Tactics for Achieving Growth in Your Design-Based Business

At the root of every business is a desire to be successful and achieve growth. As you see other businesses thrive, you may want to adapt their strategies and tactics in hopes of growing your business with the same success. The truth is, it’s not always that simple. What works for one business won’t necessarily work for you, and it’s important to realize that every business is different. To achieve and retain growth, you should consider a strategy that involves implementing small, iterative changes that allow you to gain insights into what works best for your business.

Here are some reasons to implement experimentation into your business strategy:

Experiment to Uncover Insights

Setting goals and creating objectives to achieve is a necessity when building your business. As a designer, how many clients do you hope to work within a year, a quarter or even a month? As a brand, how many products should you be selling in a given period? How much revenue do you need to sustain growth? By asking yourself these essential questions, each objective and initiative can work towards achieving these goals. If your goals are not achieved within the period, should you extend the period? Should you try implementing new strategies and initiatives to get you to that goal? Answering these questions will help you build out your growth strategies and determine what works best for your business. You need to create processes that can track constant changes while letting you experiment with them methodically.  

Focus on Your Unique Audience

When it comes to design, it’s fairly common to assume that your audience is the same or similar to your competitors. While there is some truth to that, consumers are known to make decisions based on any number of factors and influences. There is a reason why they decide to choose your business over another – and vice versa. Think about your target audience and what their customer journey is like. What do you have that is unique from your competitors that will attract customers and get them to do business with you? Set goals that will allow you to gain a certain number of leads within a given timeframe and see what processes work best to get you to that number. Then, figure out the processes to actually close those leads.

Continue to Implement New Tactics

From the outside looking in, you only see the success or failure, not the steps that got them there. In many cases, success stories are the most glorious when they talk about the failures they encountered along the journey. This does not necessarily mean you have to fail to be successful, but you may find that determining what doesn’t work helps you figure out what does. By making small, iterative changes, you can test the waters and analyze the results to determine your next step. You can certainly try out similar tactics that worked for other businesses – just make sure you are testing at a smaller scale and with a controlled sample size.