Tag: networking

Now that you’ve got the foundation and the core of your marketing strategy, it’s time to get the tools and resources that you need to implement them. With your branding and marketing research in hand, it’s time to select the tools and strategies that will help you grow your business.

Sales and Marketing Growth Strategies

There are four traditional growth strategies in marketing. The best one for you will be determined by your current situation such as your financial position, your competition and you goals. They are:

• Product Development: Developing a new or current product for your current audience.
• Market Development: Entering a new market, typically an underserved or unserved market.
• Market Penetration: Developing a current product for your current marketing to increase your market share.
• Partnerships and Acquisitions: Collaborating or acquiring businesses that have the same audience or one you want to penetrate but who are not your competitor.
• Diversification: Developing a new product for a new market. (This is the riskiest strategy of all the growth strategies, especially for small businesses. Market research and a strong plan are highly recommended before implementing this strategy.)

As a small business or solopreneur, we often have a single product or service but may consider an upsell when convenient. However, it’s important to keep all of our options in mind when considering what’s best for our business so we are not limiting our options or growth potential. It is also essential to keep the costs of each strategy in mind so that implementation does not outweigh revenue.

When to Implement Each Strategy

Having a single or main product or service can be a major benefit. While it means we will likely focus on product development before the other growth strategies, it also means that we can cater our product exclusively to our target audience. Then, once we have achieved our definition of success with our main product or service we can devote our attention to market development or penetration depending on which strategy seems more lucrative for our business.

Partnerships and acquisition can some into play at this time too or in tandem with any of the previously mentioned stages. For smaller businesses, it’s important to keep in mind that a partnership or acquisition could be a new hire or affiliate. Adding a new skillset to your business in any form can help develop your product or service or help you enter or penetrate a new market.

Diversification is often a last resort or final stage for companies, especially small businesses because of the costs and effort involved. Developing both a new product and a new market share is simply more work, so it requires more time, insight, and resources. Still, while risky, it can pay off majorly. You’ll just want to be sure you’ve done your due diligence before committing to such an effort.

Resources to Help You Grow Your Business

Research is the key to any of these strategies, so we’ll start with our favorite research tools and resources.

To gain insight into your current audience and industry you can use free resources like Google and social media to find demographic information, trends, and frequently asked questions. You can also check your competitors’ reviews and mentions for dissatisfied customers to see if anyone matches your personas and to learn their goals and challenges. To go deeper, you can implement social listening tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, or Agorapulse.

You can also survey your audience using freemium tools like SurveyMonkey or simply by asking them via phone or messaging. (Please note we are an affiliate of SurveyMonkey but would recommend them anyway because they have a free plan.) If you took any one of our surveys, then you have already experienced SurveyMonkey’s free plan.

To keep track of your results and any new leads you find along the way be sure to utilize a client relationship manager (CRM). The name is a bit misleading as they’re not just for clients but any potential partners, vendors, or team members. Agorapulse has one built in for keeping track of your social media leads but we recommend using a more robust option that integrates with tools like your email service provider (ESP) and website such as Hubspot, Salesforce, or Zoho.

Assignment: Implement A New Tool

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of using tech to make life and business easier. It can be daunting but like most things that require work, it pays off in the end. So, give it a shot. Try implementing one new tool this week to see if it works for your business. It can be a tool you already used but haven’t optimized such as your CRM or ESP.

Reach out with any questions or if you just need help along the way. Then share your results with me on social media or via email.

A Schedule for Success

To keep pace with busy lifestyles while remaining time-effective, this series is broken up into two 45-minute sessions per month for 3 months.

Meeting 1: Intros and core values 
Meeting 2: Purpose, vision, and mission

Meeting 3: Target market, research, and pricing 
Meeting 4: Building the right relationships

Meeting 5: Sales and marketing resources 
Meeting 6: Sales and marketing tools

Now that you’ve learned a bit about your target audience, it’s time to put it to use to start building strong relationships. Again, like any relationship, you’ll want to get to know your audience on a personal level by engaging with them. So while research is the first step, you’ll also need to initiate and then maintain relationships with them. From there, you will advance a select few.

The most important thing to remember before you begin is that a relationship worth having is a win/win. Of course, we’re all in business to make sales but you won’t sell a thing if you have nothing of value to offer. Once you do, you need to communicate this effectively to those in a position to accept what you have to offer. So, it’s important that you also know how, when, and where to communicate with your audience.

Building An Amazing Customer Experience

Hopefully, your market research has narrowed down your audience enough for you to know who to prioritize. If not, your budget or other resources may limit your options enough for you to find a niche. This means limiting who you prioritize but it does not mean burning bridges. You don’t want to isolate anyone but you do want to build bridges with your best candidates. You do this by creating the best customer experience for them possible.

While customer service is part of the customer experience, the experience is much more. It’s the result of every interaction your audience has with your brand. So, you’re building your relationship from your first initial contact all the way through your final communication. This is called the customer journey. To be amazing, you want to do the following at every step of the journey:

• Be relevant by giving your audience what they need when they need it. This means your strategy should change when the market does.
• Be reliable by being timely and consistent. Consistency means your values and systems connect.
• Be convenient by being where you’re needed, when you’re needed. Efficiency is key which means you need to stay on top of your customers’ needs.
• Be responsive by listening to understand and then acting. Do not listen to respond. Always ask in an unobtrusive way and be empathetic.

This section’s worksheet will help you outline your customer journey and optimize it for your audience.

Initiating Business Relationships

Once you’ve determined the best way to reach out to your audience, you’ll want to prepare to reach out to them as your best self. You want to be authentic, of course, but you also what to be interesting and at the top of your game. This doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be more successful than you are or promise things you’re not sure you can deliver. It means you want to be prepared with your relevant expertise and your best face forward.

If you’ve already started your business, this may mean having testimonials or references ready. If you haven’t, you may put together a portfolio or product samples. The goal is to be ready to address the pain points, questions, and goals your audience has (based on your research) in the most effective way your resources allow. You also want to make sure they’re presented appealingly and in an easy-to-access and understand manner.

You want to appeal to as many people in your audience as possible, simply because they will not all convert. You won’t try to maintain relationships with all of them, of course, but once you know who is qualified to become your ideal customer you’ll move toward this next step with them. Again, just like any relationship, you’ll meet a lot of potential candidates but you’ll only move forward with a few.

Maintaining Business Relationships

The important thing to remember here is that your research should never be over. The best way to maintain a relationship is to keep the lines of communication open. So, you want to be accessible and you want to continue to ask questions. This goes for satisfied and unsatisfied customers, converted leads and unconverted leads. You want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Then you want to be empathetic. You don’t have to agree with the feedback but you want to understand where it’s coming from. This way you can make adjustments where necessary to continue, improve, or reignite the relationship. We’ll come back to improving relationships later but continuing and reigniting relationships typically require less effort.

To continue a relationship you simply keep doing what you’re doing well. To reignite a relationship, you may need to go back to the initiation stage but you’re essentially doing what you’ve already done. The difficulty only increases when a bad experience has occurred. Only then or when advancing a relationship, is more effort typically required.

Advancing Relationships

Advance relationships are the best friends or romantic partners of business relationships. You realize you have a good relationship, you share goals and values, and you both want to take the relationship deeper. Maybe you become partners or affiliates, maybe you exchange VIP status for added value, maybe your merge. Whatever the path, you both invest more in the relationship.

Like best friends and partners, there are even less of these in your business then those relationships that you simply maintain. You give more to these relationships, so you can’t have as many and you don’t want to. You do, however, what to be more discerning with who you enter into these relationships with. Every business owner has a client nightmare story, the important thing is make sure that client is not the one you advance with.

Worksheet: Customer Journey Map

Create an amazing customer experience by outlining your customer journey so you can be relevant, reliable, convenient, and responsive each step of the way.

If you’re in one of our cohorts or coaching series, don’t forget to submit the completed worksheet when you’re done. We will discuss it in our session, so don’t feel obligated to complete it just yet but do reach out with any questions.

MTMN+ Bonus: Prioritizing Your Relationships

Remember, your membership automatically enrolls you in MTMN+ for the life of our course. As an MTMN+ member, you receive exclusive access to bonus content and increased discounts on events and products.

Please complete the following bonus video for extra credit in your course. Extra credit will elevate you from a Certificate of Completion to a Certificate of Excellence in the series.

A Schedule for Success

To keep pace with busy lifestyles while remaining time-effective, this series is broken up into two 45-minute sessions per month for 3 months.

Meeting 1: Intros and core values 
Meeting 2: Purpose, vision, and mission

Meeting 3: Target market, research, and pricing 
Meeting 4: Building the right relationships

Meeting 5: Sales and marketing resources 
Meeting 6: Sales and marketing tools