Six Growth Strategies for Small Business

Every success-driven small business needs strategic growth plans to fuel their passion of succeeding.

One out of their numerous growth plans is developing a flexible business plan. The reflection of their marketing and growth would be evident on their business plan as the core foundation for a directional approach.

If you are into mini importation, you should check my earlier article on drafting a simplified business plan.

A growth strategy is a plan of action to fulfill a purpose in your business – it could be to expand your business, increase sales, brand awareness or diversification. Any of these milestones depends on your business plan.

Some of the questions you would consider when coming up with your business strategies are

  • Where will you get new customers from
  • How will you expand into a new market
  • What new product will you offer

The answers to these questions will affect the growth strategies which you will choose.

These are the six growth strategies for small businesses

  1. Market Penetration
  2. Market Development
  3. Alternative Channels
  4. Product Development & Diversification
  5. g
  6. v

Market Penetration

This is one of the first growth strategies most small businesses focus on. Here, you consider the current product,the current market and how you can increase your market share.

This a competitive strategy as you are going head-to-head with your competition.

One way you can increase your market share is by lowering your price. Reducing your profit margin does not mean that your own product is of lesser quality.

The reason is because you are entering into a market where existing successful small business like you.

Bringing down your price is an attempt to win over the traction of the market. Of course most customers are sensitive of discounts and free gifting.

Also make sure to offer quality products in order to increase your customer lifetime value. At the long run, you can then increase your price to meet the market.

Nevertheless, before you increase the price of your products – make sure that they have tested your products over and over again with better customer and product experience.

If they are mesmerized with your sound products and good customer experience, they would not hesitate being return valued customers.

Offering promotions include sales discount, giveaways, referral programs etc. Doing this will not only attract more sales from your existing customer, it will encourage prospective customers to try your products.

Market Development

Looking at the supplementary benefits of your products, you find out other market where you can fix them.

If you produce a healthy soap, organic soap, with your major interest on healthy lifestyle industry; you can as well look into breaking into other beauty markets.

You may consider producing organic skin care cream, organic relaxer, organic hair cream etc.

Another consideration would be expanding your market to other part of the country, continent and to the world.

Alternative Channels

What other channels could you use to sell your products. Maybe you are selling your products only online, you could also open up a physical store to sell your product. In countries like Nigeria, some of your prospective customers would require to validate your genuineness by asking for your physical location.

Even if you don’t have a physical store, assure them how flexible business your business is to deliver to any place of their convenience in little or no item.

Register on classified platforms like Jiji, Olist and ecommerce multi-vendors platforms like Jumia, Konga. These places can get you customers for free.

You should as well consider joining business listing platforms. There are a lot of business listing platforms depending on the type of service you’re offering. Take advantage of niche business events and meetings, join Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram groups. These will contribute to the growth ofyour business.

If you are planning for a long term in your venture be it mini importation business, you may consider owing your platform through getting a corporate website for your business.

I have a tailored website design recommendation for small businesses. Learn more about my web design project here.

Product Development & Diversification

Here, a new product is developed to be sold your existing market. These products could serve as a complementary products to what you already have in the market.

iPhone introduced Airpods as a replacement to wired earphone. If I sell men’s apparels – shirts, T shirts, pants and suit. I may decide to complement these with jewelries and shoes so that my customers would not have options of going for my competitors.

In diversification, you will need to develop the product and its marketing strategies from scratch. It can be done in two ways

A Winning Product vs Multiple Product Importation

mini importation winning product

I have come across lot of confusions among the new comers in mini importation about choosing between a winning product and multiple products importation of varied products from China.

What do I mean?

Winning product

A winning product is something you found to have a greater selling power. A greater selling power in the sense that you have made a product research as a mini importer in any of the e-commerce websites, traditional market, customer-persona, having ran testing adverts on several other products but you ended up choosing one product as the winner.

You chose that product as a winner because it had more mass appeal – that is people found huge interests in it than the other products you subjected to it through your product research.

Since you have found a product that has proven to sell more than the other, your next action would be to focus only in importing that product instead of importing other products at the same time.

The cliche, winning product, could be referred to as niche product to some experts. This is because you will be focusing more on how to drive sales only on one particular product.

A successful winning products are most times referred to as hot selling products. They are called hot selling products because they have proven to have generated mass interest over time.

Multiple importation of varied products from China.

This model of mini importation is common to people starting the importation business. It is a great business model because it is flexible in the choices it gives to potential customers.

The flexibility is significant from the variations of products you as a seller will be giving to a potential customer to make their choices from the lists of what you are selling.

This is what I mean

Let’s say you found 8 different products to import from either 1688, Alibaba, AliExpress, Taobao, DHgate etc. Boom, you finally brought them home.

Let’s also say that you bought

  • Female handbags
  • Female shoes
  • Female purse
  • Female tops
  • Men’s boxers
  • Men’s sneakers
  • Yoni Pearls
  • Vaginal tightening cream

That makes it 8 different imported products.

To market these products, you either uplodad them either on your WhatsApp statuses, Facebook or Instagram feeds. If you take a closer look at this, you will be giving both your existing and potential customers the privilege to make their choices.

One may not like your purse, handbag nor shoes but find interest on your black and white tops. On the other hand, another customer may prefer a black female shoe to other products you listed.

That is the flexibility of importing more than one product.

But wait!

There is a reason why mini importation actually existed in the first place and everything is dependent on your strength as a mini importer. Mini importation aims to leverage on the opportunity of outsourcing products around the world then getting them shipped and delivered to your home address by just staying in your little, big home with your smart device – Smartphone, Tablet or PC.

  • Conventional importation involves
  • Getting a business visa to a country,
  • Meeting with your business partner in that country
  • Then coming back to your country with container loads of your products in millions.

Can you beat that? NO!

The intention of mini importation is to get few items at very affordable prices then resell them at your own convenient prices. You really do not need to start competing with the business tycoons that import at very cheaper prices in millions.

Let’s go back to the topic…

To sell a single product might be easier and stress-free than selling 10 different products. Mind you, a single product can as well have sizing and colour variations.

If you have a very small budget on marketing, then buying to sell multiple products may not work for you. It requires more on marketing strategies than when you are selling only a few.

If I am selling a female handbag that comes in black, red, pink colours, I already know that I will be channelling all my energies strategizing to market that single handbag.

I’m not distracted in any way. I can simply manage my marketing budget. Even if I don’t have enough bduget on marketing, it is now easier for me to find micro influencers to help promote my handbag.

Different forces are pulled in to market a product.

So, in a case where I am to sell 8 different products as listed above with a tiny budget or even none then I would be in a dilenma of which product to give more attention to.

If I had to use micro influencers, I would start thinking what products to advertize first and what not to. This creates marketing distractions selling multiple products.

But if you have a huge marketing budget, that would be amazing. Order as many products you can, get a standard e-commerce store and start pushing your advertisements.

There is a smarter way of buying multiple products and selling them either together as one or cross-sell.

This is what you will do

Find a product, then find other complementary products that will complement the use of that product.

Some of the complementary products include

  • Weight lost supplement and belly trimming belt
  • Mobile Phones and headsets, earbuds, pouch, power banks
  • Computer Hardware and Computer Software.
  • Shoes, sneakers and stockings, extra shoe lace
  • A female matching dress and a handbag or a shoe
  • A male sneakers and matching face cap etc

Try any of these in your product research and see how it works. Let me know what you think in the comment section.