What are the Top 10 Ways to Generate Explosive Growth?

Do you generate explosive growth year after year? Would you like to see your business grow faster without spending every dollar you make on marketing? Well, you’ve come to the right place to learn the top ten strategies needed to generate explosive growth reliably and without breaking the bank.

Ever since you first started your own business, you have looked for new ways to grow your business and its customer base, since that’s the name of the game in business. Otherwise, there’s no money to pay suppliers, employees, or other expenses. Sometimes it seems like an incredibly daunting task, especially in the beginning, but with some hard work and the right strategies, you’ll soon begin reaping the rewards from your efforts and watching your business grow.

10 strategies to generate explosive growth

Growth is rarely even, often exhibiting cycles of growth and maintenance. It’s easy to let your long-term goals and objectives fall by the wayside when you face the staggering problems you encounter every day. You lose focus because an unexpected supply chain disruption requires you to juggle orders, prioritizing those most critical for your short-term survival. You find yourself swamped with personnel issues that distract from your long-term strategies. Or, you find you lack the skills necessary to effectively implement part of your long-term strategy.

These day-to-day pressures can cripple your company. That’s because, without a clear focus on growth, along with the successful implementation of the right growth strategies, you’ll struggle along just hoping to survive. Today, we’ll share my top ten strategies designed to generate explosive growth. Here they are:

• Strengthening customer relationships
• Gain referrals from satisfied customers
• Explore new distribution channels
• Optimize content marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), and GEO (generative engine optimization)
• Explore new markets
• Form partnerships and alliances for mutual benefit
• Leverage options to scale effectively
• Automation helps expand your capacity
• Discover new customer pain points to develop solutions
• Delegate to employees who share your passion and commitment

Next, let’s explore how you can incorporate these ten strategies one at a time to generate explosive growth.

1. Strengthen customer relationships

Marketers have known for more than 40 years the power of existing customer relationships in generating explosive growth. In fact, it costs between five and 25 times MORE to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Add to this the damage caused by one dissatisfied customer, as they badmouth your brand to anyone who’ll listen.

Not only do satisfied customers reduce acquisition costs (since it costs less to keep them than replace them) and spread positive word of mouth to prospective buyers, but they also represent an opportunity for future sales, since it’s easier to convince someone who already trusts your brand to make a future purchase. In fact, we talk about customer lifetime value or CLV as a means to reflect the value of a customer to your business over time. A 5% increase in customer retention can yield up to 95% increase in revenue.

This leads to the conclusion that some customers are likely worth more than others. For instance, one of my marketing professors was the account executive for a dog food brand. He used the brand in a lot of examples, such as the value of big dog owners over those who owned small dogs. Because big dogs eat more food (my Rotweiler eats 31/2 cups of dog food every day plus treats), it’s more critical to attract their owners to generate explosive growth. That’s why much of dog food advertising features big dogs. In contrast, fresh pet food is too expensive for most big dog owners, hence the emphasis on small dogs in their advertising.

You likely don’t own a pet food company, but you should clearly find tools to help you attract and retain the “right” customers, while finding solutions that discourage customers who are more costly to serve, without creating a public relations nightmare. For instance, banks charge small depositors additional fees that are waived for large depositors, such as check limits or per-check fees.

2. Generate customer referrals

When I first started out in marketing, I worked with a direct marketing agency that prepared me for much of what became digital marketing. Making sales calls with our folks as the tech strategist, I learned that the second most valuable outcome of a sales call was a referral (or multiple referrals).

In businesses where the product doesn’t support a sales force, the referral is still essential to generate explosive growth. The only thing that changed is how you gain those referrals. Here are some elements to consider in generating referrals:

• Providing superior customer service and products is essential if you want customers to say nice things about your brand. Without this, no marketing campaign can sustain continued growth.

  

• Enlist customer support in selling to new customers. For instance, writing positive reviews and giving your brand a high rating are essential, as this customer feedback is highly influential when it comes to customer decisions (as you can see below). Don’t just wait for customers to volunteer support; initiate a program to encourage them to rate their purchases through emails, thank-you letters, or even by offering compensation (such as a discount on future purchases) for feedback.
• Another way to leverage existing customers is to offer rewards for referrals.
• Encourage customers to share your products on social media. Being photographed using your brand offers a tacit endorsement that’s a powerful influence on purchase decisions. It can remind a customer to make another purchase or help a prospect choose your brand. For instance, my kid’s orthodontist held a drawing every month to award an iPad to patients who shared photos on Facebook of themselves wearing his promotional t-shirt during their travels.
• Enlist the aid of influencers as a tool for creating awareness and positive attitudes toward your brand.

3. Develop new channels for physical distribution, as well as communication

A great way to generate explosive growth is to develop new channels for distributing products and communicating. For instance, Coke owes much of its continued success to its goal of being everywhere you might be thirsty, from vending machines to restaurants to workplaces to entertainment venues. They even discovered that exclusive access isn’t crucial, as placing a Coke and Pepsi vending machine near each other increases the sales for both brands.

In terms of digital communication, choosing the right channels is critical to generate explosive growth. You need to be where your customers are, and this image helps you determine which social channels are best for you.

Choose a few of these, plus the following, to generate explosive growth:

• A website
• Paid social and search advertising
• Email marketing
• Public relations
• Guest posting on related websites
• News alternatives such as Reddit and Medium

4. Invest in content marketing, SEO, and GEO

Sharing valuable content across social platforms, your website, and email (especially broadcasts designed to maintain customer relationships and nurture leads) is essential to generate explosive growth. Not only does this content help you reach customers and prospects to create awareness, positive emotions, and keep your brand top-of-mind, but good content also helps customers determine if your product is a good fit for their needs. Once a customer buys your brand, this content helps them get the most from their purchases, which generates positive reviews and encourages future purchases.

Content also has a role in creating awareness as it greatly influences search rank to help you appear higher in search results, so you gain more website visitors (SEO) and gain brand mentions on increasingly prevalent AI search results to build your brand’s reputation (GEO).

5. Explore new markets

While it’s important to focus on your target market rather than trying to offer something for everyone (which often means you aren’t a good solution for anyone), sometimes you find you can generate explosive growth by considering a new market. For instance, Rogain is sold for male pattern baldness, but women also experience thinning hair as they age. While baldness and hair thinning aren’t as prevalent among women, they’re often more motivated for a solution, as society is less accepting of female baldness. Similarly, many Hispanic products are now migrating to non-Hispanic markets, which can generate explosive growth due to the vast number of new prospective customers possible in this market.

Look closely at your customer and visitor analytics to determine whether opportunities exist within the market. For instance, if you operate a senior facility, you may find it more valuable to focus on reaching the adult children of these seniors who hold a great deal of influence over their parents and are often easier to reach. Similarly, older children are often in the position of making household purchases, especially if both parents work. Hence, reaching teenagers to influence their brand purchases might offer an effective tool to generate explosive growth.

6. Form partnerships and alliances

Co-marketing, product bundling, and cross-promotion are effective tools that generate explosive growth. For instance, Chicita (bananas) partnered with Popcicle to create a banana-flavored Popcicle. Maybe your retail business partners with a shopping center to create special events to attract more shoppers or promotions. You might also sponsor charitable events or practices to benefit a charity. For instance, a local retailer might offer a box to collect donations or offer a discount when customers exchange old clothing or other items donated to charity for new items. Data shows that this commitment to the community, often termed social responsibility, has a huge impact on the brand choices consumers make.

7. Franchising or licensing

Often, small businesses struggle to keep all the balls in play at the same time. In a later section, we’ll discuss automation as one solution, but licensing and franchising are good solutions when you need a product or as a tool to achieve economies of scale that reduce costs.

For instance, you might take your successful business model and franchise it. That’s the strategy that helped McDonald’s generate explosive growth. By opening more restaurants, the brand was able to garner higher visibility while sharing advertising and product costs to achieve economies of scale. Obviously, each franchise pays fees to the parent company.

With licensing, you share proprietary information with another company to expand production capacity. For instance, Nike doesn’t actually manufacture anything. Rather, it operates as a marketing company involved in developing new products and selling them to customers, while turning over manufacturing to partners who are held to strict quality and performance standards.

8. Automation helps expand capacity

One of the biggest problems faced by businesses of all sizes, but especially small ones, is time. Part of this time crunch stems from poor planning and project management. Some of the rest is due to bureaucratic roadblocks and to the inability to delegate tasks for staff to perform independently. The rest of this time crunch comes when you don’t have the right automation tools to generate explosive growth. Here are some time-saving tools to consider:

• A CRM system that monitors interactions with prospects and customers using rules to automatically schedule follow-up communication and tasks.
• Agentic marketing (shown below), which is like CRM on steroids, goes beyond rules to learn from past interactions so it can optimize performance, even calling in a human when necessary.
• Chatbots can handle routine queries 24/7. The better ones learn over time to perform better.
• Marketing automation tools, such as Buffer and HubSpot, allow you to schedule posts so you don’t interrupt your day every time you need to post fresh content. You can schedule a week or a month’s worth of posts in one sitting.
• AI tools get a bad rap, but they’re invaluable to a busy executive. Whether it’s crafting a draft to refine and then post online, helping you create an ad, or putting together your schedule for an upcoming trade show.
• Advanced systems can monitor inventory levels using historic data to predict shortages, so you never run out of product.

9. Discover pain points and develop solutions

Consumers don’t buy products; they buy solutions. I’ve said this numerous times on this site. But what does that mean when your goal is to generate explosive growth?

It implies that, if you can solve a customer’s problem, you have a good shot at selling them your product. That requires you to first discover their pain points. Social listening programs are a great tool to help you, but it takes a skilled marketer to transform a pain point into a viable product. It’s just this process that led Chrysler to invent the minivan, the most successful new body type in decades. By understanding that buyers needed space for people and stuff without the maneuverability problems inherent in a van, Chrysler put a van-like body on a car chassis to give customers what they wanted.

New products don’t have to be new to the world, like the minivan. Maybe you just add a feature that improves utility or take away a feature that reduces it. When Apple developed the iPod, it was a huge boost over the old disk players as it fit in the owner’s pocket and held many songs without damaging the recording. Or, consider adding a complementary product that increases the value of both products. For instance, I own Mac computers from desktops to laptops to tablets. Thus, it only made sense to buy a smartphone and watch that interfaced with my computers to improve my efficiency.

New business models are also worthy considerations. For instance, today it seems like many brands have gone to a subscription model that ensures a steady revenue stream, while offering convenience for consumers.

10. Hire and delegate to employees who share your passion

Staff are not interchangeable, nor are they droids that perform without emotion or challenges. Hiring the right people goes a long way toward helping you generate explosive growth. In fact, your employees are often your most valuable asset, so you should treat them as such.

• Hire the right people with the skills you need. Don’t sacrifice advanced skills to save money or think you can hire someone to handle multiple tasks because you’ll likely find they can’t do any of them efficiently. If you can’t afford trained staff with the experience necessary to generate explosive growth, then outsource the tasks to companies with those skills. As you can see below, the end result is much cheaper.

  

• Invest in your staff through training, adequate compensation, and offering clear paths for advancement. Offering meaningful opportunities to boost pay when employees master a new skill or real profit sharing to align goals is the key to success. Just ask Johnsonville Sausage how adopting this strategy exploded their growth.
• Delegate authority, as well as tasks. If you’ve hired the right people, you don’t need to make every decision. In fact, since your staff is often closer to the day-to-day operation of their area, they’re often in a better position to make good decisions. Requiring authorization for everything slows down your organization, making it unwieldy and taking away your biggest advantage over larger firms (your flexibility), while demoralizing employees. The best ones will leave for greener pastures or withhold their creativity, so you’re left with uninspired, lazy employees who don’t perform to their potential.
• Your employees need the tools to do their jobs. Give them what they need to succeed.
• Your best bet to generate explosive growth is to be a coach or cheerleader rather than a boss who stands in the way of new ideas. This is called Servant Leadership and it works.

Conclusion

I’ve given you 10 strategies that can generate explosive growth in your small business without costing you a ton of money. Implementing all of these strategies simultaneously is likely to lead to disaster. Businesses, even small ones, are often like a huge cruise ship. They can’t pivot on a dime.

If you move too quickly, you’ll likely see a lot of turnover, as some employees don’t have the necessary skills or temperament to make these changes. You may incur massive costs when trying to implement all of them at once. It may cause you to seek new partners or customers, which takes time to develop, as relationships aren’t formed overnight. Meanwhile, you need to make the transition without undue distress to existing partners and customers, which might result in bad publicity.

Here’s how to make the changes more painlessly:

• Take it slowly, implementing only a few of these at a time and phasing them in rather than expecting the organization to be an entirely different organization tomorrow.
• Communication is key. Let all parties know what you plan to do, why you’re making the changes, the timeline, and how the change will affect them. Let stakeholders provide feedback and suggestions. Consider them objectively, as some might make the change better. As the process moves forward, keep two-directional lines of communication open. That way, everyone knows what to expect.
• If you must transition to new hires or new suppliers, consider ways to compensate them. Is there another role they can play? Can they retrain for the new responsibilities thrust on them by the change? Can existing suppliers retool or supply different products as you make the changes? If not, are there ways you can help them replace you without losing too much money?
• You might consider a test in one area or one product line before rolling out implementation across the entire organization. You’ll learn from these tests and they help assure workers and suppliers in other areas that things will get better after an initial disruption.
• After implementation, do an assessment to ensure everything is working as expected. This isn’t a one-time experiment, but requires ongoing monitoring and tweaking.

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