* This is a collaborative post and may contain affiliate links.

Every business needs the opportunity to grow. And, yes, as an author you have a business. Neglecting the growth aspect of your business can contribute to its premature demise or result in your company becoming stagnant or outdated due to not moving with the times or changing market trends and consumer demands.

Growth within your business should be something you are pushing for from the very beginning. Whether you put plans into action or not, it is a goal to be working towards on a daily basis. This doesn’t have to be scary. Even small steps forward count as your business growing.

The following items are proven ways for business owners to facilitate growth and support their businesses as they need it.

1.Identify Your Target Market

You need to know your target market as intimately as you know your family members. You need to know what they like, what they don't like, what they need, and what the future of your industry looks like to cater to your audience better. Niche down if you need to; the more specific your services or products are, the better. Once you have this, you can develop your value proposition that appeals directly to them.

For authors, this looks like knowing our readers. You can create an avatar of your ideal reader. Then when you’re writing your books (and marketing them) pretend like you are speaking directly to your ideal reader. What is it that they love about your books? This is your value proposition, and providing more of this will help your business grow.

2. Understand Your Value Proposition

You need to be aware of the value you are offering your customers and why they are coming to you over your competitors. If you don't have a value proposition, then you cannot even think of scaling your business because you don't have anything that sets you apart. Each company has it. Amazon, for example, offers the same or next delivery, something many companies cannot compete with, so if you need a product urgently, Amazon has positioned itself as the go-to global company. It gets you what you need and fast.

With so many books for readers to choose from, it’s important to understand what makes yours unique.

3. Improve Your Processes

Something you should always be striving to do is to improve your operations. Streamline your processes, work towards a leaner operations structure, and use technology that can help you get there if you need to. As a business owner, you cannot grow if you cannot keep improving your capacity to do more, do it easier, and still deliver the results you offer. For authors this looks like understanding and streamlining your writing process and deciding which software you are most comfortable working with.

In the construction industry, this can be using construction project management software to help you streamline how you approach your projects to deliver results and as close to your deadlines as possible, ensuring that all your subcontractors and employees are also working to your schedule and you have everything under control, or it could be improving your delivery times and operations to get orders fulfilled faster and so on. Always be looking for ways to make things easier for you, your team, and the customer too.

4. Build A Good Team

Even if you are a solo outfit now, when you scale your business and push forward with growth plans, you will need a team behind you that is as passionate about your business as you are. If you already have employees, you need to focus on building the best team possible. Your employees can be some of your biggest cheerleaders, and if they are on board with your plans and visions, they will be in your corner as you push forward. They will need to have the right skills and knowledge to do the job properly; this is where ongoing training comes in. You want them to feel respected and valued in the workplace, too, so they give their all during their working day. If they feel part of an actual team and an important cog in the machine, the more likely they will be to go above and beyond. So, while hiring on skills is important, hiring on attitude, personality, creativity, and passion should also be important factors.

Most author businesses don’t have employees, but you still have a team, even if you are self-publishing. Your team includes people you hire on a contract basis such as editors and cover designers. Even people who volunteer to help you, such as beta and advance readers, are part of your team. Make sure you enjoy working with these people and they make your life easier, not harder.

5. Invest In Marketing

Marketing is a must. Each company should be investing around 3% to 5% of their projected annual turnover in marketing. But hand in hand with marketing comes your sales channels too. You need to utilize a variety of different marketing options and do so on various platforms to reach as many people as possible. Social media, email marketing, media marketing, billboards, SEO, PPC, and more are all effective marketing methods for 2024 and should form part of your overall strategy for your marketing and sales. So, as you market your business, you need to increase your sales channels to make it easier for customers to reach and make the same or get a quote.

In the publishing industry, this looks like testing different forms of paid advertising to see what works best for you. Their are options at all levels of costs. Pick what you can afford and go from there. Be aware that you may run some advertising campaigns and not see any additional says as a result. This is why it’s important to track your metrics and know going into the marketing campaign that you may not see any return.

6. Measure, Monitor, and Adjust

You need to track critical KPIs such as customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, lifetime value, etc., and use these findings to monitor your business and make more informed decisions in the future. If you're focusing on growth, you need to be proactive and monitor what is going on, using the analytics available to you and adjusting your approach as required to help you avoid any issues and keep improving. Continuous monitoring can help you improve efficiency, make much-needed changes, and identify patterns in consumer habits and trends so you don't get left behind.

You get to decide what KPIs are important in your author career. Is it number of books sold or dollars earned per month or quarter? Maybe it’s the number of words you write or the amount of people you add to your email subscriber list each month. Whatever your key metrics are, make sure you track them so you can watch your business grow and adjust accordingly if you hit a plateau.