Strategic thinking about your business can transform it. By comparing what is happening in your company with what is happening in your industry, you can systematically improve all aspects of your business.
So how can you think more strategically about your business?
Focus on two areas: business creation and planning.
Business Creation
You can create better strategies by exploring marketing trends, noticing business opportunities, and identifying customers’ needs.
Explore Market Trends
Before you study market trends, understand why they are important. For instance, if you explore how people like to pay for purchases on websites, you might discover they like to use many types of payment methods. Based on this marketing trend, you might decide to get a payment gateway provider and processing solution like Blue Snap to offer your customers more payment options.
Exploring marketing trends is all about organizing information, gathering resources and sifting through them for insights.
You can gather information by subscribing to trade journals, magazines, and blogs. You can also gather information by talking to people, such as discussing market trends with your team, going to networking events, and engaging with customers.
As you collect data about trends, use a note-taking app to keep all your information in one place. Regularly review your notes to get insights about emerging market trends.
Notice Business Opportunities
You can spot business opportunities by buying competitors’ products and examining them.
Here are four questions you could ask to come up with new ideas:
- Is there a way to upgrade a product to offer users more benefits?
- Is there a way to downgrade a product to reduce the cost?
- Is there a way to bundle products together?
- Is there a way to unbundle products and improve on a particular product to increase its value?
Identify What Customers Want
The best way to identify what customers want is to ask them. You could talk directly to them when they visit your place of business or you could talk indirectly to them if you have a website by sending an online survey to your email list.
Ask new customers about their experience with your product or service, what they think of your competitors, and what improvements they suggest.
Business Planning
You can plan better by creating strategic, tactical, and operational plans.
- A strategic plan will give you a big picture view of your business. For instance, how would you like your business to be in 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now?
- A tactical plan envisions a shorter time frame and it’s narrower in scope. For instance, what milestones you would like to reach in 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 12 months?
- An operational plan is what business processes you will use to improve your company. For instance, how should you launch your next marketing campaign?
Thinking more deeply about business creation and planning will help you cut costs and increase revenues.