How To Maximize Business Growth With Business Funding: A Comprehensive Guide

An entrepreneur’s hunger for growth is to be expected in the business world. If an idea succeeds then the next step will always be to determine how to further capitalize on the opportunity. This can be done through several different methods, the most common being to grow your offerings to yield a larger harvest. But how do you grow your business without sacrificing all of your capital? 

Growing your business is made possible with business funding, allowing you to take those next steps to increase your profits without using all of your hard-earned capital right away. New to business financing or simply looking to learn more? Here are some of the ways that you can utilize funding to grow your business.

Staff

Investing in your people can be one of the best paths to success. You can use your funding to grow your workforce or reinvest back in your current staff with new training that focuses on skills development to ensure that your team is armed with the tools for success. By further developing the skills of your workforce you can create a staff that is more engaged with their work overall. A Gallup “State of the American Workplace” report showed that more engaged employees can actively increase sales percentages by 20%. 

Alternatively, you can use your funds to bring on contracted employees to meet seasonal demand. Just be careful that when you are using the funding to scale your business’s staffing, you are doing this in a manner that is sustainable and that you can continually afford in the future. 

Expansion of products or services

Using funding to expand your business is a completely natural decision. In 2020, it was reported that 38% of business owners applied for a loan to expand their business. The reality is that funding is a great option to help satiate the hunger to grow your business or even expand the options of products and services that your business can offer. This can help you grow into new marketplaces while also building more recognizable brand awareness in a competitive market. 

Open a new location

Tied directly into expanding your business, opening up a new location is a great way to grow your reach and service another demographic. This method of expansion can offer a financial boost, and increase your production capacity while reaching new customers.

It is always essential to ensure that the specific costs of opening a new location can be covered with a funding product, as some funding options can have limitations on what they can be spent on like real estate restrictions for instance. 

While this route to grow your business has a high reward potential, it also comes accompanied by a high-risk factor. It is always of paramount importance to have a clear business plan when opening a new location to ensure that your business will be sustainable in the area. It may be wise to explore using funding options to cover the costs of initial market research when looking into new territories. 

It’s also important to consider protecting your brand while looking to expand by ensuring that you have the proper trademarks for any and all of your intellectual property. If this is an area that you are unsure of then you can explore the resources that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has to offer. This will be a great knowledge base for protecting your brand. 

Invest in marketing and advertising

Expansion isn’t the only way to use funding to grow your business and its reach. Investing in your marketing and advertising while developing new strategies is a great way to gain more traction in a crowded marketplace. Look at investing in your marketing as expanding your fishing net: the bigger the net, the more fish you can bring in. 

The advancements of social media, paired with its ease, have made it a boon for business owners looking to pump new lifeblood into their enterprises. With nearly 90% of marketers stating that social marketing efforts have increased their business’s exposure, it paints a clear picture that investing in your social media presence is a must when trying to grow. Use funding to push your posts out to more people or invest in a consultant to see how you can best establish your online presence.

Social media is just one of the many ways you can use your funding to fuel your marketing machine. Another great way to market your brand is to improve your organic traffic through google search result ranking. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that can be used to attract, engage and retain an audience by creating materials like blog posts, podcasts, videos, and other media. By using funds to invest in your content marketing, you promote your business, build authority and encourage brand awareness while making it easier for your potential customers to find you. 

In addition to online content marketing, you can also explore more physical marketing options like flyering, billboards, or improved signage for your business. It’s important to note that all of these strategies can be used in conjunction with each other, however, it is always imperative that you create a strict budget so that you do not overspend. 

Upgrade or replace equipment

Everyone loves new toys, especially when they are practical and increase productivity, but did you know that you can use your business funding to purchase these? Funding options like Backd’s working capital can actually provide you with the ability to upgrade or replace your current equipment so that you can get the best results from your gear. 

This method of growth does not limit you to physical equipment. Use funding to invest in programs to help automate aspects of your business in order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of your business. In 2020, Camunda found that 51% of automation initiatives were taken to boost the overall efficiency of employees, this provides your staff more time to focus on growing your customer base while providing the highest level of care for your current clients.  

However, it’s really important to ensure that you do not get carried away when using the funding to invest in new equipment or programs. It’s always essential to ensure that the purchase is sustainable. Make sure you know how long it will take you to pay off the costs as well as if the asset you are purchasing will last you in the long run or if it’s something that may need maintenance, renewal, or a replacement sometime in the near future. 

Grow your business with Backd

When growing your business with funding, there really are a multitude of avenues that you can go down. Regardless of what you decide is best for your business, Backd have you covered with access to working capital,  which is perfect for helping to bridge cash flow gaps like equipment financing, and a business line of credit, which can be useful for covering short-term needs like payroll. 

With an application time of just 3 minutes and pre-approval arriving in your inbox within 24 hours, Backd really is a great source for funding your dreams.