How to Create a Strong Business Growth Plan for 2024

With the New Year upon us, it’s that time of year when you’re putting the final touches on your marketing strategies for the year ahead. 

But have you got your broader business growth plan sorted for 2024?

Your marketing strategies are super-important, especially at this time of year. But if you want to grow your business and sustain that growth, you need to think about your long-term goals.

To help you get your plan together for 2024, our Growth Marketing Specialists at Damteq have written this article that explains exactly what goes into creating a solid growth strategy.

So, let’s get into it.

What is a Growth Plan?

First things first, what actually is a growth plan?

Well, it’s exactly as the name suggests. A growth plan is the strategic steps and actions you need to take to reach your goals and grow your business. To create a comprehensive growth plan, you need to optimise the core areas of your business so that they work in harmony. Things like your operations, finance, marketing, sales and recruitment need to come together to form a holistic and full-encompassed growth plan.

You need to identify how these areas of your business are performing and how they need to be optimised to help you reach your growth goals. Once you’ve got a solid growth plan, you can use it as a roadmap for reaching your business goals and achieving growth.

Why Do You Need a Growth Plan?

Putting a solid growth plan together and sharing it with the people in your business ensures that everyone is collectively working towards the same goals and understands their roles and responsibilities in keeping your growth strategy on track. 

As a specialist growth marketing agency, we’ve often had new clients say, “We’ve been investing heavily in our marketing and trying to recruit like mad, but as fast as we grow, we get set back.” A lot of these clients will have the same problem. They underestimate what goes into creating sustainable growth.

Sure, you can focus on upping marketing spend and hiring more people, but there’s more to business growth than that.

Even if you’re investing massively into your increasing sales and recruitment, without solid financial processes or training resources, profits can get overspent, people will leave, and you’ll end up right back where you started – expect you’ll be months behind your competitors.

That’s why having a growth plan is so important. It helps you identify the steps you need to take to grow and systemise different areas of your business to achieve and sustain your growth.

How to Create a Growth Plan for Your Business

Set Your Goals and Objectives

The first step in creating your growth plan is setting realistic, long-term goals for your business growth and the shorter-term objectives that will help you get there.

For example, if your growth goal is to grow your business by 150% over the next 5 years, the short-term objectives might look like this:

• Launch a new product or service that fills a gap in the market in the next 12 months
• Increase MRR by 20% over the next year through targeted campaigns and promotions
• Improve customer retention rates by 15% within the next 2 years through better customer service and loyalty programs
• Expand into new geographic markets within the next 3 years, such as international markets or regions within your country that haven’t been tapped yet
• Increase investments in areas like recruitment, training, and employee benefits

By creating realistic goals and breaking them down into more digestible, short-term objectives, you can make a clear and logical plan to grow your business.

Conduct Your Research and Analysis

Analysing your business performance and conducting market and customer research is essential for creating a strong growth plan.

A lot of businesses gloss over these steps or ignore the findings of their research and just do what they did the year before and then wonder why they’re not growing. To create a solid growth plan, you need to analyse your strategies and performance, conduct competitor research and analysis, and look for ways to optimise your business processes.

Here’s a short list of just some of the types of research you need to look at:

• SWOT analyses of your business
• Competitor research and analysis
• Market and customer research
• Measuring and understanding your marketing performance
• Analysing website traffic and engagement
• Looking at your financial profile and efficiency
• Analysing the way you work and optimise your operational processes

Understanding the data behind each of these areas will give you a better idea of where your business is performing well and where you’re struggling so that you can create a clear and efficient growth plan for 2024.

Map Out Your Strategy

Once you’ve set your goals and carried out your research, it’s time to start putting your growth strategy together – here’s what you need to look at:

• Set your priorities: To achieve your goals, you need to prioritise the right actions. If your plan is to reach specific revenue and staffing goals, then prioritise actions related to marketing, sales, recruitment, and training. But remember, to sustain your growth, you’ll also need to adapt your operational and financial processes as you grow.
• Create a detailed action plan: With the planning done, goals created, and priorities set, you need to map out the specific actions you’ll need to take to reach those goals. Focus on the shorter-term actions and projects that will help you reach your long-term goals.
• Allocate enough budget and resources: There’s no point doing loads of research, planning, and ambitious goal-setting just to fall at the first hurdle because you haven’t invested enough time, money, or resources into making it work. Set a realistic budget, and allocate enough time and staff resources to make your strategy work. Make sure to regularly review performance to ensure your resources are directed to the right places.
• Keep your strategy flexible: Business is unpredictable. Even with extensive forecasting and strategy creation, sometimes things don’t go to plan. That’s why you’ve always got to be flexible with your growth plan and adapt it when needed. If your KPIs show your strategy isn’t working, change it!

Create a Realistic Goal Timeline

Don’t underestimate how long it’ll take to reach your goals.

We’ve seen it so many times; businesses want to skyrocket their growth within just a month or two and lose sight of the bigger picture. Sustainable growth takes time, and if you make knee-jerk changes to your strategies because you’re not seeing results immediately, then you’re never going to grow your business. Be realistic with your goals. Think of your plans for long-term growth and break them down into smaller, short-term actions that you can progress through.

Track Your Progress and Optimise

Tracking your progress and optimising as you go helps steer your business in the right direction, and it’s a smart way to stay on top of things and keep you on track to reach your goals.

Even with the best-laid plans, you can sometimes go a little off track. That’s business for you!

But if you’re not tracking your progress, it might be weeks or months before you realise you’re off track, and by that point, it’s too late to recover and reach your goals on your original timeline.

Keep looking at the data and your processes, and ask yourself: Are sales going up? Are expenses under control? Are we completing the short-term actions that will help us reach our goals? If you spot any issues, you can fix them before they become major headaches.

Need Help Getting Your Growth Plan in Place for 2024?

If you want to get your Growth Plan together for 2024 but don’t know where to start, get booked for a Free 1-to-1 Strategy Workshop at Damteq’s Fareham HQ!

In your bespoke, 90-minute session, you’ll sit down with our Founder, Adam Smith, and some of our Business Growth Specialists, who will analyse your current strategy and help you build a strong growth plan that will help you overcome your marketing challenges and achieve sustainable growth in 2024.