A growth strategy that works: guide for online businesses
How to develop a growth strategy that delivers results
If you run an online shop or another type of business with an online presence, your goal is probably to perform better year after year so you can stand stronger than your competitors, gain more customers, bookings or leads, and increase your revenue.
To achieve this, you need a solid digital growth strategy – which is exactly what this article is all about, so read on!
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What is a growth strategy?
A growth strategy is an action plan that outlines how your business will grow over time. A solid strategy ensures that you stay focused on your goals and prioritise the areas most important to your business. This could involve attracting more customers, launching new products, improving your marketing campaigns, or streamlining your team’s workflow.
How to ensure your growth strategy delivers results
Before diving into specific initiatives, it’s important to understand how to develop a growth strategy that works. An effective growth strategy is more than just a “to-do” list. It should serve as a roadmap tailored to your business, your budget, and your target audience.
Here are five things you can start with when working on your strategy:
1. Be clear on your goals
Growth doesn’t mean the same thing for every business, so start by defining what growth means to you. Do you want to increase sales, gain more bookings, expand into a new market, improve customer loyalty, or launch a new product category in your shop?
Once your goals are clear, it’s much easier to work towards them and measure the impact of your efforts.
2. Know your target audience
Who are your potential customers, really? What values drive them, and what does their buying behaviour look like? To get a clearer picture of your audience, it’s essential to carefully review the feedback you’ve already received from existing customers. Analyse your sales patterns and dig into data from Google Analytics.
If your business is still in the start-up phase and you don’t yet have much data, conducting a market analysis can be extremely useful. In fact, this remains relevant even for well-established businesses, as the market is constantly evolving.
Personas are another highly useful tool that help put faces and personalities to the target groups you’re speaking to. Feel free to read our guide to personas, where we explain how to create and work with them.
3. How is your performance right now?
Before planning to move in new directions, it’s important to have a solid overview of where your business currently stands.
Start by evaluating your key areas: sales, website traffic, marketing channels, customer satisfaction, and the efficiency of your various workflows.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself during this process:
- Which products are flying off the (digital) shelves, and which ones are less popular?
- Where is your website traffic coming from: organic search results, social media, search ads, or email marketing?
- Are your landing pages converting visitors into customers, or are they leaving before making a purchase or taking an action like booking an appointment or subscribing to your newsletter?
- How often do customers return?
- What are people saying in online reviews or when they contact your customer service?
Again, you can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools, such as those built into one.com’s Website Builder, or the tools you use for your marketing emails and newsletters.
When analysing your numbers, it’s important to consider the full context.
Here are a few examples:
If your emails have a high open rate but a low click rate, it might mean your subject lines are strong, but your content needs a bit more love.
If your website traffic is high but sales are falling, there may be issues with your product pages or your checkout process that need attention.
4. Take a close look at your competitors
It’s never a bad idea to draw inspiration from competitors (or learn from their mistakes!). Carry out a competitor analysis to see what tactics your main competitors are using. Find out if there are products or services their customers are asking for that you could introduce before they do. Take what’s useful, make it your own, and steer clear of the mistakes they’ve already made.
Tip: It’s incredibly insightful to read through competitor reviews on Google and Trustpilot – there’s a lot of valuable insight hidden there.
5. Optimise your website
Whether you run an online shop or a hair salon that takes bookings online, your website is one of your most important sales tools. Make sure it has a clean design, is easy to use, mobile-friendly, fast, and SEO-optimised.
If your site isn’t optimised for the most widely used search engines, you risk not being found by potential customers. And even if you manage to attract visitors to your site, they may bounce straight off if the user experience isn’t up to scratch.
With one.com’s Website Builder or web hosting, you get a wealth of built-in tools. You’ll have everything you need to establish a strong online presence, even if you have no interest in dealing with code.
Prefer not to create and optimise the site yourself? We can also build a great-looking and functional website for you – tailored to your business goals and preferences.
Want us to build your website? Book a free consultation
Examples of growth strategies
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Here are a few examples of proven strategies that are popular among online businesses. Pick one or combine several, depending on your goals and resources.
Market penetration: sell more to existing customers
One of the simplest paths to growth is to focus on your existing customers and your current market. It’s also much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Tempt them with great offers, focus on upselling, or create loyalty programmes that make it worthwhile for customers to return.
Email marketing is also an effective tool here, as it helps ensure your customers don’t miss your best deals.
Market development: reach new customer segments
Market development might mean expanding beyond the UK, targeting a new age group, or using new marketing channels such as TikTok or Pinterest. Think about which new audiences might be interested in what you offer.
Here, actions like translating your website into additional languages and adapting your content and design can help you reach new segments.
Product development: add new products to your range
If you already have a loyal customer base that loves your brand, chances are they’ll also be interested in new products you introduce. Before placing your next order with your supplier, look at your sales stats and customer feedback. This often reveals what your audience feels is missing. Maybe it’s accessories for current products, related product categories, or bundled packages of frequently purchased items.
Diversification: introduce completely new product groups or services
This strategy comes with more risk, but also more potential reward. Diversification means launching products that are significantly different from your existing ones, often aimed at new audiences or markets.
For example, a hair salon might start offering appointments for manicures or simple facials. To make this possible, the salon invests in training for two employees as well as the necessary equipment. This is a risk, as the owner can’t know for sure how many clients the new services will attract. But with proper market research and demand analysis, the potential for growth is often strong.
SEO and search advertising: boost your visibility online
An often overlooked growth strategy is working on your online visibility. Both SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEA (search advertising) are powerful tools to help customers find you when they search for what you offer on Google or other search engines.
A company blog and SEO-optimised content like product descriptions, guides, and FAQ sections can increase your organic reach and brand awareness in the long term. Paid search ads, meanwhile, can deliver quick results and draw attention to your current offers and campaigns.
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Improve the customer experience and turn customers into fans
As mentioned earlier, growth isn’t only about attracting more customers – it’s also about retaining the ones you already have. By making your existing customers more enthusiastic about your brand, your products and the overall customer journey, you increase the chances of repeat business.
A great user experience, helpful and accessible customer service, and proactive efforts to make your offering attractive are key. You can achieve this with tools like email marketing, loyalty programmes, and personalised offers.
Often, growth can be driven by simple improvements, such as speeding up your website, streamlining your checkout process, or sending a great quarterly newsletter.
3 common growth challenges and how to tackle them
Are you truly ready to scale up?
If your growth strategies succeed, you’ll need to handle the increased workload and capacity demands that come with more customers, leads, bookings, or visitors. Plan ahead to ensure your stock, customer service, and website can handle the growth – or can be scaled up quickly.
When it comes to your website, remember that more traffic may require a more powerful hosting solution, such as a managed VPS or a booking system to help manage your calendar. This ensures optimal performance and uptime, so your site doesn’t crash or load slowly, which can turn potential customers away.
Short on time or expertise?
Running a business can make it difficult to find time for SEO, website maintenance, or writing copy for effective search ads. At one.com, we can build and maintain your website and create search ads that deliver the results you need, whether that’s more leads, more completed purchases, or more bookings.
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Is your strategy not delivering results?
Let’s be honest: your growth strategy is never truly finished. Markets, customer needs and behaviour, and the competitive landscape are always changing.
Don’t be discouraged if your efforts don’t yield the expected results. That’s exactly why it’s crucial to continuously track performance, listen to customer feedback, and revise your strategy when needed. Build on what works and reconsider what doesn’t – that’s how your strategy becomes stronger and more effective over time.
From growth strategy to measurable results
You don’t need a huge budget or a big team to create a growth strategy that works. Start with clear goals, get to know your audience, and choose the tactics that suit your business best.
Most important of all? Just get started! Then keep testing, learning, and refining along the way. You’ll find all the tools you need at one.com, from web hosting and VPS to Website Builder, professional email and booking system.