Defining a roadmap for business growth
A roadmap shows an overall plan with activities on a timeline meant to achieve a specific goal. Defining a roadmap for an online business growth involves:
- Identifying specific goals and objectives related to growth
- Identifying activities that are meant to achieve growth goals
- Identifying key milestones
- Timeline for those activities
Establishing goals for business growth
A business’s growth goals can include any of the following. A business should define the specific activities related to each one of the following to meet its goals and objectives.
- Increase Audience – This involves activities related to growing a business’s audience. Most start-up businesses that are still struggling to mature their products and services focus on increasing their audience base first before they start focusing on getting revenues.
- Increase revenues – This has to do with the urgency of increasing revenues. If a business already has products and services, it can have this as a goal for business growth.
- Building the technological foundations – Depending on the business type, a business may need to invest in its technological foundation before it can dream of increasing sales and revenues. There are numerous examples in the market that prove that organizations who went after enormous sales before strengthening their technology platforms didn’t survive in the long run. This is because their backend systems were not equipped to handle large volumes of traffic, backend fulfillment processes, customer service, and so on. (Click here for online training and courses on growing an online business)
Online channels for business growth
To accomplish the above goals for business growth, businesses can use the following channels:
- Social media – Using social media to acquire more traffic, increase number of leads, and even sell online.
- Online advertising – Investing in online advertising platforms such as Adwords, Bing Ads, etc. to increase a business’s online reach as well as to increase revenues.
- Content marketing – Invest in content marketing activities to increase user engagement and social media fan base. Having a dedicated base of followers and subscribers provides the foundation to sell more products and services.
- Insights and analytics – Getting deeper insights from analytics about business growth and to use those insights to make changes in business strategy growth.
Mistakes in business growth strategies
Common mistakes related to achieving business growth include:
- Not being specific about growth – The problem with this approach is that as a result they are not able to be prioritize activities related to growth. For example, not all businesses may want to focus on immediate revenue generation activities knowing that this may not be practical or they may not have the support systems to absorb more orders and revenue. These businesses instead may focus on generating leads or developing a fan base first. Prioritization of business growth activities therefore requires setting goals and then on identifying specific activities related to meeting of those business goals.
- Not tracking roadmap milestones – Establishing of a business roadmap should always be followed with tracking progress against the roadmap to ensure that the business is taking the right steps in the right direction to meet business growth goals.
- End
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