How To Scale Your Business With Growth Hacks

It's not easy to make your business successful in a competitive market.

Anyone can start a business, but scaling your business requires knowledge, experience and skill.
There are numerous hurdles to overcome while building your business from the ground up, and when facing these obstacles many businesses give up.

Of the 2.1 million small businesses in Australia, 54,992 went out of business in the last financial year. Scaling up can help your business survive while others fail.

So, what should you do to ensure your business survives and safeguards your financial future?
The answer is growth hacking.

What is growth hacking?

Should you just give up your dreams and continue committing ten hours to your job towards making someone else's life a success story? Becoming a side character in the world of business may not sound appealing to you, but without the ability to grow your business and survive this becomes the reality for countless entrepreneurs.

That's where growth hacking comes in.

Growth hacking is an umbrella term that includes all the strategies designed to help your business grow.

While the strategies differ, the overall goal of growth hacking is to acquire the greatest number of customers as possible while spending as little money as possible.

In 2010 Sean Ellis, a successful entrepreneur, coined the term 'growth hacker' to attribute the unconventional ways which a company can adapt to ensure its business success.

Since then, many companies are employing these techniques to scale up and dominate their industries. If you also want to create a successful and long lasting business, then here are some growth hacks for your potential success.

Sell what people want

No matter how competent your SEO team is, or how creative your content marketing team is, your business will struggle to achieve the success you want if you're not selling what people want. The greatest advertising in the world can't save a product that your audience doesn't want or need.
To ensure your product is speaking to the pain points of your audience, you should conduct some demographic research. This may include:

- Analysing people's taste and desires
- Running surveys
- Analysing your competition
- Running a pilot test
- Launching the product in a limited capacity

The team at Wellbeing Health Retreats have an exclusive tip that they use in their own market research process, saying "market research isn't about cold data. Study your customer's beyond their purchases. What drives them to buy? What emotions are behind a sale? Conduct face to face research if needed to ensure you get the human reasons for your data, not just the financial."
If the collected data doesn't indicate that your product will trigger audience interest, then it is better to switch to another business idea rather than investing time and money in a product that is unlikely to produce a positive ROI.

Acquire a positive cash flow

Most startups forget that business is not only about earning money, but also about investing.
You need money to retain, maintain, and sustain your business while keeping yourself afloat before your business becomes self-sufficient.

That is why running out of cash flow is one of the major reasons why startups close in their first year.

One of the simplest ways to ensure a positive cash flow is a small business loan. As a growth hacking strategy, a small business loan can be paired with cost cutting initiatives to remove obstacles hindering your cash flow.

According to the experts at Maxiron Capital, "if your company's place is on the mortgage, then you can take a property equity loan to ensure that you don't have to take out a huge sum every month. This doubles the effectiveness of your investment by both creating capital and saving you money."

Add value as well as functionality

You can't survive in a competitive market based only on functionality; you also need to add value to make your product desirable. For example, Twitter would have never become successful if it hadn't given a different form of value than Facebook.

Concreting specialists, KJ Concreting, provide an insight into the importance of product differentiation, saying "you can differentiate your product by size, price, personalisation, origin or customer service. As concreters it may seem like we can't differentiate our product, but there is always a way to add value."

Make sure your product has value, and you will begin creating a product that people want. If people find your product valuable, then they will voluntarily share it with their friends and family, and your product will increase its chances of being successful.

Are you ready to grow your business?

Businesses need time, effort, and innovation to scale up.

Success is never a given and when one of these ingredients is missing then it becomes more challenging to stand out from your competition.

Growth hacking is a buzzword for businesses who think it's a way to provide a shortcut to the top.

But follow these steps and you'll be positioning your business to be successful, whatever niche you're in.