Expanding your business? There comes a time when your business will be ready to expand and reach new levels of success. You don’t want to stand still for too long in the business world, and expansion allows you to start competing at a much higher level.
Expansion is the strategic growth of a company and can take many forms, such as opening a new location, adding new products and/or services, targeting new markets, merging with another business, or online expansion. Expansion can pose a few challenges and will bring risk, so this post will offer a few tips to keep in mind when expanding your business.
Table of Contents
Conduct Research
First, you’ll need to do some research before you start making any kind of changes to your business. Market research will help you determine the best ways to expand your business, your customer’s preferences, and information about your competitors that will help you to differentiate yourself.
Making any kind of change to your business without spending the time to do some research first is a huge risk and one that could backfire. If you plan on expanding into a new market, you need to become an expert in that new market, as you might well find that what works in your current market won’t be as effective in another.
Make Data-Driven Decisions
Leading on from this, data should be at the heart of all your decisions when expanding your business. Data gives you a clear insight into many different aspects of your business, meaning you can make intelligent, informed decisions when you use data.
Data will help you to identify the best ways to improve and optimize your business, which will reduce risk and help you to find success with your expansion project.
Choose A Suitable Location
One of the most common ways to expand is to open a new business location. Obviously, the location will be key when making this kind of change.
When it comes to thriving business locations, it’s hard to beat London. London is a business hub and somewhere that many of the most successful businesses in areas like tech, finance, media, and law call home. You can find desirable offices to rent in Kings Cross, London, which is one of the best places for a business in the whole of the capital.
Kings Cross is a major rail hub with great connectivity and a thriving area, but it’s also just north of the heart of the city, making it a slightly quieter and more affordable area. It’s also a great place to work as a newly regenerated area with many shops, bars, cafes, and restaurants to enjoy in the area.
Use Crowdfunding To Cover Costs
No matter how you’re expanding your business, you’ll find that there will be costs to cover. You need to determine what the best way to secure the funds for expansion is, and crowdfunding can be a great option.
Crowdfunding allows you to raise money from people all over the world without having to give up any kind of control. In addition to this, crowdfunding is also an opportunity to promote your business and increase brand awareness.
Automate Tasks
When expanding your business, you’ll find that your staffing needs to change. Hiring many new employees can be a major cost, so you should try to automate as much as possible.
You can use online tools, apps, and software to automate many repetitive tasks, and this will reduce your staffing needs. In addition to this, automation can reduce errors and improve the efficiency of your operations.
Outsource
Leading on from this, you should also consider outsourcing instead of hiring new staff. You can outsource tasks and even entire departments to specialists and have a lot of work completed entirely online.
Outsourcing is a lot more affordable than hiring new staff as you don’t have to pay a regular salary or the additional employee costs. You can also outsource a lot of tasks to people/organizations regardless of their location, which allows you to find experts to handle different areas. A few areas that you can outsource include:
- Accounting
- Marketing
- IT
- Admin
- HR
Find A Reliable Digital Marketing Company
When expanding your business, you’ll want to increase brand awareness and attract new customers to your business. This can be a major challenge, but an experienced digital marketing agency will help by strengthening your presence online.
You should hire a digital marketing agency that can use various tactics to create a strong online presence, such as SEO, pay-per-click, and content marketing. You should find that this boosts your visibility online, attracts more traffic to your site, and helps you become much more competitive.
Remember Cybersecurity
When expanding your business, you must ensure cybersecurity is a priority. Cybercrime is a rising threat affecting businesses of all sizes and in all industries, and you could leave yourself open to attack when expanding your business.
Therefore, you need to ensure that you always have strong protection in place with high-quality cybersecurity products. You should also provide training for your team, so they know how to carry out their roles safely — this is particularly important for remote workers.
Monitor KPIs
Finally, you should monitor KPIs as you expand the business to ensure that your efforts are going to plan. Things don’t always go according to plan, so you may need to adapt and be flexible as you expand your business.
Expanding your business can help you to achieve higher levels of success and compete with the bigger brands in your industry, but any kind of expansion will inevitably have challenges and create at least some level of risk.
The tips in this post should be useful when expanding your business and will hopefully help you to achieve your expansion goals. There are many ways to expand, but you need to make sure that you have a robust plan in place and use tech to your advantage to overcome the key challenges and manage risk when expanding.
