The Most Important Business Growth Strategy for 2021
Developing and Implementing an updated marketing plan is the most important business growth strategy for 2021. It needs to align all of your efforts with the current environment dynamics. Last year ushered in unprecedented change and this year promises to do so again. These changes have rendered many previous marketing plans and strategies outdated.
Challenging times can create great opportunities for business growth for some and failure for others. Those business owners who THRIVE tend to be more proactive, creative, and flexible than others.
What is marketing, and why is it important to my business? The better you market, the easier it is to sell, gain market penetration, and grow your business. Eventually, you may not need to sell if you get good enough at marketing.
Marketing is NOT sales, and sales is not marketing. Marketing refers to long-term activities to most effectively satisfy the needs, wants, or desires of a specific type of customer. It is about planning and aligning many activities, including research, assessment, product development, projections, branding, and promotion.
Effective marketing facilitates the short-term sales process by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. Conversely, sales involves persuading a person or an organization to buy something. The end result of sales is to complete a commercial transaction for the exchange of money.
Developing an Effective Marketing Plan Involves a series of steps, as follows:
Market Research
It is important to study your industry as well as who your customers are. You must seek to understand what your customers need and want. It is also important to know what it would take to make them buy from you. You need to understand market size, different niches, competition, trends, pricing, and customer preferences.
You can access existing research from government and trade associations or conduct original research with a variety of methods. These include but are not limited to the following: in-person surveys, telephone surveys, online surveys, focus groups, and even contesting. It's important to obtain both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (observations) information when conducting research.
Self-Assessment
Conduct a SWOT Analysis, which is an assessment of your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Understanding your core competencies and limitations helps you to determine how and where you can compete effectively. This process will help you to understand the most promising areas to capitalize on and areas to avoid.
Product Development
Create products and services to offer based on market research and your core competencies. Get feedback, comments, and ideas on your product concepts from potential customers. You should also estimate the share of the market you expect to capture.
Create a Business Model
Understand your costs and pricing requirements to ensure an appropriate rate of return. Determine costs associated with creating and distributing your product for cash flow purposes. Consider pricing based on costs, market pricing, and required rate of return. Determine sales forecasts and create financial projections to determine your financial resource needs.
Develop Your Branding & Messaging
Identify your value proposition to determine how to position your product against the competition. This is the cornerstone of developing a successful marketing strategy based on your products and market.
Develop Your Outreach Strategy
Determining where, when, and how to reach your target market is key. Choosing the most effective strategies for publicity, advertising, and promotional activities will significantly impact your company's growth.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A system and processes to identify leads in the early stages and nurture them to become customers. The aim is to maximize their lifetime value. Your system needs to incorporate personal information to provide better customer service.
This can be as simple as an address book or excel spreadsheet. However, small businesses really need to look into a more robust platform. Many cost-effective CRM systems are able to automatically track interactions and organize the database to provide extremely valuable information.
All of this seems like a daunting task, which it can be. However, there are ways to accomplish it easier and faster. Educate yourself as much as possible about marketing and sales. Get help from a business coach, consultant, or business support organizations like the Small Business Development Center (SBDC).
You don't have to do everything at once. Your marketing plan should be a living document that is updated regularly. Start with an outline and learn by implementing while developing the plan.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib is an excellent resource for developing your marketing plan. It clearly outlines all of the key activities you need to address in a powerful yet easy way to understand. There are also many marketing and business plan templates available on the internet.
According to former Fortune 500 CEO and current business strategy consultant Terry Trayvick, "Strategy is important, but not sufficient." It is not good enough to just have a plan. It is about successfully implementing it.
First, you need someone within your organization tasked with implementation and empowered with a budget and decision-making authority. There are also many different skill sets requiring a coordinated team approach with both internal and external resources. In addition, you must identify key performance indicators (KPI) and review the information on a timely basis.
The key to business growth in 2021 is developing and successfully implementing a relevant marketing plan for the current environment. It should leverage today's technology resources and address the changing needs of customers. It should also take into account changing demographics and trends that may be temporary or permanent.
