Most B2B businesses are interested in growth, attracting new clients, and securing new revenue to increase profitability and scale. But what happens when your growth strategy starts falling off? What happens when your business growth plateaus and you aren’t sure what to try next?
Visibility and Sales
One option is to invest more in promoting the visibility of your company and making it more attractive to prospective clients. There are three closely interrelated, sometimes overlapping strategies that can help you in this pursuit.
- PR: PR for B2B growth is incredibly valuable for breathing new life into a company that has stagnated. The general idea is to get more press coverage for your brand, improve your brand’s reputation in the eyes of the public, and ultimately increase your visibility online and in channels that matter to you. With the help of focused press releases, SEO, social media management, and other tactics, you can get control over the narrative around your brand.
- Marketing and advertising: You can also invest more in your marketing and advertising efforts. As you’ve likely already realized, there’s considerable overlap between PR and marketing, as strategies like SEO and social media work in both categories. You should also consider investing in advertising, including PPC advertising, if you have the budget. Of course, budget is likely to be your biggest limiting factor here.
- Sales: Another idea is to scale up your sales efforts, especially if you have a decent pool of qualified leads and a steady stream of new traffic to your website already in place. Experimenting with new sales channels and tactics, investing in incentives for salespeople, and making new pushes to higher goals can all help you here.
New Products and Services
If PR, marketing, and sales aren’t working for you, or if you simply don’t have the budget to support these strategies, you might consider introducing new products and services. This is especially valuable if you feel your brand has become stale or if your competitors are running laps around you with new innovations.
The two best tools to help you here are competitive research and market research. Competitive research can help you figure out what your rivals are doing, so you can either mimic them or find a way to eclipse them. Market research can help you figure out what your audience needs that you aren’t currently offering. Combine the data you gather in these endeavors with a bit of creativity and luck, and you could develop a new product line that pulls your company out of its funk.
Developing new products and services can be both expensive and risky, so a more affordable, accessible alternative might be making improvements to your existing product and service lines. Can you make them more reliable? Less expensive? More aesthetically pleasing or comfortable?
Rebranding
In some cases, rebranding is the right move. If your company has been around for a long time, and it’s still using a logo that looks like it came out of the 1970s, this is especially true. Rebranding is an investment, and it’s not a magic bullet that’s going to solve all your problems. However, it could be an excellent opportunity to start fresh, adopt new marketing strategies, and position yourself in a new light to both new and existing customers.
Outside Perspective
Sometimes, all you need to break through the plateau is some outside perspective to help you figure out what’s going wrong.
- New leaders. One option is to instill new leadership, either at the highest level or in the departments where you feel like you’re suffering. New direction and new energy could be exactly what you need to launch a new campaign successfully.
- Consultants. You can also choose to hire outside consultants, who have the knowledge and experience necessary to diagnose your biggest problems and help you correct them. They exist outside of your organization and are qualified to tell you hard truths, so they can often shed new light on issues beneath your radar.
- Customers. Why not ask your existing customers about what they’d like to see from your brand? Quantitative and qualitative surveys can help you get a better gauge of what your customers are missing, what they value, and how to best serve them. From coming up with new products to improving your customer support, this can be a treasure trove of new ideas.
Stagnation is common across B2B companies of all shapes and sizes. But unfortunately, not all companies have what it takes to pull out of this doldrum. You need to be ready to invest time and money, experiment, and adapt if you want to restore your growth momentum and take your business to new heights.