Big or small, every business needs high-level strategies in place to grow.
Effective strategies create a vision and will guide all areas of your business, but are not quick or easy to develop. Strategies involve a well thought out process, step by step actions, and thorough research in the market, competitors, and customer needs to be successful. Strategies require clear and detailed steps that are reasonable and actionable while leaving room for flexibility and evolution.
At first, you may say a large business requires a growth strategy, but that growth strategy is made up of several components, including your customers, digital marketing, sales, partners, operations, and innovation. It also smart to Chirpish in order to grow.
Each strategy needs to be communicated to the rest of the business, to ensure it is meticulously followed. This enables everyone within the business to stay focused, and work in line with the company’s goals and the bigger picture. Without clear goals, it is easy for people to lose sight of the company’s values and sidetrack its progress.
To help you get started, here are 7 of the most important strategies every large business should have.
#1 Customer-focused strategy
Customers should be at the heart of every business, seeing as it is their trust, and money, that keeps your business running. A good customer strategy should focus on both existing customers, and driving new customers. Customer-focused strategies use campaigns and activities that target the interest of customers, by supporting, educating, and informing customers, in order to improve loyalty, community, advocacy, growth, and drive retention. Some of the key components of a customer strategy are:
- Creating an excellent first impression by setting expectations, creating a tailored experience, and going above and beyond.
- Listen to what your customers have to say by giving them a voice.
- Host your own events that are in person or via online platforms such as Zoom. We are constantly communicating via social media, emails, and online chats, but nothing is better than putting faces to names with a little face-to-face communication.
- Don’t just neglect customers once they have signed up to you. Keep them focused and engaged, or you will lose them to your competitors.
- Stay innovative with the products and services that you offer.
- Hire an effective, and friendly customer support team that you can trust.
In order to serve your customers in the right way, it is vital that you fully understand who you are serving. A huge part of a customer strategy is developing a buyer persona, which will guide all of your strategies forward. A buyer persona is made up of specific details that enable you to understand your customer better, for example, who they are, where they live, their age, occupation, interests, hobbies, etc.
#2 Digital Marketing strategy
There are a plethora of digital marketing strategies you can adopt, but which ones should you focus your time, money, and resources on? Digital marketing methods utilize technology that can be viewed on a phone, tablet, computer, or another device, in various ways, such as a social media post or display ad, in order to promote a brand’s product or services. With over 4 billion users on the internet, digital marketing is vital for any business to grow. Digital marketing is made up of many components, some of these include:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Blogging
- Video marketing
- Social media
And many more.
A digital marketing strategy should be focused on what platforms your audience spends the most time on, why they spend their time there, and what you can do on those platforms to serve them. For example, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are for more short and snappy content, whereas YouTube and blogs are best for long-form, educational content. When considering what digital marketing strategies to employ, you may consider researching top marketing agencies that can support your growth in this area.
#3 Sales strategy
A sales strategy is vital to making money from your products or services and involves winning new customers, as well as retaining them. A sales strategy, combined with your buyer persona, will direct the activities and campaigns your business moves forward with. This will involve how you position your product or service in the market, what your competitors are doing, gaps in the market, and how you can appeal to your customers.
Some of the components of a good sales strategy are:
- A strong value proposition in your messaging
- Solve a problem
- Create urgency around your product or service
- Articulating a compelling story
- Develop different strategies for different points of the sales funnel to meet customers where they are at and expand your market
- Get as much feedback from customers as possible (and do something with it)
#4 Market positioning strategy
You could be a large corporation, but if you are not positioning yourself well in the market, then you are missing out on huge opportunities. It is vital as a business that you claim your niche and position yourself high in the market.
It is important to establish your voice, values, and branding. To help get you started in this area, get together with some of your employees and ask the following questions, to see what they think of the brand currently:
What makes you stand out from the crowd?
What makes you different in the market?
Why should customers choose you over their competitors?
And then ask the same questions with what it could, or should be. Your employees work directly with your products, and customers, and will have some valuable feedback and insights that can help you with your market positioning. It is also crucial to speak to your customers for feedback, instore, via interviews, surveys, or questionnaires.
#5 Partnering strategy
The relationships your business has with its customers, community, suppliers, distributors, and other companies are key, which is why it needs its own strategy, in order to help your business identity needs, find partners, make introductions and proposals and grow and nurture these relationships. Relationships are built on trust and mutual benefits. The types of relationships that your business builds will entirely depend on your market and services.
#6 Operations strategy
Regardless of the type of business or industry, all businesses need to continually review and improve their operations. Stagnant operations will only keep employees and customers unhappy, and limit your business. Operations include the in-house processes, efficiency, supply chains (including things like inventory management and stock rotation), lead generation, and much more. To help improve your operations, you may consider a review and refine a process that enables you to locate inefficiencies and boost sales and productivity, outsource certain tasks, or update your technology and information management to drive business performance. Some businesses choose to use a consulting service, such as ServiceNow consulting services, to help them to quickly transform processes within IT and improve employee and customer experience.
#7 Innovation and development strategy
Without innovation, your business will quickly get left behind, regardless of how big it is. Product and service development is key in keeping up with your customers and getting ahead of the market. By offering the latest and greatest product or service, you are able to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Innovation strategies will only work if you include your customers in this process. You need to ensure what you are upgrading takes into account what is already working and what is not, gaps in the market, customer feedback, and lots and lots of testing. To make sure innovation efforts stay aligned with your business goals, using a tool like powerful balanced scorecard software can help track progress, evaluate results, and keep development focused on what delivers value. It also allows teams to stay on the same page and make decisions based on real performance data rather than guesswork.
There are many strategies that are important to keeping your business alive and growing it to new heights. Each strategy named above is considered fundamental and should be carefully considered. Take time to review each strategy with the relevant department heads, and ensure they are up to date, effective, and will drive the business forward.
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