Growing and expanding a business is a tough undertaking in and of itself. Just imagine how arduous and challenging it can get in an emerging market!

However, successful businessmen always recognize that emerging markets not only pose challenges but also offer excellent opportunities. So, they employ some smart strategies to make the most of these opportunities and scale up their businesses in such volatile and fragile markets.

Let’s go through some of these strategies.

Conducting Thorough Market Research

The emerging markets are fiercely competitive so in-depth market research and analysis are crucial to understand and be conversant about them before taking any steps towards scaling the business in that environment. Businesses must be informed about the market such as its size, composition, potential, saturation, trends, supply and demand situation, economic indicators, as well as segmentation.

Apart from the market dynamics, it is important for businesses to collect comprehensive data about the customers, their behavior, pain points, needs, expectations, preferences, and desires. Likewise, is also essential to identify and monitor the competitors, the strategies they employ, their strengths and weaknesses, etc. Having a profound awareness of the market can help them create their value proposition, set pricing, and find suitable distribution channels.

Securing Adequate Funds

Expanding business operations entails hiring more staff, establishing branches at multiple locations, developing new products, purchasing equipment, and machinery, increasing production capacity, entering new markets, carrying out promotional campaigns, undertaking mergers and acquisitions, etc. To execute these activities, businesses must procure enough funds according to their goals, and requirements, so that they can scale up smoothly without any financial obstacles.

To secure sufficient funds, businesses can leverage various government programs and grants, approach local investors and venture capitalists, seek loans from regional financial institutions, or explore crowdfunding platforms and other funding sources.

Businesses can ensure successful funds procurement by creating a winning pitching deck that shows traction and incorporates information about the company team, and existing competition in the market, as well as ropes in a well-structured budget outline with accurate revenue projections, expense breakdown, return on investment (ROI) projections, profit and loss statement, cash flow statement, break-even analysis, and contingency plans.

Becoming More Adaptable

To achieve successful business expansion specifically in an emerging market, the businesses must transform their business model accordingly while retaining their core business propositions. They must also be aware of the economic, socio-political, and environmental risks and uncertainties of such markets and proactively get prepared to face and flexibly adapt to them.

They also must gear up to face the issues related to regulatory, legal, and ethical matters that can potentially impact the compliance and reputation of their companies. Moreover, they must also deal with the internal challenges that may come up as the business grows further.

Adopting an Innovative Approach

Emerging markets are highly competitive and so here, to keep ahead of the competition businesses must remain innovative to achieve growth and expansion. Businesses must keep innovating to develop new and unique products and services as well as improve the existing ones so that they fulfill the unmet desires and preferences of the customers that their competitors failed to do.

Being innovative can offer a competitive advantage to the business that aims to scale up successfully in an emerging market. It also makes the business resilient preparing it to navigate smoothly through economic downturns and shifting consumer behavior.

To adopt an innovative approach, businesses must persistently look for the gaps and also anticipate shifts and trends in the market to experiment, and come up with new ideas, designs, features, uses, or solutions so that better value can be provided to the customers.

Harnessing Partnerships

Expanding a business in an emerging market can be extremely difficult as the factors and forces are not the same as in the domestic market. By partnering with local businesses and doing co-marketing, and joint promotions brand trust, credibility, awareness, and recognition can be enhanced to grow the customer base dramatically.

By leveraging local partnerships, the expanding businesses can accelerate their chance of achieving success in the emerging market. Such collaborations can offer support in tailoring effective marketing and sales strategies as well as fine-tuning the marketing messaging, and promotional methods to harmonize with the local audience. They can also help in formulating best practices by providing insights and understandings of the local business landscape, its cultural nuances, consumer needs, and behavior while bringing attention to its dos and don’ts, that the expanding business may not be aware of.

Regardless of its size and nature, every business aims for growth because if a business ceases to grow continuously, at one stage it will certainly die. The continuous growth of a business is imperative for its enduring existence. However, sustained business growth is impractical without pushing the boundaries. By applying the above-mentioned functional strategies businesses can scale up in challenging yet opportunity-laden emerging markets with great success.