5 Sure Fire Ways to Make Your Business a Growth Machine
Every once in while you need to step back and look at the big picture to accelerate your business growth. All of the day-to-day demands of running a small business draw you away from that 20 thousand foot view of your business. That’s where real progress can be made in better defining your value proposition, adding clarity to your marketing message and standing out in the crowd.
Here are 5 simple ways to help gain traction in the market place.
- Define your strategy. Then shout it from the roof tops. Are you the low cost solution, offer a differentiated product or serve a niche market? Choose one and only one. This is the basis for your vision, mission, value proposition and content of all your marketing campaigns.
- Diversify your marketing. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to marketing. There are hundreds of ways to promote your business, why restrict yourself to one? Your marketing calendar should leverage at least three to five promotional tactics at any point in time and focus on a specific product or service and call to action. There is strength in numbers and some methods will prove to be duds. You don’t want to come up empty handed because the only tactic you were using didn’t work out.
- Invest in competitive intelligence. You can’t go to market effectively if you don’t know your competition. What are they doing, how are they doing it, who are their customers, when have they changed strategy and tactics and why. Simple enough, you can’t execute your strategy if you are the low cost solution if you don’t know the market price points, you can’t differentiate if you don’t know the offerings available and if you’re servicing a niche, who else is in that space.
- Invest in market intelligence. Your strategy will define your target market. You’d better know that market inside and out if you’re going to convince anyone that you are the preferred solution. Better validate that the market you think exists really does. What seems to be common sense from a supplier’s point of view doesn’t always translate well to customer needs and wants.
- Measure your results. Sales and marketing will likely be your biggest administrative expense. Invest wisely and the only way to do that is to measure your results. This doesn’t have to be a burden, an accounting exercise or a complex ROI calculation. Just ask each prospect how they found out about you and after they buy, why they did or did not select you. From there you can make it as complicated as you want, but you’ll know more than most even if you do nothing more. You should remember enough to capture a trend and have a good feel for where you should invest more and where you should invest less. I’d still recommend capturing that data in a more sophisticated manner, but you get the idea.
Taking time to think through these 5 sure fire ways to create a growth machine out of your business if it’s just you or 1,000 employees will pay huge dividends. If you’re way behind in one or more of these, match your activity to the resources available. You want to implement them in such a way as to have a maintainable process that creates a sustainable competitive advantage for your business.
Richard Gabel
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