When you’re growing a business, it’s exciting to think of what exponential growth could do for you – the kind of spike that sends your sales soaring and elevates your business to a whole new level.
But in reality, this type of growth can be challenging for a number of reasons.
Exponential growth can be hard to adjust to, hard to maintain, and hard to plan toward with any accuracy.
Incremental growth, on the other hand, is the perfect solution for growing businesses through the long-term – it builds a strong foundation for your business to grow from, using consistent testing and optimisation to streamline the process of scaling up.
Here’s why you should aim for incremental growth in your business, and how to do it well.
Incremental growth is about aiming for steady month-on-month improvements on your existing metrics, not reaching for an external goal that may be unrealistic for your business.
This data-based approach enables you to set and reach realistic goals that match your business needs and capacity, as well as consistently providing further goals to reach for.
“Growth is a very personal thing, there’s no such thing as an ‘industry standard’. There are some quick wins that can often be had initially, but to sustain it long term your product, price, and promotion all need to remain competitive in the market.”
- Josh Sexton, Digital Performance Director, Sprocket
Growth can be as challenging as it is exciting – do you have the capacity in your team to manage those extra sales? Are your systems robust enough to handle a higher number of product returns, complaints, and general queries?
Incremental growth allows you to scale up your business systems and processes gradually, making changes proactively as you go rather than reacting to pressure.
“It is often a lot less stressful to ride slow steady growth over months and years, rather than aiming for sharp increases. It also gives us time to collect marketing data in order to analyse areas of profitability, which informs and steers our strategy over time.”
- Josh Sexton, Digital Performance Director, Sprocket
In terms of digital marketing, incremental growth gives you time to optimise and adapt your strategy, streamlining your budget and efforts to increase efficiency across your accounts so that as you scale up, your revenue does too.
A business that’s grown gradually has the opportunity to create firmer foundations and more streamlined systems, enabling it to scale more sustainably, escaping the cycle of boom and bust that can come with too-fast growth.
“Incremental growth adds up over time. Customers often see monthly percentage growth targets as individual metrics, which means they ignore the wonderful thing that is compound growth. A consistent 5% gain on 100K monthly revenue for a year gets you $179,000 by month twelve. That’s huge growth!”
- Josh Sexton, Digital Performance Director, Sprocket
The key to setting incremental growth goals is to gradually improve your metrics by percentage points month on month. While these gains may seem small at first, over time they compound and grow in momentum to lead to much larger long-term growth.
“Successful, ongoing growth comes through making informed data-driven decisions, ensuring all stages of the purchase funnel are being targeted, and providing a great customer experience throughout the customer journey.”
- Josh Sexton, Digital Performance Director, Sprocket
The four pillars of incremental growth are:
1. Continuous monitoring for optimisations
Track and monitor your digital performance to see where opportunities for optimisation arise. These tweaks can increase effectiveness and efficiency across your campaigns, with results amplifying as your business continues to grow.
2. Testing & mobility
Test different elements of your digital campaigns to refine your strategy and creative, and improve your ROI and conversion rate. Remain mobile to make changes depending on the data, to capture opportunities for growth as they’re discovered.
3. Planning for long term growth
Rather than working from short-term goal to short-term goal, set long-term growth ambitions to work toward, measured monthly in increments. Significant growth will show over time, once the strategy has had an opportunity to build momentum.
4. Consistency is key
With this type of strategy, you can’t just turn the tap on and off – it requires consistency and patience to build your business gradually, taking what’s working and optimising what’s not, to see substantial growth over the long term.
What could your business achieve with consistent, incremental growth?
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