Scaling Your Business
There are many businesses in the world however they have one thing in common, they need to increase their business maturity levels to get the larger fish. Now if you are in charge of your own business and want to grow it successfully then there are some standard tricks that you can use to cultivate your wealth-creating.
Now to the uninitiated these all look like a magician’s dream however they are used by the informed, and just like a magician’s circle you need to be in the know to get a seat at the table. Below are 10 tricks and tips to help you advance your business.
1. Branding Strategy
What is Branding Strategy?
Every part of the business that is customer-facing is your brand; this includes your logo, paper heading, and even right down to your dress sense. Every few years you need to update your brand to keep ‘relevant’.
Why do you need to use it?
People buy and stay loyal to brands they feel align with their way of life and fashion. As fashion changes, you need to update branding every 5 years.
How do you use it?
You need to use a Consultant and a Graphic Designer to update your branding. Subscription-based graphic design packages such as Adobe Creative Cloud can be used to update digital assets.
2. Establish USP
What is Establing USP?
Unique selling point (USP) is your offerings niche in the marketplace.
Why do you need to use it?
If you are doing the same thing as others you will always struggle to make a profit from intense competition.
How do you use it?
This can be as simple as having a better sales interface or just a higher-quality product. Protect your USP of the product such as through a utility patent or a design right. For best results and align your solutions with USP contact a specialist.
3. Competitive Intelligence
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Understanding your marketplace competition can yield useful information that will impact your business decisions on what to offer and when.
Why should you use it?
Avoid bad product release dates or offer something that is of lesser value to a client compared to a competitor’s offering.
How do you use it?
While this can be done through web-scrapping, cyberstalking your competition, and putting information in your CRM system can be done through specialists.
4. CRM
What is CRM?
Client Requirement Management or CRM (such as Salesforce) is a sales and marketing solution usually cloud-based and can be accessed by different teams from either in-house or on customer visits. CRMs are essentially customer lists that you can add call notes to enabling inside sales and support help onsite sales on engagements to seal a sale or contract renewal.
They can allow call lists to be tagged and filtered according to a campaign or flagging clients that are likely to need additional services and consumables at a predefined date or just a call back to touch base.
Why should you use it?
To be effective at marketing in a personalised manner you need CRM to automate promotions through filtering clients based on their needs. Buckshot campaigns are counterproductive as clients may not be ready to buy from you at that time.
How to use it?
Integrate a CRM solution such as Salesforce into your sales, marketing, and support teams will help provide up-to-date information on the customers’ needs all in one place for all.
5. Email Marketing & SMS Marketing
What is Email marketing and SMS Marketing?
Reaching out to the customer through email and SMS technology. Emails and SMS can highlight interesting news or topics to the user and a link provided to funnel potential sales candidates to relevant locations on a website for further information and a call to action.
Why should you use it?
Email marketing if done poorly can get a customer to unsubscribe fast.
How do you use it?
CRM and SMS add-ons can be used to quickly create and send out marketing material to automatically defined users based on tags and filters. Klaviyo and Mailchimp are great examples of software that can be used.
6. Sales Copy & Ad Creative
What is Sales Copy and Ad Creative?
Professional marketing and sale professionals are used to create professional marketing materials.
Why should you use it?
Poor marketing materials will impact your brand, brand loyalty, and sales. Too subtle and you will get missed, too loud and people are irritated or insulted; losing custom.
How do you use it?
Use professional marketing and sale professionals to produce slick marketing that is not going to get lost in the digital noise.
7. Social Media Ads
What are Social Media Ads?
Either you are using viral marketing on social media or you are using what most use; sponsored ads.
Why should you use them?
Now fail to get this right, the wrong layout, look or call to action and nothing will happen as a result.
How do you use them?
Get a social media advertising specialist to help you.
8. A/B Testing
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is where you show multiple pages of an advert or website to groups of people and they statistically decide which one is better. This is important as people who design media are too close to it and therefore will be unlikely to tell if it will be successful or not.
Why should you use it?
Use it to confirm quantitively that you are using your best ads and web pages. Ugly presentations will lead to users going to competitors that reflect their standard of aesthetics.
How do you use it?
Marketing specialists will have groups that they leverage to conduct A/B testing for work that goes to clients and produce reports of what was found from possible options.
9. Organic Reach
What is Organic Reach?
Organic reach is where your offering is so good users actively champion it in companies.
Why should you use it?
Research has proven that this method is the least marketing intensive as users do the work for you; this saves you money.
How do you use it?
This is great for offerings that are made to a high quality and that sell themselves through an unlimited free offering with capped features hooking the users before they need to uncap the product through a subscription service; speak to a consultant.
10. Omnichannel Presence
What is Omnichannel Presence?
This trick involves having different customer-side interfaces being aligned; in the old days, this used to be called 360-degree marketing. This is where different products would bolster others; such as films plugging merchandise, magazines for market information again helping the process and so on. Free or loss-leader products can increase revenue through bundled offerings.
Why should you use it?
No matter what you offer these need to be aligned into a coherent business strategy to yield the best sales.
How do you use it?
Use marketing specialists to create coherent sales pipelines from products.
Conclusion
Use the ten tools above to scale your business effectively, reducing bottlenecks and associated growing pains. Failing to adopt the latest and greatest technology and advice will likely lead to business failure. Remember, if you are not advancing you are getting washed down the stream.
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