Category: Video Marketing
With statistics showing 70% startups finding it hard to scale their business, it is easy to go wrong. If you’re amateur trying to transition from scale your business from growth, we have an action-packed article chock full of what you need to start scaling right away.
Scaling does not replace growth, but focuses on it exclusively using strategic action plans. According to a recent study, startups that succeed with scaling, are known to raise upwards of 250% more money than they anticipated. The same study reveals that successful businesses who used scaling had upwards of 360% of user growth too!
But, if both growth and scaling strategies increase your revenue, what makes them distinct? The smartest business minds have cracked it already. Are you ready to learn how to scale your business into a viral product?
Growth and Scaling Explained
There are four strategies or stages for succeeding in any business today; they are
- Launch
- Growth
- Sustain
- Scale
When developed into effective strategies, these four steps help businesses to effortlessly transition from one to another for formulated success.
What is Growth?
The percentile increase of benefits is referred to as growth in corporate lingo. It is the immediate stage after implementation where resources and revenue are equally added to the business.
The best strategy to focus on after launching your product, growth is inevitable to the success of any business.
Most businesses follow the model of growth to progress. To increase their profits, companies add more resources such as staff and raw materials for boosting the total products they make or clients they take.
What is Scaling?
Once you’ve established consistent growth, it is time to reduce the principal costs and add more to your profits and revenue. Scaling in terms of business is creating a sustainable growth that does not eat up all your resources or revenue to expand. It increases the revenue by simultaneously bringing down the total cost of operations.
Efficiency and replicable capabilities make a company sustainable. Scaling is a strategy to hone your skills of becoming an expert in what you do. Often, companies are stuck at the stage of growth without funds or direction due to their lack of planning for scaling.
Streamlining the Differences: Growth Vs Scaling
You must start with growth, but always aim at scaling your business architecture as it is the way great entrepreneurs make their mark.
Change is an inevitable guest that comes with growth. Millions of new startups are born every day across the world. But, very few remain or even become an industry expert. You must learn to welcome the change as unplanned changes can be costly such as in the case of Zappos who had to let go of 15% staff during their transitional stage in sustainability!
1. Resource and revenue
The most straightforward difference between growth and scaling in business is the total resources and revenue generated. In a growth strategy, a business has to offer high resources for a fixed revenue but once you scale the business, your revenue grows exponentially in addition to saving the resources.
2. Volume in growth ncreases when you scale
While growing a business changes the structure of your business plan, it can welcome a static or fixed growth too. On the other hand, scaling makes you grow into a big business by multiplying your growth without sacrificing on resources.
The volume in the growth of a business is the chief effect of scaling, also referred to as long term growth.
3. Scaling systems can manage themselves
While the growth of a business is measured as a single entity, scale analyzes multiple parameters. Many businesses neglect the necessity of a clear structure when they are starting out and often end up quickly overwhelmed in the face of growth.
Scaling teaches you ways to sustain the business with more ROI while using fewer resources. A growing company will find it hard to manage itself in the face of emergencies, while a scaling business can face boon or bane in calm.
4. Risk Management
Growing comes with a lot of unplanned risks as you’re unaware of the algorithms that might affect your rate of success or failure. When you begin to scale the business, risk management comes as the insurance for your success. Scaling will help you focus earnestly on the critical tasks without compromising on your resources or revenue.
Businesses aiming to cut down the risk with scaling require the creation of risk assessments too. Hence, scaling can help you cope with the risks better than in a growth strategy. Moreover, it will make expansion easier in the near future as well.
5. Recurring Customers and Revenue
When observed exclusively, the growth of a company is based on the new customers it generates. However, scaling the business can help create sustainability by bringing in repeat customers.
The aggregate result of standardizing the business and creating repeat processes using scaling makes your business efficient and fast. As a result, you create recurring revenue by establishing repeated actions with more ease. The repeatable business architecture of scaling relies on automated services and outsourcing.
Successful Strategies for Scaling your Business
If your business is a rising startup, you might want to scale your business before it’s too late. Scaling helps to generate the revenue faster than it does with straightforward growth. The scaling strategy will give you more time to exponentially grow your business without relying on bulk resources.
1. Assess your Capacity to Scale
Not all companies are easily scalable and change can often cost more than you’ve bargained for! Create a database listing the capacity of hours, work, staff or budget you can put in for scaling processes.
To assess your capacity to scale, you must actively make plans based on your future goals. Then move forward with designing the best business architecture that you can based on these goals.
2. Create Realistic Plans and Estimates
Another way to create substantial scaling structure for a business is by revamping disoriented visions and missions of the company.
Often, companies spend more time and resources in decorating the working ethics that they forget to draft tangible data on the target reach and financial future of the company. Replace meaningless statements to create effective estimates of the budget and resources you aim to achieve. To do so, start by studying your target audience.
Wal-mart is one of the smartest businesses that drafted a realistic scaling for better reach. Instead of chasing big cities for a rapid growth of revenue, Wal-Mart targeted the small markets in the Midwestern demographics. This way, the supermarket mogul saved energy and money to compete with fierce markets such a K-Mart and chose horizons sure to win!
3. Standardize Work Habits
Many amateur entrepreneurs aim at scaling with the misconception that standardization limits creativity. Habits are scientifically proven to ease up the brain, helping it to focus on graver things.
In the same way, by creating regular routines and streamlining processes, you will save time, energy and money. Using automated processes for everything from project management to marketing to social media can help you focus on the newer possibilities for applying sustainability to your business.
In fact, opposite to the consensus, standardization nurtures creativity. Moreover, automated tools are renowned for giving deeper insights about the customer engagement ratio of any business nowadays.
4. Re-establish the Personality of your Business
Referred to as core competence by Forbes, scaling can be used to focus growth by harnessing the core traits of the business.
You must revamp the aims of your company to gain the competitive strength in what you’re best at, depending on the market you’re aiming to penetrate. To exemplify an imaginary way to implement any strategy, you can start by hiring people with an expertise in interior designing, if you’re starting an interior designing firm.
Blackberry is one of the infamous failures in the corporate sector. It failed due to lack of realistic vision, which led them to ignore the likes and dislikes of the emerging mobile audience.
5. Collaboration Network
Another way to scale your resources for an exponential increase in revenue is by collaborating with other market partners and distributors who can uplift your business. You can begin by building a collaborative team or staff and then extend your community to established companies who would vouch for your services.
Collaborating with industry experts gives you a better edge over the competitors as well as the target reach. It can even open your product to new types of customers!
When you venture outside the business for collaboration, it creates professional alliances as well. Up to 60% startups work together and gain cost-efficiency to cross promotions and marketing bonuses. A successful scaling can be seen when Apple collaborated with Nike for producing fitness accessories for a mixed demographic!
In a Nutshell
We obviously recommend scaling your business if you haven’t started already. So, if you’re finding it hard to figure out distinct traits that signify the functionality of scaling over growth for businesses, now you have your answer. Oh, and you also have a few little bits of actionable advice as well because these five strategies above are customized to help businesses just like yours.
Sources
https://www.conversational.com/the-difference-between-growth-vs-scaling/
http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/small-business-collaboration/#827Ut2Ooz8qd
https://www.businessbusinessbusiness.com.au/growth-vs-scale-business/
https://joshlowryblog.com/2012/03/15/what-does-scale-mean-in-business/
http://www.edisonpartners.com/blog/5-strategies-scaling-growth
http://www.aberdeenessentials.com/cfo-essentials/scale-vs-growth-for-the-midsize-enterprise/
https://www.fundable.com/blog/post/growth-vs-scaling
https://www.techstars.com/content/homepage/statistics-scaling-startups-growth/
https://productive.speedlancer.com/what-does-it-actually-mean-to-scale-your-startup-8cc17682b28e
https://shockwaveinnovations.com/2013/03/16/the-difference-between-growth-and-scalability/
https://hbr.org/2016/07/midsize-companies-shouldnt-confuse-growth-with-scaling
I am presuming that most of us are Google users here. I practically Google anything under the sun. And if you notice, when a person conducts a Google search on a movie or celebrity, the search typically provides the web results along with a social media post right from the brand at the highest rank of the search engine result page (SERP). What does that mean? What in it for us Digital Marketers? Well let me tell you, the top of the SERP list is a great way for a brand to remain visible and drive traffic to a website. Although top SERP results have worked in the past to increase traffic, today, Google Posts is a powerful new feature that enhances the SERP results and is available to any business that has a Google My Business account.
Google Post: What is it?
Google Posts is an innovative and exciting way for a brand to maintain communication with new and existing customers. It is free for all Google My Business account holders and it presents businesses with the opportunity to promote events and highlight vital happenings related to the business. And yes! It is completely free of charge. It is a straightforward way for businesses to share and engage with clients and it acts like sort of a free advertising strategy.
Unlike social media posts like Facebook, which requires a user to like a page first, Google Posts are automatic and appear on the Google search, meaning that clients do not have to go to a company website to access the new information. Businesses can add fresh content and communicate directly with clients on the SERP without the need of redirecting them to another platform.
Why Google Posts?
You might wonder what’s the difference with posting for your clients in the Social media? First, It is FREE to all Google My Business customers. And for something free of charge, it offers the ability to promote events and highlight important things happening to your clients. It’s way to share content to your client’s target audience. Bottom line is, It is FREE advertising. Need I say more?
Stay Ahead of the Game! Make finding you easy and convenient. Add fresh content and engage with your customers right on the SERP without the trouble of redirecting them to a different page. A simple Google search will make your customers find your latest promotions or events without visiting their website. No need to like pages before seeing updates. Google posts are instant and it shows automatically in a Google Search.
Increase online visibility! Google Posts content will automatically appear high on the SERP. Create regular posts for business and increase your chances to have Search engines pay more attention to your listings. Google Posts is a new cool feature. It is a quick-win to improve clients’ranking.
The value of Google posts:
Generating traffic
These posts present a great opportunity for businesses to become more visible in a crowded SERP. Businesses can now target new and existing customers with timely content catered specifically to the business. When posting Google Posts, ensure to keep your posts short and to the point that have compelling descriptions with eye catching images. Google Posts resemble mini blogs.
Characteristics of Google Posts:
- Images/ photos: images are cropped so it is essential to take note of dimensions. Videos and GIFs are not yet supported.
- Content: content can be 100-300 words long but only the first 100 characters will show up on the knowledge panel.
- Call to action- terms such as sign up now, read now, etc.
What to post on Google Posts:
- Events: you can provide relevant information such as dates, free sign up or even reserving and buying tickets.
- Product promotion: you can promote upcoming sales offer discount codes and images of new goods.
- Daily specials: specials or in-store promotions can also be added on Google Posts.
- Promote your brand: these posts are great for promoting new blogging content as a way of increasing traffic to your site.
Marketing trends are seemingly impossible to keep up with today, which makes it harder for businesses to incorporate them into their marketing strategies and plans particularly on a small budget. This year, instead of concentrating on trying to do it all, businesses should select just a few of the trends to try out. A refreshed strategy may be all your business needs to improve engagement levels, boost impressions and ensure that your marketing plans are a success. Here are some of the 5 things that should be included in every marketing campaign:
Video marketing tests
Video marketing is one of the fastest ways of boosting your marketing plan to ensure its success and efficiency. A large number of marketers are planning on increasing their mobile ad budgets to accommodate videos. 2017 is a great year to test out your marketing chops to see what elements excite your audiences the most. A variety of video options to try for a range of budgets include social media videos, which include Facebook Live, Snapchat and Instagram Stories, which are all free. Additionally, embedded email videos can increase the click through rate significantly; instead of crafting text emails, you can send a message through video.
Guest posts
Guest posts are a good way for a business to get high quality content at no cost. When done correctly, it is possible for businesses to gain free blog posts from experts in your niche on a regular basis. Guest posts also give you access to quality backlinks that lead visitors back to your website. For proper guest posting, these rules must be followed:
- Guest blogger links should be high quality and from experts that have domain and traffic authorities.
- Guest bloggers must be experts in one shape or form.
Regular non sales marketing
It is important to send customers a mix of different emails that are not just sales based. Too many sales based emails have a tendency to lose customers owing to lost interest. Non sales marketing emails can consists of:
- Content based emails which contains a weekly roundup of your posts for the week.
- Video based emails
- Discount or coupon advertisement
- Freebies, which everyone loves in the form of free e-books or white paper resources
A coupon distribution plan
Coupons help to drive new and recurring clients to your website and can increase revenue by 40%. Customer only deals such as these can increase sale and ensure a ROI.
Drip email campaigns
Drip email campaigns allow you to keep in touch with potential or current customers whether they have newly signed up or purchase a service. Drip email campaigns are perfect for free trial campaigns.