which can also protect your online environment from cybercrime, helping your business avoid costly and brand-damaging remedial actions in the aftermath of a cyber attack. In short, every growing business needs to expand its cloud operations but ensure that the online assets can be monitored and managed effectively.
Retain key staff with comprehensive benefits packages
Finally, it’s important to understand the value of retaining your best and brightest staff when seeking business growth. A company that doesn’t achieve this will suffer from higher rates of employee churn and will need to spend more as part of ongoing recruitment and onboarding activities.
In addition to these costs, if experienced staff leave, the firm will lose some of the industry-specific knowledge and expertise they bring. This can ultimately lead to a less knowledgeable workforce that needs to spend considerable time learning industry best practices and the most effective working methods.
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Thankfully, businesses in all sectors can take action to retain their staff. A key way to do this is by offering all workers a comprehensive employee benefits package. This should go beyond common health benefits and may even include some form of health plan for all the employee’s family members. In addition, subsidized gym memberships, cycle-to-work schemes (where staff can pay a small amount from their wages to get a brand-new bike to commute to work on), and tailored training schemes can all form a high-quality employee benefits package.
In short, comprehensive employee benefits plans can play a vital role in retaining staff, helping any business to keep its best and brightest staff, and using their knowledge to secure business growth.
