As a local business owner, you’ve developed the skill to spot a marketing scam or gimmick from a mile away. You’re done with the agencies promising quick success and delivering mediocre results, leaving you with little-to-no control over integral business decisions. You want real business growth.
Local businesses are constantly looking for different ways to grow their businesses and drive more revenue. Unsurprisingly, organic growth is one of the best and most efficient ways to grow your business over time. But how do you get started?
Below are all the tips and tricks to help you understand and achieve organic business growth with less effort and stress. First, we’ll explain the basics and then share our favorite strategies.
What Is Organic Growth?
Essentially, organic growth is the growth you achieve through internal strategies and efforts. Aka, growth achieved from efficiently and effectively using your company’s available resources. This can include any investment in content, customer service, sales, and more.
Organic growth happens over time and centers around enhancing sales internally. For example, you might:
- Hires/train new staff
- Build new stores
- Establish production plants
- Expands marketing initiatives
- Develop products with your workforce
Benefits of Organic Growth
Organic growth is attractive because it involves scaling a business without the need to drive additional resources to increase sales, customers, and outputs. Of course, it takes time to become profitable with internal resources alone. There’s always a chance that a fast-moving startup might pass you in the short game. However, organic growth typically generates more value in the long run and has a host of important benefits.
Benefits of organic growth:
1. Gives You Control
Because organic growth strategies remove third parties, you have direct control over key business and brand decisions. You can also typically pivot more quickly, making for an adaptable business model.
2. Drives New Customers
Organic growth improves all facets of your business, attracting new customers who come from a variety of backgrounds and markets. This leads to significant revenue growth.
3. Contributes to Company’s Financial Health
Organic growth helps your company only put cash where it’s actually needed. It helps you avoid debt and mitigate risk by ensuring your investments go toward stable and predictable efforts and outcomes.
Organic Growth vs. Inorganic Growth: Key Differences
While organic growth relies on internal growth, inorganic growth uses resources outside of a company’s means to drive more sales and outputs. It relies on outside capital, such as taking loans or entering into mergers/acquisitions. While inorganic growth is much faster and often wields greater financial power, it also comes with its own downsides:
- It requires a lot of money.
- Combining operations rarely goes smoothly.
- In takeovers, employees are often terminated.
- Systems might be incompatible causing delays.
Organic growth is a better strategy than inorganic growth for local and growing businesses because it’s more efficient, it suits your budget, and it’s sustainable. You already have assets, people with know-how, and an established brand—all of which give you a significant advantage.
Organic Growth: 5 Strategies for Success
There are many strategies to help you drive organic growth—here are five of our favorites.
1. Reduce Costs
Pull out your budget breakdowns, it’s time to do an audit. Reducing costs has a direct effect on your business operations, allowing you to allocate valuable resources to areas that might have a greater return. Invest in improving your customer experience and website lead-driving tools, such as text and website chat.
2. Improve Work Efficiency
Examine your business operations and performance metrics with optimization in mind. Ask the following:
- Are you wasting valuable time in meetings that have little impact?
- Are your employees failing to look into client history before assisting them?
- Are you still using a landline or email instead of using a VOIP system or text when communicating with your customers and staff?
- Could you benefit from routing all employee and client texts to one place?
3. Focus on a Well-Defined Niche
To grow organically, your focus needs to be narrow and established. Pinpoint what it is that makes you appealing to certain sectors and differentiates you from your competition. (Bonus if you can find a niche with underserved or unmet needs.) And make sure your social media marketing reflects the specificities of your offerings. For example, Coca-Cola markets Diet Coke specifically to health-conscious individuals as a diet-friendly product.
4. Research Your Target Clients
One of the best organic growth marketing strategies is really understanding your target audience. There’s a good chance that you’re offering a great customer experience and product but are missing a key portion of your target demographic because you haven’t done your homework. Create detailed customer profiles that outline your ideal customers. Thoroughly analyze buyer history, create focus groups, get feedback in person or via text, and examine your competitors.
5. Develop a New Product
You might think you don’t have time for product development—but progress is crucial for the health and growth of your business. This strategy can often piggyback off of the work you do researching your target clients as you determine what they want and need. Perhaps you tweak an old product and re-introduce it to increase your market share, or promote a new service that targets a specific demographic that you’re missing.
Marketing Strategies to Accomplish Organic Growth
Investing in low-cost marketing efforts and growth solutions is another way to improve organic growth. This can drive more sales to your business without significant investments. Here are a few low-budget marketing strategies to achieve organic growth.
Did you know that text is one of the fastest ways to achieve growth? Text has a 209% higher response rate than phone, email, or even Facebook. Customers are twice as likely (1.8x) as likely to prefer it to other communication channels, and over 65% think it makes working with local businesses more convenient.
By using text for appointment setting and confirmations, review invites, follow-up, inventory updates, shipping updates, promotions, and even payments, you can drive and retain customers with unparalleled convenience and engagement. The trick is knowing what to send and when. For templates and pro tips, check out our library of 500 ready-to-use texting templates.
2. Customer Reviews
70% of customers say online reviews are more important to them than ever. Almost a quarter have read an online review in the past day, and 60% in the past week. That’s a lot of influence.
If you want to improve your growth rate, focus on getting quality reviews and lots of them. Showcase them on your homepage, respond to them on Google and local sites where your business is listed, and ask for them at the right time in your customer journey. If you really want to tip the scales, you can make leaving reviews ultimately convenient by sending customers a text that has a link to review. For tips, check out More reviews. More business for you and our review link generator: Free Google Review Link Generator – Easy to Send – Podium.
3. Referral Programs
Want to know how to grow organically through your current customer base? Referral programs help you turn your customers into your best marketing tool by rewarding them for sharing what they already love about you. Of course, the trick is to have an outstanding customer experience so that customers will already want to market for you. There are a lot of ways you can do this. Dropbox’s referral program offers 500 MB of extra storage for customers who refer. Swagbucks offers 10% of your referral’s earnings, encouraging you to invite lots of friends to use the site consistently.
4. Customer Retention
A high retention strategy is one of the most important ways to keep growing your business. Often, this involves overdelivering on the three things your customers care about—being 1.) quick, 2.) clear, and 3.) kind.
And even if you don’t have the answer they’re looking for right away, say something like, “Good question, I’ll find out and let you know ASAP!” so they know you hear them and are working on resolving their challenge. Show empathy and be honest and transparent—that’s what your customers want.
For more marketing strategy ideas and examples of organic growth, check out this guide.
Regardless of your business’s budget, you can take advantage of organic growth opportunities right now. Check out Podium’s suite of messaging tools to get what you need for high growth.
